Many! thanks to all those who replied; in no paticular order: Bruce Purcell Ryan Bishop Kevin Buterbaugh McClark Paolo Jejcic Robert Brockway Doug Floer John Riddoch Nick Hindley There were a variety of answers, ranging as follows: -> Don't do it, you must be mad :-) - insidious little issues will creep in and bite you in the future ; plus it isn't sun-supported hence creates tech support issue if sunsupport is needed. -> No prob, should work fine, probably best to do the swap using a cloned disk or the like to provide rollback in case of "disaster" (ie, the swapped disk is mucked up somehow and you want to get back where you started :-) -> as for 3rd party apps tolerating the migration, it will depend on the apps. "should typically be OK though". !!Note there MAY be licensing issues since some apps are licensed by CPU / CPU Power etc!! [ note the case for me on this box, but always good to keep in mind :-) ] In light of these comments, I'm still pondering if I want to proceed. The majority concensus suggests "yay" rather than "nay" ; certainly at the very least, I'll use a cloned disk or the like to test to ensure I've got a painless rollback in place. Many thanks again to all those who replied - the help is greatly! appreciated. Tim Chipman {and now, to see for yourself? the replies follow:} ===========ORIGINAL REPLIES FOLLOW=============== This should be fine. e250s & e450s are similar in many ways. As long as the cpu architecture is the same (sun4u in this case) it should be fine. The touch ./configure is smart though :) Checkout the man page for installboot and be ready to boot off cdrom when run installboot to get the e450 booting off the right device. Back the drive up before starting but I think you'll be fine. Good luck! Cheers, ============================== As I remember there is no "special" configuration that avoid you to do it. I did it from a E450 to a E250, and after a few boot -r everything work perfect. So it is doable. Anyway, I recommend you try first with another disk, make a dd of the root disk and then use that one in the new server. It should work perfect. Regards.- ============================== I haven't done an e250 to e450 transition before, but when I moved the boot disks from one E10k domain to another one, I had to remove /etc/path_to_inst and do a boot -a. This lets the system fix up the bus and device path differences. As for the apps, it really depends on the app. The main thing you might encounter from standard commercial applications is hostid based license locking. Usually, it's just a matter of transferring your licenses (and somtimes paying more money to license the extra CPUs). ============================== What we would typically do in that situation is temporarily install the E450's root disk in the E250 (this assumes they're the same size drive), then partition it identically and copy the E250's root disk to it. Put it back in the E450 and do a "boot -r." Having said that, I don't see any reason why your plan wouldn't work. HTH... ============================== This should not be an issue as long as you touch /.reconfigure or issue the boot -r command from the <ok> prompt. As you said below the hardware is identical and the nomenclature of the hardware i believe is the same. I can not remember if I have done this personally but I do not think that it would be an issue. ============================== I've done the reverse. At my last company, we ran databases (Progress) on e450s. We moved those disks to an e250. Ours were mirrored -- SDS was not happy, so we re-did the mirroring. With the reconfigure, we didn't have any other real problems. In theory, they are the same server (almost...) using the same hardware and the same OS. That's supposed to be the Solaris selling point -- proprietary stuff can be expected to just work. Anyway, moving backward from the e450 to the e250 was a breeze with the reconfigure. That was a couple of years ago, so perhaps time has made it seem easier ;-) ============================== Should work. Might be safer and maybe just as quick to do a ufsdump/ufsrestore from single user mode on the E450 over the network. ============================== The E250 and E450 use fairly radically different hardware internals (# of PCI/SCSI buses, how the memory is laid out), so I'd be surprised if your path_to_inst file worked OK on the E450. However, I have heard of various methods of doing this with booting from CD to create the path_to_inst & /dev tree; try this: http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?q=sun+managers+move+disk+path_to_inst&hl=e n&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=v0153050cacbd5e532b50%40%5B193.96.189.32%5D&rnum=5 ============================== >From bitter personal experience when a colleague did this, swapping OS disks across different hardward classes - my e450 gives SUNW,Ultra-4 my E250 gives sun4u for a uname -i - is don't do it. While it may work in the short term, your platform specific devices drivers will be incorrect and when you try to patch the server at a later date it will almost certainly fail and Sun support will tell you that you have done something unsupported. ============================== ---that's it that's all --- _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Mon Dec 9 14:59:11 2002
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