Anyone have any words of wisdom to share for 6.1 or 6.2?

[Donna Bailey]

Getting ready to put on an upgrade…going to be moving from Unix to Windows…anyone have anything they want to share as issues, concerns, gotchas, loves, etc….with either CL6.1 or CL6.2……we haven’t made our final decision on which one to go to.

Thanks in advance for your input!!

Donna

Donna Bailey
Tele: 315-729-3805
dbailey@microstar.health
Micro Star Inc.

Topic

[David Barr]

You haven’t decide on 6.2 or Windows? I like Unix, so I wouldn’t recommend the switch to Windows unless you’ve got a really good reason. We’re using 6.1, and it mostly works OK. I’d probably go with 6.2 if I was doing a new installation.

[Donna Bailey]

Thanks David…we are definitely going to windows….I’ve had some opportunity to work some with CL6.1 but not much….I don’t see much on clovertech regarding CL6.2…so was trying to get input from other…Thank You.

Donna

Donna Bailey
Tele: 315-729-3805
dbailey@microstar.health
Micro Star Inc.

[James Cobane]

I don’t know if I would consider moving from UNIX to Windows an “upgrade”, but I would definitely move to the latest version of Cloverleaf as part of that process.  If you are going to be putting the effort into upgrading and testing, you might as well be testing the latest version.  Just my $.02.

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health System

[bill whatley]

Hi Donna – Infor has implied that on equivalent hardward (x86/x64) you will see around 20% improvement of performance running Linux instead of Windows.

[Hongle Sun]

we have CIS 6.2 installed on RHEL7.1 recently in test Environment. Still in validation stage. we are getting a sporadic error “no such object in table” at the client end, does anyone has the same issue? Thanks

[Steve Williams]

The items of interest (for me) in 6.2 over 6.1 is the removal of the 59 file limitation on SMATDB searching, the upgrade to TCL 8.6, improved GUI, and support for multiple master sites. All should be documented in the release notes.

[Sophie Chege]

Be aware that 6.2 may not be as stable as it is. We went from 5.8 to 6.2 in March and we were more stable in 5.8. We have had nothing but issues in 6.2. We stayed on Unix

[James Cobane]

Sophie,

Can you be more specific as to the issues you are experiencing in 6.2?  I would like to know what you are encountering and what the response has been from Infor.  Can you provide the hardware specs and OS level you are running on?  We are planning to move to 6.2 (currently running 6.1.1).

Thanks,

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Sophie Chege]

We are on AIX 7.1 TL3. Our box has 24 CPU’s and 192GB RAM. Here is what we have noted. Everything has been reported to Infor and I do have to say that Infor development has been actively working on our issues.

1. Site capacity has greatly decreased. We were running CIS 5.8 on a less powerful box (AIX 6.1 4CPU, 16GB RAM). Our 6.2 sites seemed to crash with the same amount of threads/processes and volume as what 5.8 could handle without any issues. We had to break down our sites from 5 sites to 7 sites. we had to split some processes too as they did not seem to be able to handle the volume that they handled in 5.8

2. Hostserver constantly went down after we went live- probably because of #1, and who knows what else.

3. Depending on location of tcl procs, processing of messages is affected. We have routing threads, may not be the best set up ever but no issues in 5.8. In 6.2, messages seem to get stuck at different states. Mostly they were stuck in state 5 in the recovery database. This would also cause # 2, when they got to be too many. We resolved this by moving our tcl procs from the routing threads to the actual receiving thread …there’s prob a better way to explain this 🙁

4. Processes get hung and it takes a long time to stop and start. (I’ve waited 10 mins). Nothing in logs to indicate the cause.

4b) Inbound threads  losing connection but the display remains the same- all green and up,hciconnstatus shows all up but sending system showed no connection, so we had to set up alerts esp for our ops  that monitors 24/7. A simple bounce fixes this (could be argued as networking but we did not see in 5.8 )

Some minor issues:

1. cannot resend from error database if threads are in 2 different processes (bug)

2. process start times appears to be later than thread start time (I’ve posted this one here before.)

3. We were going to enable GM but I’m wary since everytime I call support they ask if we have it enabled. We went live with GM but we turned it off as per Infor’s recommendation.

4. When you open Smatdb, IMHO, the default should be all disabled and not everything enabled to search

Other than the occasional headaches,  we love the new features that 6.2 has to offer :)..oh and Infor implementation team helped with the upgrade, so we did not go rogue with the install process.

[James Cobane]

Hi Sophie,

Thanks for the info.  Just a few follow-up questions 🙂

1) Your hardware configuration seems very robust (24 CPUs, 192 GB RAM); is it all dedicated to the production instance, or is it LPAR’d and split across environments (i.e. test, prod)?

2) What is you overall daily message volume (inbound/outbound), and what are the number of threads/processes you are running?  You said you went from 5 sites to 7, just wondering what the number of threads/processes per site might be as well.

