Domino R5 to R8 Question

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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We’re looking to upgrade an application only environment – no mail, no resources. I’ve been told no upgrade path exists directly to R8 and that I should go to R6.5 first. Why is that? Can someone be specific as to what the dangers are in going to R8 directly and what the benefits are in stepping to R6.5.

We plan on building a dev instance of one of our R5 servers with our key apps installed which would be upgraded to R8 to test. If this goes well I do not see why it could not be implemented in production.

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Subject: I would not recommed it, but have done so before at the same time.

I did upgrade R5 to 8.01. Did not do any convert or something. The place is small, 3 people, only one mailflile really used, no calendar really used.

The custom app did survive fine (But I had all source codes in case I had to go to action).

Anyhow, would do it again for this customer, but don’t think it is a good idea to recommend this.

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Subject: It’s do-able

If you only have a few apps and can upgrade a test server first, then I think I direct upgrade is reasonable in an application-only environment.

In particular, you’ll want to decide at what point you want to upgrade your system databases (names.nsf, admin4.nsf) and the Administration Server. Generally, both of these happen early in the upgrade and normally, there’s no problem replicating later versions of these templates to older servers. But keep in mind that Lotus will only have tested replicating these designs to Domino 6.5 and 7 servers, so they won’t support you if you hit the skids. You may want to have a roll-back plan in case your Domino 5 servers don’t like the new designs.

I don’t recommend keeping the old versions of these databases on your Domino 8 server, as you’re not really testing a proper Domino 8 environment. A third option is to upgrade the design on the test server, but prevent it replicating to the rest of the domain.

Be sure to think through the hardware and OS issues, too, as there’s not much overlap between R5 and ND8 specifications for these. That can make both the upgrade and roll-back paths difficult (unless you’re buying all new servers).

To ease your worries a little, I can tell you that I am in the process of doing a Domino R5->8 upgrade very much as you describe, and we have hit no major issues so far, though it did help us identify a few areas that needed recoding before upgrading production.

Rupert Clayton

Chicago

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Subject: We have a budget for some new hardware

We plan on using some new hardware and some older hardware, but all servers are dual processor at a minimum and at least 2 gigs RAM each. We are planning on not allowing the design of the Domino directory to replicate from the upgraded administration server, instead opting to just replicate data.