You've put a lot of time and effort into creating and maintaining your WebSphere 9.0.5 environment, but a migration to another machine may be lurking around the corner! For example, just recently WebSphere announced a discontinuation of support on Solaris or HPUX systems. Whether your hardware is getting old, you want to upgrade, or your environment is going out of support, it's time to move your WebSphere 9.0.5 installation to another machine!
The -allowSameRelease parameter in the WebSphere traditional 9.0.5.11 version to version config migration tool (WASPreUpgrade) makes this task easy. With the new parameter, you can use the same procedure to migrate WebSphere cells to a new machine as you use to upgrade release versions of WebSphere. The migration target must be fixpack version 9.0.5.11 or later, but the migration source can be any WebSphere 9.0.5 fixpack version.
The steps for a successful WebSphere traditional cell migration to a different machine can be followed at Migrating cells to new host machines using the command-line tool. The process will be consistent with a typical release migration until step 5. If you try to run the WASPreUpgrade command in a remote migration to WebSphere 9.0.5 from WebSphere 9.0.5, the command will stop short and print the following message:
"MIGR0108E: The <install_dir> directory does not contain a product version that can be upgraded. Verify that the directory name is correct and rerun the command."
To move past the message and continue with your migration to another machine append -allowSameRelease true to the end of your WASPreUpgrade command. The addition of this parameter to the command allows the user to use the migration tools infrastructure to easily package and move a WebSphere environment to the desired location while on WebSphere 9.0.5.
Some care must be taken while using this command. Make sure to use the -allowSameRelease parameter to migrate to the same or a more recent fixpack on the same release of WebSphere traditional. Migration to a newer fixpack is supported and recommended for the newest version of WebSphere.
For migration to a new machine while on WebSphere release version 8.5.5, -allowSameRelease is not supported. The recommended path for moving to a new machine while on WebSphere 8.5.5 is to upgrade to WebSphere 9.0.5 while performing the cell migration. Follow the same steps linked above without the use of the -allowSameRelease parameter.
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