Critical Solaris Patches

[Former Member]

Dear Experts,

We are running SAP 4.7 ext 200 on Solaris 5.9 for the last 4 years. Our database is Oracle 9.2.0.5. Right now performance is satisfactory and business is running normally and good.

We have planned to upgrade our Oracle to 9.2.0.8 due to support recommnedations. I want to know weather 9.2.0.8 is perfectly problem free for SAP 4.7 ext 200 as we are running quite efficiently uptill now.

Similarly it goes with Solaris; our OS which is Solaris 5.9 is also running normally and efficiently for the past 4 years. Moreover we are behind very well configured firewall (Checkpoint). Are there still Solaris patches which are required to implement to guard against attacks or to eliminate known or unknown problems in Solaris 5.9 OS?

Only extra Solaris patches or packages I implemented were during installation of SAP recommended by SAP.

Please guide me in these issues.

Best Regards

Waqas

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Dear Wagas,

we're running several Solaris boxes and once per year all the boxes are patched. Normally this is done as follows:

1. Download the latest Solaris patch cluster for Solaris 9

2. Choose a test box to test the patch cluster -> install the patch cluster and find out if everything works normally

3. Patch your productive environment - plan at least a downtime of one night as the patch clusters normally needs a reboot of the machine. Moreover if you run into any problems you have the time to correct them. Make sure you have enough free space in /var to save the informations about the patches, which were built in.

HTH

André

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Andre for responding .

Please guide from where to download those critcal updates and security patches for Solaris 9. and also its hard to proper test that patch on test machines as on test machine some you cant replicate complete Production data, due to space limitations or security. Moreover you can also provide same user load on that test environment. In this case it could be very risky. What do you say about that?

Please tell me are you running on latest Solaris patches with SAP R3 Enterprise with 150 Plus user environment with Oracle.

Please share your experience.

-Waqas

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

> Please guide from where to download those critcal updates and security patches for Solaris 9. and also its hard to proper test that patch on test machines as on test machine some you cant replicate complete Production data,

I would use pca to download the patches (http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/), very easy to use and very convenient.

You need a valid Sun maintenance contract (being able to logon to http://sunsolve.sun.com)

> Please tell me are you running on latest Solaris patches with SAP R3 Enterprise with 150 Plus user environment with Oracle.

All Solaris patches can be used, they are supported. You can read

Note 550585 - SAP relevant patches for Solaris 9 on SPARC

to find out the absolut minimum patchlevels.

Markus

[markus_doehr2]

> We are running SAP 4.7 ext 200 on Solaris 5.9 for the last 4 years. Our database is Oracle 9.2.0.5. Right now performance is satisfactory and business is running normally and good.

> We have planned to upgrade our Oracle to 9.2.0.8 due to support recommnedations. I want to know weather 9.2.0.8 is perfectly problem free for SAP 4.7 ext 200 as we are running quite efficiently uptill now.

If you plan to do an upgrade I would go for Oracle 10g. Oracle 9.2 is out of normal support (see note 1021844 - Oracle 9.2 Extended Support free until July 31, 2008). In case you will encounter a problem and you have no extended maintenance contract (do you have one?) you may run into problems.

Markus

[Former Member]

Thanks Markus for your detail answers, I am really grateful to you.

From reading several notes what I have understand that since we have acquired Oracle through SAP we will get support as normal for known errors. ie according to SAPNOTE 925871

"

The discontinuation of the "Customer Care Support" basically means that:

There will be no new corrections for errors that are not known up to this date.

There will be no portings to new operating system versions.

However, corrections for known errors will still be provided as normal.

"

Since we are on 9.2.0.5, we are not thinking for going 10g migration right now.

But please tell me do we have to purchase licesnses for 10g or it will be free as we have already licensed for 9.2.??

We are not expecting a major unknown error right now.

Also please tell me for extended support i.e. for maintenance of unknown error and problems do we have to ask SAP for extended maint. contract?

Have I understood right?

Regards

Waqas

[markus_doehr2]

From reading several notes what I have understand that since we have acquired Oracle through SAP we will get support as normal for known errors. ie according to SAPNOTE 925871

yes - true.

Since we are on 9.2.0.5, we are not thinking for going 10g migration right now.

But please tell me do we have to purchase licesnses for 10g or it will be free as we have already licensed for 9.2.??

Since you bought your licenses already you can (and should) upgrade to 10g

Also please tell me for extended support i.e. for maintenance of unknown error and problems do we have to ask SAP for extended maint. contract?

Yes. see note Note 1110995 - Extended maintenance for Oracle Version 9.2

If you would upgrade to 10g that wouldn´t be necessary so you would safe (a lot of) money.

Also keep in mind that 4.7 is running out of normal support in march 2009 too, to get further support and necessary legal patches (for e. g. FI and HR) you will need to buy an extended contract for 4.7 too.

Markus

[Former Member]

Dear Wagas,

another way to get the cluster is to go directly to sunsolve: Sunsolve and download the cluster on this site. You'll need a username and password.

Wagas, do you have a possibility to copy an existing productive environment to a test environment? Are you running on SPARC or x86? If you run on x86 you may try to use a virtual environment and test the patch cluster inside a virtual machine.....

André