Migrating from earlier unsupported releases of IBM WebSphere MQ for z/OS

You must take into consideration whether you are upgrading a production system, or a test system, before you undertake the migration process.

Production systems

For production systems you must, firstly, migrate the unsupported release of IBM MQ to IBM WebSphere MQ Version 7.1, following the instructions given in the documentation for that release. For more information about where to find the documentation for older versions of the product, see Documentation for older versions of IBM MQ

We can then migrate to IBM MQ Version 9.0 following the instructions in this section. Important: Ensure that your system is stable at Version 7.1, before migrating to Version 9.0, so that we have a system to revert to, if necessary.

Test systems

For a test system, it might be appropriate to migrate directly to IBM MQ Version 9.0 instead.

Before you begin the migration, take complete backups of your system, to ensure that we can restart from backups if you need to use the old release again.

IBM MQ Version 9.0 migrates IBM MQ objects and messages during the first startup at Version 9.0.

New attributes added to objects in IBM WebSphere MQ Version 7.0 and IBM MQ Version 9.0 releases are set to their default values.

Important: After we have migrated to IBM MQ Version 9.0 using this method, we cannot revert to the original version.

We can restart a queue manager, at the original version, using the full set of backups taken before migration. However, note that any changes you make to the system after the backups were taken, or while running at Version 9.0, will be lost.