Communicator 3000 MPE/iX Release 6.0 (Platform Software Release C.60.00) (30216-90269)

Chapter 3 49

System Management

Overview of HP Stage/iX

by Venugopal

Commercial Systems Division

HP Stage/iX is an operating system facility for applying and managing

MPE/iX patches on your system. Using HP Stage/iX reduces system

downtime and provides an easy and reliable method for backing out

patches.Use HP Stage/iX to place PowerPatch and/or reactive patches

into staging areas on disk while the system is up, then choose a staging

area to use at boot time to apply the patches. After the patches are

applied, they can be backed out at any time through a reboot to the

Base (the version applied by the last tape update). Once you are

satisﬁed with the patches on the running system, you can commit the

staging area to form a new Base while the system is running (no reboot

is needed).

Requirements

HP Stage/iX is targeted for larger HP 3000 systems with adequate

extra disk space. Since putting patches in staging areas requires that

additional ﬁles be placed on disk, using HP Stage/iX uses a lot of disk

space. Adequate disk space on LDEV1 is especially critical, since a

large percentage of patches require changes to large ﬁles that must be

staged on LDEV1 (NL.PUB.SYS is an example).

NOTE Not all patches are stageable. At the time of release 6.0, Stage/iX

cannot handle patches which involve System conﬁguration ﬁles,

MMSAVE.MPEXL.SYS, non-system volume set ﬁles, and patches with

ﬁles that contain jobs that are streamed during patch installation.

Patches will be identiﬁed as stageable or not stageable during the

installation process.

HP Stage/iX Concepts

HP Stage/iX has three interfaces:

1. HP Patch/iX menu—allows you to stage patches to staging areas

once HP Stage/iX is initialized (as well as create CSLT/STORE tapes

as usual). Refer to "Overview of HP Patch/iX" in this chapter for

information about HP Patch/iX.

2. STAGEMAN utility—allows you to manage your HP Stage/iX

environment, and obtain information about the environment and

individual staging areas.

3. STAGEISL utility—is an ISL utility available when the system is

down. It contains a subset of the STAGEMAN functionality, and allows

you to recover from most errors or mistakes.