We are considering using one physical AIX server to host two D3 VME's.
RD has a technical annoucement T42 that highlights how to set this
up. Our plan is to use the single box for both UAT and Production.
Creating the environment according to RD will allow for different
releases of D3 in each VME virtual server that would support a D3
release upgrade methodology where the release is tested in UAT before
being applied to the Production VME. However, it does not support the
same upgrade methodology for AIX. Therefore, we are thinking of
creating two AIX virtual servers on the single box and installing a D3
VME on each. However, RD has indicated that they have never done this.
Does anyone have any experiences with such an installation?

I think I wrote or at least made major revisions to T42. The problem
that it does not address is that you can't test two different monitor
releases in one AIX environment. And since some ABS patches rely on
corresponding monitor changes, you don't have a great deal of latitude
for testing different releases outside of minor ABS patches. The
multiple VME concept was intended as a way for a company to run
development and testing on the same release but in two completely
separate environments. It's also useful for companies that insist on
having their data separated by more than just a account/database but
in separate disk and memory space as well. I think I've setup about
20 virtual environments on one AIX box like this, though my memory
makes a lot of past accomplishments seem much more grandiose than they
really were. I remember when I was King of France once and... never
mind...

Seriously, if you can do testing as an event rather than doing it on a
regular ongoing basis, then contact IBM and see if you can use one of
their service centers (I think they call them SPC's). They'll set you
up on high end equipment, maybe a couple boxes so that you can compare
one release to another. You'll also need RD to give you activations
for both boxes but for this sort of testing I suspect they'll be happy
to comply.

HTH
Tony
TG@ letmeknowifyouneedhelpNebula-RnD.com



"jim" wrote:

On Feb 12, 5:27 pm, Tony Gravagno
<g6q3x9lu53... (AT) sneakemail (DOT) com.invalid> wrote:
Tony,

I guess I misinterpreted T42 where it says this technical annoucement
" ... is the procedure for installing two AP/RS6000 releases on the
same machine". And then in step 1 says to "install the monitor of the
first release with 'installp -F pick'".

Thanks for the feedback.
Jim

"Jim" wrote:
I don't know if you know but I was working in Support at Pick Systems
starting in 1995, and was QA Manager for a couple years, so maximizing
the use of resources was always important in order to keep testing
moving. I filed an enhancement request back then to allow us to
install different versions of AP/D3 simultaneously on the same system.
There are many files that D3 uses which are not versioned, so
overloading releases will corrupt whatever is already in place. With
platforms like AIX, DGUX, HPUX, and other *nix environments it was
always been extremely difficult to test cross-release issues because
we would need to test one release, completely uninstall (sometimes
completely wipe the OS), then reinstall a new environment just to see
how the different releases behaved.

The enhancement request was never processed, though the topic came up
many times over the years, obviously still does. If someone needed
cost-justification for a change like that, they only needed to
calculate the amount of time people spent reloading environments, and
the amount of hardware (and sometimes support agreements) required to
support a different box for every DBMS release.

Virtualization with vmWare and similar tools these days helps with
Linux and Windows but I still often don't want to have to use a
completely different virtual environment when one of my clients asks
whether something is a bug in release X. And due to licensing issues
I can't afford to load D3 in different environments to do that kind of
testing. *sigh* I get very frustrated with short-sighted decisions
that seem to come back to haunt us year after year.

All I can suggest, Jim, is that you ask RD to add your "me too" vote
to the request to support multiple versions of D3 on one system. I
suspect it's been purged by now so you may need to enter this again
from scratch.

Good luck.
T