Build date restriction prevent customer from upgrading across AIX TL levels.

Customer : Kaiser Permanente

Customer has over 2000 AIX servers running with AIX 7.2 TL01 SP06. When we try to upgrade them to AIX 7.2 TL03 SP02 But it failed because AIX 7.2 TL01 SP06 was released after AIX 7.2 TL03 SP02.

AIX 7.2 TL01 SP06 is having higher Buid date and not allowing us to upgrade the server to higher TL. IBM case with PMR "TS003122154" suggested to reject the AIX 7.2 TL01 SP06 and upgrade to AIX 7.2 TL03 SP02 but this solution is no acceptable to customer, because this is possible only if it is applied state but we cant reject the service pack in Production environment as mostly they are in committed state.

So we have to go for rebuild and that's not possible as we will have huge business impact . The alternate solution provided by IBM was to go to AIX 7.2 TL03 SP03. However, AIX 7.2 TL03 SP03 has a LVM filesystem srink defect. i.e "System crash if we change the size of jfs2 filesystem" . A PMR "TS002441569" was raised for this issue. So this solution is also does not work .

We explained the problem with the IBM product team and suggested that the AIX Development team to consider higher TL level as an overriding factor over build date and allow customer to upgrade to higher TL level. Latest APARs can be taken care using the customer patching strategy and there is no need to hold "latest APARs" as the reason to prevent upgrading.

As we see the quality of AIX delivery is deteriorating ( see the two cases below), it is imperative that we don't put unnecessary road-block on upgrades.


1, only Root user can able to read the errpt and restricted to normal user and need to install ifix IJ10405 to fix it.
2, Possible undetected data corruption and need to install ifix IJ21580 to fix it.

Please consider.