Specifications

Lotus Redbooks Wiki – IBM Lotus Notes and Domino V8.5 Deployment Guide
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Features
When upgrading or deploying Domino 8.5 it should be part of of the rollout plan to define the new features
you’re going to activate.
Sizing
For a checklist to use when sizing a new Domino server, see Techpaper 7008851, "Notes/Domino Best
Practices: Sizing", available at this URL:
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=203&uid=swg27008851
If you are planning to run your Domino server inside a virtual machine, please read technote "How to size
Domino and Sametime systems for full production loads on VMware ESX Server"
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21267837
Consolidation
When reviewing your Domino environment, you may have found your environment in need of some level of
consolidation, such as domain consolidation or server consolidation. If you are considering consolidation, it
would be wise to conduct the consolidation as part of your prerequisite activities. While consolidation is not a
prerequisite, best practices suggest that, should you want to consolidate, you should do so before
upgrading, to avoid making multiple changes at once. Then upgrade those servers to Domino 8.5 only after
the consolidation has been successful.
For more information about consolidation, see "Domino 7 Server Consolidation: Best Practices to Get the
Most Out of Your Domino Infrastructure", REDP-4181, available at the following URL:
http://www.redbooks.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/redp4181.html
Compatibility
Although Domino itself is backwards compatible, there are some things to consider when upgrading an
existing environment.
Application considerations
From an application perspective, there a few things to consider when planning to upgrade your application
servers. While it is not necessary to rewrite your pre-existing applications, we strongly recommend testing
your applications on Domino 8 before upgrading your production application servers.
In previous steps, you collected the information about your applications. Using this information, you can
target your testing appropriately. Additionally, once your application has been tested and the application
server upgraded, you can consider modifying the application to take advantage of new application
development functionality in Domino 8.5.
At this stage, you may want to identify the new application development features you would like to leverage
in your Domino applications. For more information about this, see the Application Development
pages in this
wiki.
Third party applications
Your third-party applications also have prerequisites, and server readiness includes making sure
that your environment meets the prerequisites for supported versions of your third-party