Sorry for being a pest, just want to get a sense of the configuration and volume.  We are running AIX 7.1 TL3 as well on a 16 CPU, 16 GB RAM system, with production allocated 4 CPUs (8 CPU max) and 20 GB RAM.  Our inbound/outbound volumes are roughly 1,273,534(inbound)/4,748,642(outbound) spread across 8 sites.

Thanks,

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Sophie Chege]

No worries James, ask away. Maybe someone can see something that we are missing.

1. Our hardware is 100% dedicated to Prod.

2. Our volume is double what you have. I should also mention 1 site is master. so technically 6 sites.We average 8 processes per site.

[Bob Schmid]

so 6.2 is really is a “stay clear” if in fact your problems are inherited from the 6.2 upgrade

Could someone explain the multiple master sites to me?

– or is there a white paper/or doc on this ?

if I have 6 regions with 5 sites per region (total of 30 sites) can I have 5 master sites? (one per region)?

Bob

[Max Drown (Infor)]

Multiple master sites is used primarily for active-active HA. Two servers are both active and both use a master site. In the case where one server rolls over to the other, both master sites would need to be supported.

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Bob Schmid]

I guess I can understand maintaining access to code not on shared disk…but what about the very real need to address enterprise

multi-regional configurations where 1-n sites exist for same region so thatif i have 6 regions…there may be 6 universes.  I would like 6 master sites

[Lori Hartsfield Neal]

Hello All. I am reading all of the post on the experience had with the upgrade to 6.2 by Sophie.  We are also planning to upgrade from 6.1.1 to 6.2.  We run in a Linux environment and will continue to.

For Sophie:

1. Has Infor been able to address your major issues and is your system now stable?  

2. If so, were the solutions clear and easy to implement?  

3.  Did the solutions require bug fixes that are now available to all who upgrade or were they more custom configuration solutions for your environment?

4.  Did you have to change any of your tcl code as I have read that the tcl scripts are impacted with the new version.

Any new insights from anyone who has upgraded?  Thanks all for any responses.

[Bob Schmid]

Staying tuned…

planning on beginning the 611 to 62 in our test environment very soon

Bob

[James Cobane]

We are in the beginning stages of upgrading from 6.1.1 to 6.2.0.2 (on AIX).  We’ve installed the new version to our dev/test server and are starting the process of “baseline testing” where we take production data and run through upgraded copies of the production sites, comparing output to insure it looks the same and things didn’t break.  Will keep you posted on any issues we encounter; hopefully you won’t hear from me 🙂

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Lori Hartsfield Neal]

Thanks for your replies!

James, I hope to hear that you are having no issues!

[Bob Schmid]

…..very interested in your results

[Donna Bailey]

James do you have any update on your upgrade…any gotchas…

Thanks,

Donna

Donna Bailey
Tele: 315-729-3805
dbailey@microstar.health
Micro Star Inc.

[Sophie Chege]

Sorry for the late response:

We are stable..ish, I say this only because we have now figured out how to quickly resolve some of the issues with 6.2 that we did not see with the previous version without any calls to Infor

Infor has been very helpful and has worked with us, and is still working with us.

We have not applied any patches as of yet (still on 6.2.0). (We are a little apprehensive)

[Donna Bailey]

Update on this from our upgrade(s)..We ended up going with 6.1.2 for the first client..everything was pretty smooth except when we came up on live…had issues with the number of CPU’s not being enough…they added CPU’s and the engine started purring again.

Also, that upgrade we moved from Unix to Windows and experience several issues with bat scripts replacing the ksh/csh scripts.  But we worked out those issues without too much of a headache.

We are currently working on another Windows upgrade to 6.2.2 and the main issue inside of Cloverleaf we are seeing are with variants instead of just putting a warning in the logs…it’s removing the segments…This client is on 6.0 and it isn’t doing that.  So we fixed the variants and that helped….Also funny thing with Tables…if the Table was using a default value, the 6.0 version left the Original value, CL6.2 was taking the default.  So we tweaked those Tables…

The bat scripts have been another problem area….working on a script that needed to stop/start a thread to get a charge batch file off and the script quits working after the hcicmd -p process -c “thread pstop” command line…it stops the thread, but exits out of script….my work around here was to create a separate stop/start bat script…pheww that worked.    Also always seem to have weird permissions issues on Windows….

I think the Windows users should get together sometime and compare notes!!

Thanks all for your feedback.

Donna

Will be putting the second client to production soon…

Donna Bailey
Tele: 315-729-3805
dbailey@microstar.health
Micro Star Inc.

[James Cobane]

For those of you who may be following this thread, there is a Technical Bulletin released last week (2/13) regarding performance issues some are experiencing with 6.2.  See post under http://clovertech.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=8484

We are scheduled to go-live on 6.2.0.2 on March 8th, but in light of this new information, we may be re-considering the upgrade.

Regards,

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Author]

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