Richard Siemers wrote:
I am a big fan of using all those extra dev spindles for PRD performance when dev is idle, But I also like having a dev Inserv just for testing/experience online upgrades in a non-critical environment first.
Another "option 1" pro is that it will enable you to get clever with snapshots of PRD VVs and using them in DEV instances. This can save space, improve read cache hits, but also decrease the amount of time and horsepower it takes to spin up a DEV database from a copy of production, if such a thing exists in your business workflow. Refreshing a SAP dev or QA instance from a copy of prod is a major event that can be scripted and become trivial with the use of snapshots.
Adding more nodes; you will want to look at re-balancing your zones/host paths as well.
For all firmware/patching updates we wind up using our DR site to stage them. We have used test as well for that but DR winds up being a better option for us to test against as I don't have a separate FC build out just for test in order to test updates end to end.
Anyone know if we have to take an outage to add in the additional controllers for option 1? From what I can tell the answer is no.