Migrating from iSeries to Red Hat - Part 1

Moving Domino from to a new hardware and OS platform takes careful planning and lots of testing. I have been working on this project for over a year and wanted to share the lessons I have learned along the way.

Currently I run five Domino partitions on an iSeries 270 Dedicated for Domino. Yes, that's one of the bumblebee boxes. I'm migrating to an IBM BladeCenter with a DS4300 SAN. We have two blades for Domino, with mail services on one and applications on another. I am debating installing a secondary Domino partition on each blade and using them for clustering, but that's another set of posts.

The first step in this process was to determine the best approach for moving things over. After extensive research and lots of testing with VMWare Workstation I decided on the following scenario:

1. Install the same version of Domino on RHEL that I have on the iSeries. In my case this is 6.5.4 FP3.
   
2. Create a folder in /local/ for each Domino partition
   
3. Create an IFS share on the iSeries for the root Domino folder (all my Domino partitions are installed in /NOTES/ on the iSeries)
4. Mount the share on linux and copy the files from the iSeries to linux
5. Adjust notes.ini to use the new path structure
   

Many people move Domino to new hardware in conjunction with an upgrade to a new version. Don't install a new version of Domino on the new hardware and try to copy everything over. That is difficult to do correctly unless you really know what you're doing. Using the two-step approach gives you the opportunity to create a known working installation before you do the upgrade to a new version.

That's the 50,000 foot view of where I'm headed. In upcoming posts I will cover installing RHEL and configuring it for Domino, installing Domino, configuring ODBCDirect database drivers, migrating servers, and tweaking applications so they work correctly. I expect to learn a lot throughout this process.