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
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Senior Solaris Platform Engineer
Cardiff University
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