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Welcome at the SAP on IBM i update! In this edition I will reflect on the V5R4 End of Support by IBM and what it means for our platform.

End of Program Support for V5R4

Only few days ago the date was officially announced to be end of september 2013. You find the details for this and other releases at IBM's Upgrade planning site, and some generic thoughts about the topic in the recent edition of Steve Will's You and i blog series.

SAP information

Let me take this event as an opportunity to route you to the Product Availability Matrix, where you can find details for every SAP product in terms of supported OS releases, database releasess Java VMs and many more.

But there is more to know, and you may appreciate to have specific information collected at a few spots like the following set of SAP notes. They collect known issues and their solutions for specific OS releases, where the ones relevant in the current context should be:

More associations

In addition to the pretty formal stuff above, I'd like to share some thoughts, which came to my mind quite immediatly when starting to write.

IBM i 7.1 is precondition to use the 7.20 EXT kernel with optimized performance. So one could think of taking advantage of a downward compatible kernel and of its optimized version on 7.1.

How to handle Java? Until we shipped SAP JVM you were bound to use IBM Classic VM on IBM i in SAP Web Application Server 6.40 and SAP NetWeaver 7.0. It is known to be very different in many respects compared to any other Java VM you may know from other platforms. In later OS releases you are encouraged or urged to switch to IT4J. Might be a good idea to switch to SAPJVM as a preparation step before an OS upgrade in order to avoid an additional switch, which will come from an already announced End of Support for the IBM JVMs.

Stay tuned...

As the development team intends to maintain a consistent format, editions of the series will continue to be published on my name. Set feeds accordingly if you are interested in following the series.