JDE 8.9 Platform upgrade to Windows 2008 R2 ????

ScubyMath

Member
Hello,
Here is an interesting topic for you to read and please comments on. (All crazy comment are welcome)

We are running a JDE 8.9 legacy instance which is running perfectly well and stable. It has been very heavily customized to fits the Business need; so much that there is no plan in the short terms to migrate it to a newer supported version of JD Edwards due to the massive effort it would require and the limited staff and time we have on hand. It currently runs on very old hardware (+8 years) and reliability is a becoming a growing concern.

So our project for this JD Edwards 8.9 platform to was migrate it to a newer hardware platform AND keep it on the same JDE Release. To top it off, all of this would need to be in a Virtual Environment to facilitate hardware management and Disaster Recovery.

This platform currently runs JDE 8.9, Tools Release 8.96.2.1 clustered on Windows 2003 R2 32 Bits. (Tools Release upgrade to 8.97.3 is doable as this is the latest supported TR by JDE 8.9) DB is SQL2000 SP4 (yes, SQL2000) clustered on Windows 2003 R2 32 Bits. Deployment server runs on Windows 2003 R2 as well. Presentation is done through a farm of 6 Citrix servers. There are around usually between 30-40 concurrent users most of the time.

We were looking into possibly trying to make this run on the latest Microsoft OS and DB. Windows 2008 R2 as the OS with either SQL2005 which was supported in our Tools Release or SQL2008-2012 which could be running in compatibility mode I guess. Deployment server will need to be installed on Windows 2008 R2 as well.

I know that we are venturing way off the beaten path with this platform upgrade as this release of JDE has not been supported for years. MTR doesn’t support this at all and we would be on our own. So we would be trying this install and try to fix (workaround) what doesn’t work manually if even possible.

On top of my head, there are so much that can go wrong that I don’t know where to start. Deployment server wise, for Windows 2008, I know we will run into a problem with the compiler version we need to use. We would need to install a newer compiler which is supported by Windows 2008 R2. What’s supported now on our current TR is VS C++ 6.0 or .NET 2005 (if we upgrade TR to 8.97.3) which will probably not install at all on 2008. (Maybe .NET2005 will install on windows 2008 R2 but this will be to test) Can we make JDE work with a newer compiler?

For presentation, we already have tried a Proof of concept which worked! Instead of using Citrix, we installed a JDE fat client on Windows 2008 R2 and used the Windows Built-in « remote apps » feature to publish the application. Believe it or not, it worked great and this could work on a larger scale.

Has anyone experienced or heard of doing such a radical unheard of upgrade. What problem did you run into and what did you do to solve the obstacle?

This was crazy plan A. Plan B might consist of just virtualizing everything as is (or upgrade to whatever was last supported by our tools release (like SQl2005)) and hope that performance doesn’t suffer too much by virtualizing those old soon to be unsupported OS. We would have to live with the risk of running an old Microsoft OS which will not be getting patched in the future with all the security risk and threats associated with that.

What’s your take on that topic???
 
I can tell you from personal experience, it is possible to install Visual Studio 6.0 on Windows 2008.

As for the rest of it, you'll just have to try it and see. I don't know how the older versions of the Tools Release, et al, will run on the newer OS.
 
Thank you Ken!
This is the kind of information that I was looking for.

Was your Visual Studio 6.0 installation on 2008 R2 as well?
 
Yes, this was a hardware upgrade for a client that is still using Xe. They didn't want to pay for new Microsoft compilers if they didn't have to, and I found the procedure to get Visual Studio 6 with SP5 installed and working on Windows 2008 R2.

The same procedure will work for all flavors of Microsoft OS from Vista on up.
 
We have to do way more testing but so far in my lab, I have JDE 8.9 TR 8.96.2.1 running on Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2.

Deployment server is on Windows 2008 R2 as well with still Compiler VS 6.0 and MSDE local database.

All this on VMware.

I'm very surprised that it work at all.
 
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