Ceri,
Thanks for your response.
The reason driving our move is that as an institution we do not support
Solaris 10, our main supported platform will be RHEL4. BB beyond 7.1 is
not certified to work against Solaris 9, but is certified to work
against RHEL4.
Our NFS shares will either be done by an 'onstore' file-er; or the IBM
netapps box we are replacing it with. I am no expert on SAN / file-ers
(we have a storage team who take care of that), but I am assured it is a
resilient system (RAID'd disks and failover at the file-er level.
Our experience of RHEL4 and NFS on other systems has been positive. I
don't believe we have experienced any stability / reliability issues.
We are also moving the server that the DB is running on from Solaris 9
to RHEL4.
Thanks,
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ceri Davies
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 8:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Migrating from Solaris 9 to RedHat 4
Paul Beckett wrote:
>We are looking at migrating from Solaris 9 to RedHat Enterprise Linux
4.
>We are currently running Blackboard 7.1 , but will aim to upgrade to
>Blackboard 8 at the same time.
>
>We have a load balanced server configuration, with our data being
stored
>on a SAN and mounted to the load-balanced web-tier via NFS shares. We
>are using Oracle 10gR2 as our DB.
>
>We had assumed that the migration would be a relatively simple case of
>mounting the NFS shares and connecting to the DB from the new servers.
>However, we have recently been led to believe this is not the case,
>but don't have any details of what's involved.
>
>Has anyone else carried out a similar migration?
>Did you do it yourselves or use BB consulting?
>Do you have any instructions/advice/experiences you can share about
>this process?
>
>Apologies for cross-posting.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Paul Beckett
Could you explain why you're migrating? That's a lot of work to do at
the
same time.
Depending on what exactly you have on the NFS shares (I'm thinking
blackboard/cms, blackboard/users and so on), I suspect you might well be
able to get away with what you mentioned.
Perhaps you could do a new installation to a different database schema
on
the Linux machines and then just repoint them to the live database with
the
new NFS data. One thing that's annoying is that the database contains
connection information for the database keyed by appserver name, so you
would need to fiddle with that, but I suspect you could get it all
working
in a couple of days on a test system and come out of it with a workable
plan for migrating production in a few hours.
I'm assuming that you're not migrating the database platform; if you're
doing that then there's a whole mess of work, but 10gR2 would cope with
that too.
I'd also note that Linux isn't exactly the most reliable NFS client in
the
world, but I suspect you've already ensured that you're happy with it.
On a selfish note, I'm interested in what you're using to serve the NFS
shares; do you have a highly available solution for your NFS shares?
This
is the bit that always worries me.
Ceri
--
Senior Solaris Platform Engineer
Cardiff University
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