Recommendations for upgrading to TADDM 7.2.1.3 (refresh)

IBM has listened to customer feedback, and has focused on substantial improvements in product quality and value in this newly released fixpack and code refresh for those customers still using the 7.2.0 product level. To take full advantage of these improvements, all TADDM 7.2.0 and 7.2.1 customers are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 7.2.1.3 (refresh) on the time line that best suits their needs. 7.2.1 includes a much stronger architecture that allows you to scale both discover servers and storage servers. The 7.2.1.3 refresh has considerable improvements to data integrity.

During the testing of the migration from TADDM 7.2.0 to the TADDM 7.2.1.3 (refresh), it has become apparent that the amount of data migrated to correct the data integrity issues that drove the refresh leads to high amounts of time for the migration. Customers should be aware of these time requirements and weigh the time it will take to complete the migration with the alternative of starting fresh at 7.2.1.3 and rediscovering your environment or awaiting Fixpack 4 with an optimized migration path.

Support will be presenting a Support Technical Exchange, "TADDM 7.2.1 Refresh Release plus Fixpack 3 - Focus on Migration", on September 6th, 2012 with details on the three options and specific steps and recommendations for each.

The recommended migration path is to drop your database and migrate an empty database. This would complete the "migration" in about 30 minutes. Much of your configuration data (access lists, scopes, etc) can be exported beforehand, and imported back in after the migration. Support will present details on what can be exported and the steps for doing so in the Support Technical Exchange on September 6th. Choosing this path may affect your integrations with other products. Please attend the aforementioned Support Technical Exchange for details on potential impacts on CCMDB and TBSM before committing to this path.

An alternative to migration is to defer your migration until the release of TADDM 7.2.1 Fixpack 4. The same migration process will have to be undertaken, but work is being done to optimize that migration in Fixpack 4. Fixpack 4 is not expected until the first quarter of 2013.

In some cases it will be necessary to migrate your 7.2.0 environment and database to 7.2.1.3. While we cannot estimate how long your individual migration will take, we can provide the following guidelines to help you estimate whether your environment would fall on the shorter or longer end of the migration spectrum.

1) Because the majority of the migration work is updating the database, we are strongly I/O bound. Testing has shown I/O on databases on SCSI disks to be substantially slower than I/O on databases on SAN disks.

2) Migration uses a single processor. Systems with processor speeds on the higher end of our recommendations (3 GHz) will migrate faster than ones on the lower end (2 GHz).

3) The amount of data in your database will directly affect how long your migration takes. A very rough estimate would be 1 day for every 1 million CIs. You can determine your CI count with the following database query:

./dbquery.sh "select count(*) * 1.2 from persobj where classname_x NOT IN ('com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.InstalledOn','com.collation.platform.model.topology.net.BindAddress','com.collation.platform.model.discovery.scope.IpAddressScope','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.BindsTo','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.BindsAsPrimary','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.Uses','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.Contains','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.AccessedVia','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.Performs','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.Exports','com.collation.platform.model.topology.relation.MemberOf')"

The September 6th Support Technical Exchange will include tuning and pruning recommendations to be performed before migrating.

If you use 7.2.1 GA, Fixpack 1 or Fixpack 2 you should install Fixpack 3 and perform clean up actions described in the Fixpack 3 documentation to remove duplicates you have in your database and bring your database into a consistent state.

If you are upgrading from 7.2.0 into 7.2.1 without the migration of database please install the 7.2.1 Refresh 2 with Fixpack 3 (7.2.1.3) included in DVD package. This is the preferred migration path from 7.2.0.

If you are upgrading from 7.2.0 into 7.2.1 with migration of database please install Refresh 2 with Fixpack 3 (7.2.1.3) included in DVD package but plan carefully for production roll out since the time required for migration is substantial.