Greetings Fellow TSMers, This morning I received some bad news from Tivoli support: Moving a TSM database between platforms (in my case, from AIX to HP-UX) is not supported. This REALLY hurts. We have installed a new HP L2000 server and HP 20/700 library, to which we want to migrate our TSM environment. After much discussion with both HP and Tivoli, we were assured that this environment would be fully supported, and would function quite well. All parties knew that we were currently running our TSM server on AIX, and I would reasonably assume they knew we would want to migrate our database to the new environment. Last week we attempted to restore the database on the new server in order to do some stress testing... the plan was to start running some test system backups on the new server in preparation for the cutover. We got an ANR9999D error message, "invalid block header... etc". Yesterday, I opened PMR 83621 with Tivoli support, and spoke to them this morning. They informed me that backup db / restore db is only supported on the same platform. They said export/import might work, but it is unsupported, as they CANNOT GUARANTEE THERE WOULD BE NO DATA LOSS. I will be trying that, and I guess the only way to verify if it works will be to do some actual restores from the new server. To make matters worse, Tivoli told me that I would not be able to check in tapes from the AIX server to the HP server. This hurts me two ways: the initial migration, and we will not be able to use the AIX server as a disaster recovery machine, as we intended to do. However, they did say that virtual volumes between platforms is supported. I guess this leaves me with only one option... I'll have to keep the AIX server online until all the data residing on it expires, which in my case will take at least a year. We'll run all new backups on the new server. We'll continue expiring and reclaiming on the old server, and move the scratches to the new machine as they become available. We'll run restores from the old server when needed. If anyone has done a migration from one Unix platform to another, please let me know how it was done, and any problems encountered. As I told Tivoli support, it's bad enough that I can't do this; it's much worse that it isn't well documented. It should be emblazoned in bold red letters that once you choose a server platform, there is no supported way to migrate data to another. This betrays the spirit of open systems. Robin Sharpe Berlex Laboratories
