Although I have not performed my migration to 6.X yet, I plan on doing the 
following. 
New 6.X instance, redefine all short term hosts to the new instance and server 
to server export long term retention.
After short term retention period has expired. Deleted all short term data from 
old TSM instance. Same method I have used for library replacements. 
No matter what happens there will be drawbacks for every method. In my case, 
this method mitigates the most risk.

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Prather, Wanda
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 10:02 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: Upgrading paht from TSM 5.5 to 6.1

It's a judgement call.
Tivoli's estimate for doing the DB conversion/upgrade from 5.5 to 6.2 is to 
assume you'll get 5GB per hour.
If your hardware is really fast, you might get  7-10 GB per hour.

So doing the conversion is problematic, and what works well at small sites 
isn't necessarily practical at large sites.  If you do a direct conversion from 
5.5 to 6.2,  you'll have to shut down your TSM server, and sit and wait for 
many hours while the conversion runs.  And if your DB is very old, I have 
talked to one person who tried the conversion and it hit some bad record in the 
DB and quit.  So it's bring the old TSM back up, wait until the next weekend, 
try again..repeat.

Using a new TSM instance an doing export/import has the benefit of letting you 
do a few clients at a time, while you get used to 6.2.
For customers whose data has a very short retention time, you can even just 
point the clients to the new 6.2 server and let the old data expire.  And if 
you have had problems reading your tapes in the past, now is certainly the best 
time to clean them up by doing a refresh as you move to the new server.

But in your case, reading/writing 2000 tapes may also be prohibitively 
time-consuming.  You could try doing an export of a large client to tape, 
rename the client on your TSM server, then re-import it to get estimates of how 
long it would take you. (Even if you go with export/import, doing it 
server-to-server via TCP/IP is better than doing it via tape exports.) 
 
There is a way of doing a "hybrid" conversion - you dump your TSM data base, 
leave the old server running, do the conversion offline to a new 6.2 server no 
matter how long that takes, then use "incremental" import/export via 
server-to-server TCP/IP to get the 2 servers back in sync before cutting over 
to the new server.

So you'll need to make your choice based on how long it will take you, how easy 
it is for you to get downtime for your TSM server, cost, hardware availability, 
etc. 
   
W
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Alain Richard
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 10:34 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] RE : Upgrading paht from TSM 5.5 to 6.1

Our TSM 5.5 database is little more than 100GB (6 X 20GB at 83% full)


-----Message d'origine-----
De : ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] De la part de 
Prather, Wanda
Envoyé : 2 septembre 2010 10:01
À : ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Objet : Re: [ADSM-L] Upgrading paht from TSM 5.5 to 6.1

How big is your TSM 5.5 data base?

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Alain Richard
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 9:57 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Upgrading paht from TSM 5.5 to 6.1

Hi,

To make the upgrade from TSM 5.5 to 6.1, our "reseller support" tell us that 
they prefer to do a fresh install of tsm v6.1 and import all tape written by 
tsm 5.5 so all the tape will be now written by TSM 6.1. They tell us it will be 
safer that way. We have more than 2000 tapes to import.

That way to upgrade look weird to me. Can you comment on that?
Should I ask another opinion before let them go that way and pay for that?

al