HIS 2004 upgrade

Question

Hello All, I have a customer running HIS 2004 on Windows 2003 that I need to migrate to a supported platform.  I am assuming Windows 2012 R2 and HIS 2013.  I am looking for any guidance on how to upgrade from HIS 2004 to HIS 2013, any conversion
utilities, known upgrade path, gotchas to look out for?
Best Regards

Answer 1

The upgrade scenario depends mostly on two things:
1. What features of HIS 2004 are being used? For example, is HIS used for 3270 display/print sessions and/or LU 6.2 (APPC) sessions? Or are the Transaction Integrator feature or Data Integration features being used?
If the HIS 2004 provides support for legacy 3270 sessions and/or APPC sessions, the migration is typically pretty straight forward.
If the Host Print service is being used for 3270 printing, careful testing in the HIS 2013 environment will be needed to make sure the print jobs print correctly. A lot of changes occurred in subsequent HIS versions and in the print drivers available in
Windows so formatting issues may need to be addressed.
2. How is the HIS 2004 Server connecting to the IBM host system (mainframe or AS/400)?
If it is using DLC via the 802.2 DLC link service, then a little more work is needed. Support for DLC was dropped after HIS 2009. In HIS 2009 (and previous versions), it was only support on 32-bit versions of Windows Server. This means that DLC couldn't
be used on Windows Server versions after Windows Server 2008.
The replacement for DLC is the IP-DLC link service which integrates with IBM Enterprise Extender on a z/OS mainframe (and on current iSeries/AS400s). IP-DLC and Enterprise Extender utilize UDP for the SNA sessions. Please refer to the Configuring IP-DLC
Link Service for IBM Enterprise Extender white paper (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17441) for some details on this. 
As far as the migration in simple terms, the following is a basic outline:
- Save the current HIS configuration file (COM.CFG)
- Install HIS 2013 on the new server.
- Install the required link service (e.g. IP-DLC link service since DLC is not an option).
- If the new Server will have a new server name, then the old COM.CFG file will need to be updated to change the server name in the configuration to match the new server name. This can be done by opening the old COM.CFG file in offline mode using SNA Manager
or by exporting the COM.CFG to a text file using snacfg.exe, making the server name change and then importing the updated configuration data (using snacfg.exe) into the new COM.CFG created when HIS 2013 was installed.
- If a switch was made from DLC to IP-DLC, then additional changes need to be made in the old COM.CFG to account for the new link service being used.
- Once all the changes are made in the old COM.CFG, HIS 2013 can use this file and all of its configuration.
While I was with HIS support, we found that the best practice was to open a support case with HIS support to have the current configuration reviewed so that specific steps and potential pitfalls could be reviewed before the migration was started. This is
especially important when going form DLC to IP-DLC, migrating print sessions, making sure the applications that use HIS (emulators, APPC applications, etc.) will still work in the new 64-bit environment, and if Transaction Integrator applications are being
used.
Not the exact answers you likely wanted, but hope this helps.
Stephen Jackson - MSFT