SAS Grid Administration

[prashantprash17]

We are planning to bring our prod environment back to 9.4 M3 from 9.4 M6 due to some requirements within our environment. We are having SAS Grid environment running on RHEL 6.8 Server. It would be great if you guys can help me with the recommended documentation and also suggest me the pre-implementation and post implementation steps. Also, the risks and challenges we must keep in our mind before we go ahead with this. Any prompt response will have be highly appreciated 🙂

[SASKiwi]

I would be interested to know what "some requirements" are. Why can they only be fixed by regressing your maintenance level?

This could easily be a case of where the cure is worse than the disease. Regressing your maintenance level could mean SAS applications start producing errors as you've removed enhancements they were using or reintroduced old bugs. Your SAS metadata could easily be corrupted due to metadata model changes. I'm not sure you can promote metadata to an earlier maintenance release.

[Anand_V]

Very interesting ask! Would like to know what is making you do this. Also first thing to check would be if you have any SAS objects that are downgrade compatible or you have to rebuild them. For Ex: EG projects

[prashantprash17]

The scenario is as follows:

We have our

prod on 9.4 M 3 and Rhel 6.4
Dev and val on 9.4 M6 and RHEL 6.10

We want to upgrade our prod OS level to RHEL 6.10 too but to test all the applications or say UAT it, we wish to first see the compatibility on Dev with the same configuration as on prod.

So we plan to bring our dev environment SAS to 9.4 M3 (As on prod) and as we already have RHEL 6.10 over here we can check the performance on the dev first and if all goes well we would upgrade both later to the 9.4 M6 and upgrade prod OS to RHEL 6.10.

So I wanted to know the path/Process/Sequence of the steps we should follow , Risk we have , Challenges we might face , Time it should be taking, pre requisites and post requisites to it.

Any additional suggestions and documentations in support.

Above all Thanks all for carving out time to answer these questions.

[MargaretC]

Just wanted to share with you that Red Hat is dropping support of RHEL 6.x the end of this year. You really need to be looking to upgrade all your systems to RHEL 7.8 or higher.

[SASKiwi]

If you have sufficiently validated and tested the combination of 9.4M6 on RHEL 6.10 in Dev / Val, what is the problem with rolling both of those out to Prod at the same time? That way you avoid any regression. 

[prashantprash17]

Because we want to stay on 9.4 M3 on prod with RHEL 6.10 as of now.

So we want to bring our dev at the same level and test it there.

[SASKiwi]

I'm confused now:

Above you say you have Prod SAS 9.4M3 on RHEL 6.4 but you are now saying you want to stay with 9.4M3 and RHEL 6.10?

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @prashantprash17 ,

this is a very interesting discussion, but let me put it in an easy and short manner to you: 

what you are asking is not possible from the application point of view. And there is no documentation for what you are asking. 

If you want to be creative, the solution must come from the infrastructure point of view. Still, I suggest not to be very creative. As you have been told, this is clear case of "medicine to be worse than the illness".

I also suggest to pay attention to @MargaretC advise. You do not want to be out of proper support in production in 3 months.

I do not intend to be harsh, but you really need to re-think your approach and assess the impact.