Migrating from earlier unsupported releases of IBM 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 should, firstly, migrate the unsupported release of IBM® MQ to IBM WebSphere® MQ 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

You can then migrate to IBM MQ 8.0 following the instructions in this section.

Important: Ensure that your system is stable at Version 7.1, before migrating to Version 8.0, so that you have a system to revert to, if necessary.

Test systems

For a test system, it might be appropriate to migrate directly to IBM MQ 8.0 instead.

You should take complete backups of your system, to ensure that you can restart from backups if you need to use the old release again.

IBM MQ 8.0 will migrate IBM MQ objects and messages during the first startup at Version 8.0.

New attributes added to objects in IBM WebSphere MQ 7.0 and IBM MQ 8.0 releases will be set to their default values.

After you have migrated to IBM MQ 8.0 using this method, you cannot revert to the original version.

You can restart a queue manager, at the original version, using the full set of backups taken before migration.

Note, that any changes you make to the system after the backups were taken, or while running at Version 8.0, will be lost.