Thanks Andy with you valuable tips..

I am having a Box on which there are 8 instances and under each instance there is a single Database,These are not production Database
these are UAT,JST etc testing Databases.The database is running in non archive mode.Can i take database backup and restore it after installing the latest version of DB.I mean unistall the 7.1 V first then install V8
Is it going to work fine or it may give some problems after restoring to the new version

If I follow the steps given in the red book (Quick Beginnings fo DB2 Servers) ,Am i supposed to have latest version simultaneously with the older version..

Also I am having 7 AIX boxes ,On each AIX boxes there are 2 instances and a single DB under each insatnce.Apart from that we are having 9 apllication servers which are aceesing all the above DB..If I am able to estimate time for one DB and Appllication server It is going to to give some rough estimate..also can you tell me whether the DB is 32 bit or 64 bits..any command for it ..

there is not any possibilty that i can try first and then estimate,All the servers are in US..Thx

ashaq,

That is far moe complicated that what we have. We just had one instance and one database per server. We created a new server on new hardware, installed only V8 on it, Then copied the data (export/import). Also our servers are Linux.

I think backing up on V7 and restoring on V8 is OK (I could be wrong--you can test it). Just keep the same OS when you do this. I do not know the answer to you second question. The one about simultaneous versions. I am fairly certain that 32 and 64 bit versions are different releases.

Again, I strongly suggest that you test the migration first before you actually do it. These are the reasons:

1) if you screw up, nothing is impacted. You just start over.
2) you gain first hand knowledge on what to do and what not to do.
3) you make sure that the migration will work for your environment. Upgrading just for the sake of upgrading can be a bad thing. Sometimes newer versions break things that work in the older versions.
4) you know what resources are necessary to accomplish the task.
5 through 1000) see number 1.

Andy

Thx andy for the sincere advise

A backup taken on v7 can be restored to v8 - however it has to be a full offline backup.

It is very hard to have simultaneous versions of db2 running on the same box. Somewhere in quick beginnings, it says that only one can be pointed to implicitly. ie you cannot issue db2look for version 8 directly - you will have to specify the full path to the executable - I have tried to do it in our development environment and found it very difficult to manage.

Check out the IBM website of fixpaks at
http://www-306.ibm.com/cgi-bin/db2ww...ist.d2w/report

Issue a dblevel and match the output to the site and you will know if you have 32-bit or 64-bit installed. For the OS, ask the server admin.

Hope this helps