Posted on: 26/06/14
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) V5 officially became end of support on the 30th April 2014;
so if you are still running these versions of TSM servers or clients it is now time to upgrade.
There are a number of good reasons to upgrade as the current versions of TSM offer a more
robust and feature rich environment over the older, version but for many, the process can
appear daunting and raises questions over hardware and application support.
Unsurprisingly, TSM V6.4 requires more server resources in the way of CPU, memory and
disk space when compared to TSM 5.5, so customers may need to factor in system upgrades
or provision a new server to support the new environment. TSM V5 may have ran happily on
Windows 2003 with 4GB of RAM but to upgrade to V6.4 would require a minimum of Windows
2008 R2, 12GB of RAM and 64 bit processor.
A key difference with TSM V6 is the move to using DB2 as the central TSM database. Luckily all
the database management is built into TSM so you do not need to be a DB2 DBA to maintain
your systems, but sound planning is important for trouble free operation.
The TSM V6 upgrade, or installation, wizard guides you through the process of creating various
server folders for the DB2 database components. Where possible all these folders should be
on independent physical disk arrays with the database and log volumes on the fastest disks
available. The installation will require you to specify:
Database folder(s) – Create one or more folders to hold TSM database files. Multiple folders
on different disks improve database I/O
Active Log folder – Contains in flight database transactions. This log requires a predetermined
size to be defined when it is created but it is important to ensure it is large enough to cope with
the concurrent activity that the server typically handles otherwise TSM will crash if the log fills up.
Archive Log folder – Contains committed transactions. The archive log is used for roll
forward recovery of the TSM database and is cleared down when a full database backup is taken.
Active Log mirror folder (optional) – A mirror copy of the active log. TSM will use this if the
primary log is unavailable.
IBM offers the upgrade tools and wizards to make the process as simple as possible but it is
important to ensure that all of the prerequisites are met, and that all of the pre and post update
tasks are completed to ensure all goes smoothly, enabling you to recover if there are
any issues encountered. The IBM support pages and forums offer the best place to look for compatibility,
sizing and upgrade documentation.
Depending on your requirements, you can choose to perform an in-place upgrade of the current
server if suitable, or carry out a migration to a new server if not. There are pros and cons to both
methods, however, an in-place upgrade is more straight forward, as there are no additional
tasks required, such as connecting tape libraries or the need to perform fabric zoning that would
be required with a new server. Using the migration upgrade method to new hardware is quicker and
simpler to recover from if there are problems, as you can revert back to the old server and attempt the
process again.
Another factor to consider is the time required to perform the database data import stage of the
upgrade. IBM estimates the data ingest rate of between 5GB and 10GB per hour, so a 100GB
TSM V5 database could take between 10 and 20 hours to convert to V6.4 plus a few more hours
to run the integrity check which is something to plan for.
When considering your server upgrade it is important not to overlook your TSM clients. The oldest BA
client version officially supported with TSM server is version 6.4 is client version 6.2 .
A useful server query statement to show your client versions and when they last access the sever is:
SELECT node_name, platform_name, domain_name, TRIM(CHAR(client_version))||'.'||TRIM(CHAR(client_release))||'.'||- TRIM(CHAR(client_level))||'-'||TRIM(CHAR(client_sublevel)) as "TSM Client Version", DATE(lastacc_time) AS LASTACC_TIME FROM nodes
Identifying old and redundant clients and removing the backup data can reduced the size of the database and speed up the upgrade process.
So if you are still running TSM Server V5 the time is now to start planning your upgrade!
Should you require any advice on upgrading your version of Tivoli Storage Manager, please do not hesitate to contact your Celerity representative.
David King, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited
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