Enterprise Information Systems
Banner Hardware and Software Infrastructure Upgrade

October 2011

October 20 – October 24 Banner and related systems will be unavailable beginning 5:00 PM Thursday afternoon October 20th, 2011, in order to perform the systems upgrade. Acceptance verification will be conducted on Monday October 24th.

Jerry Spicher, Derek Kowalke, Mike Pratt of the ITC ASG DBA team will be migrating Banner production to the new EIS platform. Sunday October 23rd, other members of the ASG team including our leads Roger Van Andel, Paul Lambeth, Tom Hoffman and key developers including Tom Marchwick, Don Oswald, Steve Scarff, Steve Dysart, and Angela Hoffman will be conducting verification of the new EIS services in preparation for Monday morning’s functional team acceptance verification. Deb Felkey will be exercising basic Banner forms and Justin Van Almelo will be conducting verification on Banner Security.

October 14All issues have been resolved at this point, and we are a green light to proceed as planned. Many thanks to all those involved in reaching this critical milestone. All-in-all a great team effort to move things forward.

October 7As of today we have 3 critical open showstopper issues that must be resolved before we can upgrade the EIS hardware on the weekend of 10/21-10/24. The issues are poor performance of processes/JOBSUB of TSRCBIL, SRRPREL and TSASPAY. The DBA team continues to work closely with SunGard to resolve these issues. We may require some quick turnaround testing to ensure that any adjustments that are made do not have unexpected impacts on items that have been successfully tested thus far and we value your efforts in this regard. ASG appreciates the continued support of key functional users and testers who are assisting with issue identification and test resolution. The MTLs, key functional stakeholders and ITC members have agreed to postpone the Go vs No Go decision until the regular MTL meeting Wednesday morning, 10/12.

October 7GO vs. NO-GO decision point during which time MTLs, key functional team stakeholders, ITC members will convene and review outstanding issues pertaining to the upgrade and assess if we should proceed with production roll-out planned for October 21-24th.

September 2011

September 9FREEZE DATE – no more patches or upgrades scheduled to the Banner or Oracle environments until after the production roll-out is completed on October 24th. Only exception will be ‘production-down’ issues that require a patch to sustain operations or critical security patches.

August 2011

Following finance end of year, Banner FINANCE team led by David Court (MTL) and the Banner Human Resources (HR) team lead by Paul Lindsay (MTL) began testing their respective module area processing on the new test/development environment.

Paul Lambeth works with UC4 to install the Banner Agents for Application Manager (Appworx) for this new environment.

July 2011

ITC ASG DBA team begin buildout of the future Oracle database infrastructure on the new production clusters.

June 2011

ITC ASG released the test/development environment to functional team testing mid-June. Early testing in STUDENT module led by Leota Pilon (MTL) detected a number of form issues, invalid form versions, and new security issues impacting file ownership in the new Oracle 11g cluster environment. These issues were worked on by the ITC teams.

FIN AID testing began late June and Eric Wold (MTL) coordinated closely with FIN AID testers including Rita Larby and others across the four campuses. Similar problems were reported, isolated, and resolved.

ITC ACNS teams receive, install, and initially configure the future production hardware cluster.

Team members Martin Bourque, Mike Hall and Chuck Hatfield installed the new NetCOBOL compiler and Jerry Spicher and Derek Kowalki configured and tested the compiler.

May 2011

Initial internal testing of the new Oracle 11gR2 environment revealed problems with cluster interconnect configuration and some other configuration issues. Cluster was rebuilt and reinstallation was completed, and a Banner 8 database was installed in the environment. ITC ASG development team including Paul Lambeth and Angela Hoffman readied Application Manager (Appworx) for this test environment and other development team members including Tom Marchwick, Tom Hoffman, Don Oswald, Steve Scarff, and Steve Dysart migrated and recompiled MSU local applications and MSU modifications to Banner and performed some preliminary testing. Deb Felkey, Banner General Lead, exercised basic Banner forms and Justin Van Almelo adjusted and maintained Banner security for this new environment.

ITC ordered remaining new servers for future production, and disaster recovery clusters to be received and configured early summer. top

April 2011

ITC ASG DBA Team of Jerry Spicher and Derek Kowalke installed Oracle Clusterware services, Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clustering for Oracle 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition on the test/development cluster now named HYDROCARBON.

March 2011

Ordered hardware arrives. Martin Bourque and Mike Hall install hardware, establish cluster interconnects, attach to the storage area network, install the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system and ready environment for ITC ASG DBA team.

February 2011

MSU purchased two DELL rack mounted database servers model R810 with dual eight core Intel Xeon 7560 processors and 96 GB of memory. This environment will be installed and configured for our test/development servers and connected to our existing Storage Area Network for disk storage on the EVA 6100.

January 2011

ITC Database Administrators, Jerry Spicher and Derek Kowalke) received hands on instructor led training for the installation and configuration of Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Cluster (11gR2 RAC) databases on environments similar to what MSU will purchase for the future EIS platform and for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5 operating system.

ITC ACNS and ASG teams met, reviewed hardware recommendations from the fall, checked any product updates from the past two months and finalized hardware purchase orders. top

October, November 2010

Team members Martin Bourque, Mike Hall, Cherie Eck, Jacob Hahn from ITC ACNS and Jerry Spicher, Derek Kowalke, Mike Pratt, Paul Lambeth, and Craig Deaton from ITC ASG met to review system requirements, hardware technology, server architectures, and developed recommends for future EIS hardware platforms.

August 2010

After review of the support issues and product de-support notices with MSU management, decisions were made to proceed with defining future hardware requirements and planning for server purchases.

Oracle revised its desupport plans for its Web Application server in response to strong negative reaction from client-base and extended support through Dec 2011. ITC ASG abandoned its plans to immediately upgrade to WebLogic Application Server, and consolidated those plans into the overall EIS Upgrade plans for October 2011 deployment.

May 2010

Oracle announced free one year extended support for Oracle 10g database and 20% surcharge for extended support for second year. Extended support affords no enhancements, but provides for security and bug fixes. ITC developed plans to utilize these extended support timeframe to research and recommend a new hardware platform (Fall 2010), finalize hardware requirements and purchase by February 2011, and deploy in production Fall 2011.

In order to meet the more aggressive de-support schedule for Oracle Web Application Server for which there was NO extended support, ITC developed plans to deploy Oracle WebLogic Web Application Servers for Fall 2010 deployment.

March 2010

ITC ASG reported multiple de-support notices that impacted the Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) infrastructure platforms used to support our Banner administrative information systems.

• Oracle ends premier support for Oracle 10gR2 database – July 2010 requiring customers to migrated to Oracle 11g database.
• Oracle announced end of life for Oracle 10R2 Web Application Server – Dec 2010 requiring customers to implement Oracle’s new Web technology based on WebLogic immediately. No extended support to be offered.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4 support ends Feb 4, 2012

All of these required MSU to upgrade to newer version of Operating System (RHEL 5), and new version of Oracle database (11g), and new Web Application Server (11g WebLogic).

Furthermore, Red Hat Linux failed to announce a Version 5 operating system for our existing HP Itanium hardware platforms and without a supported operating system Oracle would not release a compatible 11g database version. This left us no migration path using our current production EIS platform (HP Itanium servers), and obsolesced that environment about 1 year ahead of plan. MSU forced to replace hardware, operating system, upgrade versions of database servers, etc. top