Compatibility check for CA Gen 8.6 Upgrade

[Sathiyamorthy Ganesan]

Hi,
We are currently running on Gen 8.5 with COBOL 3.3. We are planning to upgrade to v8.6, as per Olga Schiller(Broadcom), 8.6 upgrade requires Cobol 6.2(minimum). Can you please check on whether any other customers running CA Gen V8.6 with Cobol older than 6.2 (3.3 in particular)?

[Attila Fogarasi]

Enterprise Cobol 3.3 went out of support over 15 years ago (the IBM EOS
date was April 2007) and has known problems running with supported LE
versions ... what z/OS version are you using? Are you still compiling
using Cobol 3.3 or just using old executables? Gen is the least of your
concerns, there are some big LE runtime exposures which vary with options
and how it is being executed (worst case is data corruption). There have
been 10 releases of Cobol compiler between 3.3 and Cobol 6.4 ... so lot of
changes.

Attila Fogarasi

Senior Technical Architect | Mainframe Software


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[Sathiyamorthy Ganesan]

Thanks for the response, Attila. We are running on z/OS 2.3 and planning to upgrade to 2.4 by Sept.
As the customer is not planning to upgrade Cobol anytime sooner, we need to know that any other customers who are using CA Gen 8.6 with Cobol older than 6.2 (or 3.3 in particular) and also any known problems running Gen 8.6 with COBOL lower than v6.2 or v3.3. Can you please check and confirm on this?
We need to go with this information to the customer.

[Attila Fogarasi]

GEN support can give a more authoritative answer as I only know a few GEN
customers, but your question is more about LE dependancy which is supported
by IBM. My customers do have backlevel Cobol running successfully with GEN
8.6 but with considerably newer Cobol (v5.1 and v4.2). However new
compiles are done with Cobol v6 compiler as elements are changed, they are
not running the old Compilers on z/OS 2.3. This has worked on z/OS 2.1,
2.2 and 2.3. If you haven't had problems with Cobol 3.3 with the LE z/OS
2.3 runtime, then you are clearly not using the Cobol options and language
features that cause problems for Cobol 3.3 running on z/OS v2. These are
unrelated to Gen (for example there is a Cobol storage leak for some DYNAM
environments when running unsupported, the fix is to recompile with Cobol
v6).
Attila Fogarasi

Senior Technical Architect | Mainframe Software


[phone] | [e-mail]

--
This electronic communication and the information and any files transmitted
with it, or attached to it, are confidential and are intended solely for
the use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed and may contain
information that is confidential, legally privileged, protected by privacy
laws, or otherwise restricted from disclosure to anyone else. If you are
not the intended recipient or the person responsible for delivering the
e-mail to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use,
copying, distributing, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of
this e-mail is strictly prohibited. If you received this e-mail in error,
please return the e-mail to the sender, delete it from your computer, and
destroy any printed copy of it.