Domino 8 on System i: Some notes…

I recently upgraded a customer from Domino 7 to Domino 8 on the iSeries (a.k.a i5, System i, AS/400… or whatever IBM’s marketing whim is this month). In the process

Domino 7 uses the default Java 1.4 JDK (5722JV1, Option 6). IBM has built Domino 8 to support Java 5.0, and therefore requires the Java toolkit 1.5 as well as the J2SE 5.0 (5722JV1 options 7 and 8 respectively).

After I got the server upgraded, we noticed that the JVM would not start, nor would the HTTP server tasks. I followed the required software list verbatim, and ensured that all the recent PTF’s were properly applied. No matter what I tried I kept getting this same error:
10/20/2007 12:46:40 JVM: The Java Virtual Machine creation returned an invalid JVM machine pointer.

10/20/2007 12:46:40 JVM: Java Virtual Machine failed to start
10/20/2007 12:46:40 HTTP Server: Error Loading Java Virtual Machine
10/20/2007 12:46:40 HTTP Server: JVM: Missing entrypoint in JVM runtime library.

I found out that PASE was required. This is not explicitly listed in the requirements, although it is a requirement for the J2SE 5.0. Since PASE was not needed for Domino 7, my client had not installed it. Once we installed PASE, everything worked like it should.

Keep this in mind if you do a Domino upgrade on iSeries/System i/i5.