Upgrade to 9.0.1?

901 has diff dependencies than 900. =

John, what do you mean 'diff dependencies'? Sorry that I have no clue about 901. Thank you!

Assuming you are running WAS 6.0, you will need to upgrade to 6.1/7.0 as well as JDK and Bouncy Castle. =

In addition to the technical changes as John pointed out, you should also concider the impact to your users. We knew that we would not be able to schedule testing for the MSP/ESP release and then follow up with another upgrade in the near future after that, so we made the jump as much to take advantage of 9.01 technology as to eliminate testing /upgrade cycles for our users.

If you have virtualization platform in place, I would open this up as another migration project.

Deploy a new 64 bit 9.0.1.5 and migrate at your own pace. You can take advantage of websphere 7 64 bit and the added support for SQL 2008 if you are running it. SQL 2008's real time data compression is great feature and serve as an alternative for data archiving. On my initial pass, my database shrunk from 370GB to below 190GB. (at around 5gb data growth rate per year, i just bought myself another 20 years worth of time). My read based tranasction performance actually gone up, write based transactions performance went down by slightly. You can target specific table/index for real time compression. Enabling it for most read access table is the best bet.

The best of all however is what vitualzation offers. Ability to snapshot VM and failover VM to avoid downtime results from physical server failure. Taking server image backup becomes a matter of seconds instead of minutes. Upgrading hardware and assigning additional hardware resources to the VM running lawson becomes painless.

Going 64 bit also resolves memory bottleneck issue.

Note: Do not use the new LUU (lawson unix utility), stay with MKS. Some lawson delivered upgrade programs do not work with LUU. (TA>LP upgrade program for example or any program that invokes sh/ksh.)

Check with the compatibility matrix also to see some of the application minimal requirement. 9.0.1.5 ENV requires minimal 9.0.1.0007 RSS version etc.

Jimmy, Can you please elaborate on the memory bottleneck issue. We occasionally get an out of memory error on our JVM on test (WAS6.1, env 9.0.0.8). I've since increased the JVM max heap to 2048 at the Lawson Sizing groups recommendation for our case. I'd like to more about the issue you're referring to. We're running under AIX, so this may or may not apply. Thanks.

32 bit websphere has memory bottleneck limited by the OS. 2GB is the maximum heap size you can allocate to the application server regardless of what your physical server has in memory.

With 64 bit websphere, that limit has been lifted. Thus, whatever your physical server has, is what you can allocate minus some overhead for the OS/application. IE: on a 16GB server, you can allocated a whooping 10GB to the JVM heap size if that's what your application need.

On my 64 bit developer server, I run 4GB min/max on my websphere 7 heap size.

That's great news - thanks for the information!

Thank you all for the input. Since the windows 2003 will be decommissioned in 2012, I think a new 64bit windows 2008 is the way to go. Maybe SQL 2008 is needed too.

http://blog.lawsonguru.co...upgrade-crazy-train/