Michael,

This is certainly possible as we have done this in the past for customers
who couldn't tolerate any downtime for OS upgrades. Hence we came up with a
solution to have a duplicate set of SYSVS discs that we upgraded while they
were still
on the old OS. Come day of the 'real' OS upgrade, brought them down, stored
off
any modified files, switched over to the new OS, restored modified files and
they
had an OS upgrade in about 45 minutes from their POV. So it is possible.

They only gotcha I can think of is that it would be difficult to have any
user volume sets in this scenario for a couple reasons.

1) NEW/ALT/PURGE ACCT/GROUP/USER SETCATALOG commands would only be done on
the
   OS discs mounted at the time

  a) unless you had a mechanism that logged these and applied them on your
     next switchover

2) I remember when MPE/iX 5.0 came out that the XM logfile format had
changed
   If this where to happen in a future release , you would probably lose
your
   user volume set

-Guy
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Hurdle [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 14:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Splitting an MPE system to two sets of discs/two OS versions


Has anybody had success trying to split a single HP3000 system into two
different OS versions by using two sets of discs? What we are looking to do
is something like this:

We have a 937LX with a single FW-SCSI slot currently configured to 4 7.3Gb
discs on a XP256 farm under MPE/iX 6.0. We have a need to create a second
environment for this system with five 7.3 Gb discs on a XP256 farm under
MPE/iX 6.5. Conceptually, I would think we could keep the four discs on 6.0
configured as 48.0-48.3 and set up the five discs on 6.5 as 48.8-48.12 and
then simply point the system to whichever OS we wanted to run under by
setting the primary boot path to the appropriate ldev 1. There is no need
for sharing of information between the two OS'es and they would run
independently of each other at different times of the day. The internal DDS
drives could be configured the same in both environments. The solution would
involve 9 discs physically connected to a single FW-SCSI card, but only a
total of five would actually be "active" at any given time.

Anybody doing this? Any problems that can be seen with this?

> Michael T. Hurdle
>
MPE Systems Management
Nortel Networks Account
perotsystems*
Phone: 001-615-432-4386 (ESN 222)
Fax: 001-615-264-6174 (ESN 455)

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