When I recently looked at upgrading Smart Office from version 10.0.5.x to 10.1.x I was rather concerned about a couple of the steps and really wanted to be able to test the install in a completely isolated environment. Unfortunately, at work I wasn’t going to be able to do so – I’d always be relying on either our DR AS400 or my production AS400. Neither situation is ideal.
So I had considered building my own test lab in an isolated environment. As it happens I have my very own HP DL380g4 sitting at home and have VMware ESXi 5.1 sitting on it – this server is what I tend to test upgrades of VMware, or our email system on amongst other things. A few months ago, I increased the ram on the unit from 14gig up to 50gig for the purpose of trying to build a M3 lab. It’s really quite amazing what sort of kit that you can purchase now at such a low price.
I had a chat to the NZ Infor Techy about running through an install from wo-to-go with me, however due to some proposed restructuring I came to the conclusion that I’ll be lucky alone get budget for something that could be considered rather frivolous.
But, me being me, I really wanted to see if I could do it and I was kinda interested to learn about how everything would hang together, de-mystifying M3 if you will. And of-course, the great thing about going it alone is that I would screw stuff up and then have to fix it – it may take longer but at least I get to make my mistakes and conclusions. And believe you me, there was definitely a lot of that.
First things first – this is a pure lab install, there is no tuning, there is no performance checking, nothing. It’s purely an exercise to learn about an M3 install, and ideally later use it to test procedures in updating various components without hosing one of my expensive work environments. There were several instances where I had to back-track, and some instances where I was a little too click-happy and skipped screenshots – I may have even skipped a step or two. I have also cleaned up this document from my 153 A4 pages of notes and screenshots – changing the order so it is a little easier to follow – so it is equally possible I have missed some steps – be prepared.
In total, there was the better part of 4-5 days working on getting this installed and running – some of that was due to getting distracted by TV or doing other work :-). I’d be fairly confident that I could reduce that significantly now that I have a better understanding.
Because there is a lot in the way of screenshots (these would have been invaluable as I was following the install guides!), I’m going to break this up in to 5 posts:
After which I had a pretty basic install against which I could test and run a few programs.
Continue reading →
Potato IT 