Advice on migrating SAS 9.2 to 9.4 m7 non grid AIX environment

[FCB2020]

Hi Team,

   We have decided to upgrade SAS 9.2 AIX environment to SAS 9.4 M7  AIX environment. Could you please provide best approach to successfully complete this upgrade?  Is it possible to upgrade from 9.2 to 9.4 m7 without any interim version upgrade? 

From data/code point, do we need to perform any update to avoid compatible issues?

Appreciate if you refer any installation and deployment videos which will help us with our migration project. Thanks in advance.

[SASKiwi]

A good starting point is the SAS resources for upgrading and migrating link

I suggest you explore this first then come back with more detailed questions.

AFAIK you can upgrade directly from 9.2 to 9.4M7. I would highly recommend installing 9.4M7 on dedicated new servers and then run these in parallel with 9.2 while you migrate all of your SAS applications to the new platform. Please bear in mind that all business-critical applications will need to be thoroughly tested on 9.4 to ensure you get the same results as 9.2. This is one of the reasons why you need to maintain both systems until migration is complete and tested successfully. 

[Kurt_Bremser]

Second what @SASKiwi said. Set up a new server (no big thing in these times of fully virtualized server farms), do a clean install, and copy your data and applications to the new environment. Datasets need only to be copied, but catalogs must be recreated. Clean up any issues you found with your current installation while you set up the new environment. Once the new environment is verified, switch your users over.

This is what I have been doing with 9.1.3 to 9.2, and then 9.2 to 9.4.

[FCB2020]

Thanks for your response.

Would like to have more details on fresh installation of 9.4 m7. Any suggestion where I can find installation and configuration details for 9.4 M7 at AIX environment? Appreciate your help on this.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi @FCB2020 ,

I would give a look into the following documentation:

https://support.sas.com/en/documentation/install-center/94/guide-for-unix.html