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Note 585277 - iSeries: System Copy - SDM Export?

tj_wilkinson2
Participant
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Hello,

Can someone explain why it's necessary to do an SDM export as part of this process? I got to thinking, if we were in a position where we needed to recover from a hardware failure, we wouldn't have an SDM export to use to rebuild the system. Is this something we should be exporting / saving with our daily backups? Or if we have it exported / saved once is that sufficient? Thank you.

~TJ

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

markus_doehr2
Active Contributor
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Backing up a combined ABAP + Java or a single Java instance always implies backing up the database content and the filesystem content at the same time. Opposed to ABAP Java stores a lot of information on the filesystem also.

The same is true for a system copy, you must use sapinst to perform the copy, you can do a backup/restore of the database (or a direct copy) but the Java content must always be "unloaded" and packed using sapinst.

Markus

tj_wilkinson2
Participant
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The SDM export / import is the IFS portion of the java system?

So in a disaster, if I want to rebuild the system, where would I get the SDM export from? We backup the pieces of the IFS during our daily backups (along with the abap / java database), but it's not packaged as a nice export. If we needed to restore, could we use the IFS backup, or would we have to have that stored as an SDM export?

If we can use the backup of the IFS to do a restore, in the event of a disaster, why can't we use it in the case of a system copy?

Thank you - I appreciate your help.

markus_doehr2
Active Contributor
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> So in a disaster, if I want to rebuild the system, where would I get the SDM export from? We backup the pieces of the IFS during our daily backups (along with the abap / java database), but it's not packaged as a nice export. If we needed to restore, could we use the IFS backup, or would we have to have that stored as an SDM export?

Basically you need to backup everything under /usr/sap/<SID>/.../j2ee, which you can restore if you can make sure the part in the database and the filesystem are "in sync" - means e. g. no deployments/changes during the backup of both.

> If we can use the backup of the IFS to do a restore, in the event of a disaster, why can't we use it in the case of a system copy?

Because Java clutters all information about hostname, SID, database connectivity etc. in .properties files on the filesystem and in the database. What is stored where and synchronized during startup of the engine is not really documented and is application dependent (a portal has more/different .properties files than a plain empty J2EE instance). This is also a reason why it's e. g. not that easy to just change a hostname of a Java instance.

If you do the export using sapinst in case of a system copy, it packs them together and at import time sapinst does the magic to replace all the necessary entries of hostname and sid and cluster ID etc. automatically for the new built instance.

Markus

tj_wilkinson2
Participant
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Thank you, that was a great answer.

Answers (2)

Answers (2)

Former Member
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Hi TJ,

you should consider doing an SDM export always when you change something on the Java side of the system. That means, if you only import ABAP transports/SPs on a double stack system, it is of no use doing a backup of the SDM again (assuming you already have one).

Best regards,

Christoph

Former Member
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We create the sapinst export after a support pack upgrade and have it parked in our DR environment. We hope to exercise this plan sometime in the future. We do a system copy of our production systems using the sapinst export and it works.

Regards,

Robert

markus_doehr2
Active Contributor
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> We create the sapinst export after a support pack upgrade and have it parked in our DR environment. We hope to exercise this plan sometime in the future. We do a system copy of our production systems using the sapinst export and it works.

Good!

Just make sure you have the corresponding database content too!

Markus

tj_wilkinson2
Participant
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I have a question regarding my previous thread ...

Do we need to do another SDM export each time we run transports, or only when we import support packages? Thank you.

~TJ