Length of Downtime to Upgrade from 5.4 to 5.7

[Vince Angulo]

I probably don’t have enough information to ask this question intelligently, but we’ve got a request from our SysAdmin team for a 6-hour downtime for our upgrade.

We are AIX 5.3 and will also have to upgrade from TL03 to TL08.  We are not HACMP.

We have 2 5.4 production sites, one with 15 processes/32 threads and one with 10 processes/31 threads.

It’s the just the beginning of cold and flu season and we’re already experiencing an abnormally high inpatient census and our emergency room is operating near capacity — so asking the PowersThatBe for six hours may not go over well.

Does this sound reasonable based on the info I’ve provided?

Thanks in advance.

Topic

[James Cobane]

Vince,

From a Cloverleaf perspective, the interface downtime required would only be a matter of how long it takes to shutdown the interfaces under 5.3, and bring them up under 5.7.  You can have everything ready and waiting (your site configurations, etc.) ahead of time, and then it’s simply a matter of shutting down 5.3 and bringing up 5.7.  With only 2 sites and 30 threads per site, it shouldn’t take long at all.

The additional downtime is going to be a factor of the OS upgrade and how much time is required to apply the release and re-boot etc.

Our last upgrade (from 5.4 to 5.6) we scheduled for a 6-hour downtime which included OS upgrade, along with HACMP testing.  We were done within 4.5 hours.  We have 5 sites and over 240 threads, and the majority of the time was for the OS upgrade and HACMP testing.

Hope this helps.

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Sundeep Kumar]

Hi Vince,

We recently did an upgrade from 5.2 AIX to 5.5 Linux VMVARE and had practically no downtime. I presented a talk on this at the recent healthvision user conference in Dallas TX on Oct 17. I have enclosed the PPT.

[Vince Angulo]

Thank you both very much for your detailed replies.

[Author]

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