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Preparing for Your Upgrade

Upgrading your system can be an anxiety-ridden task. Worrying about what might go wrong and how much downtime you’ll face could keep you up at night. IBM now provides a tool to help bolster your peace of mind before an upgrade.

The IBM* Pre-upgrade Verification (pruv) Tool for i5/OS* can help reduce overall system downtime during an upgrade and may help avoid a failure during the process. If you don’t follow all of the software pre-upgrade or replacement tasks described at the i5/OS Information Center, you may face problems during your system upgrade. The pruv tool isn’t designed to take the place of those tasks—its goal is to reduce the potential downtime of a failed system upgrade and to identify problems that may prevent your upgrade from completing successfully.

The pruv tool authors worked with support-center data to identify common problems during the upgrade process. Many of these problems can cause the system to be down until they’re resolved, which is scary if you’re running business-critical applications. The authors analyzed this information for trends and compiled a list of problems, which they used to develop checks that should be performed before every system upgrade. The tool performs the necessary checks and provides recommended actions to avoid these problems. Since the tool uses actual support-center data, you can rest assured it will address all common issues.

Once you’ve performed the steps the Information Center recommends, you can use the pruv tool to validate your upgrade tasks. The tool provides a graphical display of problems that could hinder the upgrade, along with the recommended actions to correct them. When all of the recommended actions have been performed, you can run the pruv tool again to verify that your system is ready to upgrade.

Using the Pruv Tool

The pruv tool runs as a standalone application on all current Microsoft* Windows* operating systems. You’ll find it at the IBM software download site (https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_us&source=ipvt). Download the tool and extract the files from the ZIP file. Note to where you extract the files because the tool’s output will be there. Start the tool by executing the pruv.bat file. When prompted to sign on, choose a user ID that has *ALLOBJ authority; this level of authority is required due to the nature of some of the checks that’ll be performed. Ideally, the user ID you specify in the pruv tool will be the user ID used to perform the system upgrade.

When you start the tool, use the Next and Back buttons to maneuver through the screens. The tool follows a common wizard-like interface for ease of use. After accepting the license agreement, specify which system to run the tool against. The interface will display the current release of the system, and you’ll be given the option to select your target release (see Figure 1, page 54). Choose the checks you want to run. As you can see in Figure 2 (page 54) you can select to run checks for only high-priority items, for all items or for a custom list of checks. The high-priority items are the ones that will prevent a successful upgrade. The custom list of checks lets you run one or several checks. This is particularly useful if you want to run a previously failed check again.

Let’s look at some of the system checks that can be performed (see Figure 3).

Check for acceptance of software agreements—Before you upgrade, it’s a system requirement that you accept the online software agreements for the Licensed Internal Code and the i5/OS operating system. This step is performed during your upgrade tasks. Any attempts to circumvent this task results in a failure to load Licensed Internal Code. This high-priority check determines whether you’ve accepted the software agreements. Note that if you’re preparing to install from redistribution media, you don’t have to accept the software agreements, and the results of this check can be ignored.

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