Lots-o-Werk

Last week I finished up a large block of Hub and Mail Lotus Domino R8 upgrades. By the end of the week there were 20 servers upgraded from R7 to R8. Other admins helped with another 6. In total there are ...

26 R8 Domino partitions,
9 R7,
6 R6,
and 3 R5.

The rest of the servers will be done, as needed, dependant on the support of the speciality server administrators.

Two of my major application groups already have R8 QA servers (included in the count above), so the application testing can go ahead as needed. While I do application development as well, most of my role will be support for the primary developers.

Next Part: A majority of my focus will be on the client software installation. Followed by the mailbox template customizations.

The Biggest Hurdle

Hooray! The Superhub is upgraded!


Background

I manage a Lotus Notes and Domino infrastructure which covers North America with a hub and spoke design. The Superhub is the central messaging and data replication point in that infrastructure. Each physical site may have several servers (in a hub and spoke configuration as well) to support local clients. Each physical site's data and messages traverse the Superhub to other North America sites or to other regional data centers around the world. For an illustration look at http://www.scribd.com/doc/19492037/Super-Hubs .


The Events

In preparation of a few rogue sites not waiting on any official project I hardened the Superhub from any impact of a mixed version environment or from newer design elements leaking into other environments. In December I was able to finalize the How to Upgrade document and the OS scripts to support the procedure. Finally, it took a little time, but we got the project and date approval we needed so, in mid-march we did it.

Using the scripts developed back in December, the whole upgrade and maintenance on the system DBs, the upgrade of their designs, and ODS upgrade (On Disk Structure reorganization) affecting about 4.5 GB took only 1.5 hours. With no bug or errors reported, later that week we finished the upgrade by performing an ODS upgrade on the rest of the system affecting > 600 GB.


Now there's no holding back thoes rogue admins with their dreams new software! |-:-)