4.6C x86 32-bit Win2K/SQL 2000 to ECC x86_64 64 bit on Win2K3/SQL 2005

[Former Member]

Hi all,

We are currently puzzling over a problem involving our ECC upgrade and the path forward is not clear, based on the information provided to us by SAP's platform support.

We are currently running 4.6C (D Kernel) on 32-bit Xeon servers. Windows 2000 Advanced Server and MS SQL Server 2000.

We are planning, as part of our upgrade to ECC 6.0, to move to the 64-bit x86_64 platform, running Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005.

Originally, the path had seemed quite clear,

Homogeneous System copy from current 32-bit platform onto newly installed (temporary) 4.6C system, running on Win2K3 and SQL Server 2005 on 64-bit platform (x86_64.)

However, I started to do my homework and found that SAP's platform support for 4.6C only allows it to be installed on Windows 2003 on the IA64 CPU architecture.

This means I would not be able to install 4.6C on the target system, in order to use it as a system copy target.

I had also looked into doing the upgrade in place, from 4.6C to ECC, on our current i386 Xeon, 32-bit platform.

However, upon looking at the PAM, SAP ECC is only supported in 32-bit on the IA32 platform.

The only remaining option that I can see, is doing a 3-step migration.

1 - 4.6c 32-bit homogeneous System Copy to 4.6c 64-bit on newly purchased IA64 server.

2. Upgrade in place on IA64.

3. Homogeneous System copy from ECC 64-bit IA 64 server to newly installed ECC 64-bit x86_64 server.

Do I really need to buy a server for just this purpose?

Any advice, experience or comments are welcome.

Thanks,

Troy Shane

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

> However, I started to do my homework and found that SAP's platform support for 4.6C only allows it to be installed on Windows 2003 on the IA64 CPU architecture.

No.

Note 814834 - Windows 2003 SP1 x86_64 Support for SAP releases

Note 960769 - Windows: Migration from 32-bit to 64-bit (x86_64)

According the second note you can Install 4.6c 32bit on the 64bit OS and do the upgrade:

<...>
The following table illustrates which OS/DB combination supports each SAP release in the target system.
Source System	  Target System (Kernel, DB Software)	    Support Comment

4.6C	            4.6D 32-bit,  MSSQL 2005 64-bit 	   productive (b)
<...>

So I would

- Install Windows 2003 x86_64 on the new hardware

- Install SQL-Server 2005 with latest SP

- do a homogeneous system copy from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 64bit

- do your upgrade

And finally I would upgrade to Windows 2008 (and maybe even SQL 2008) to avoid running into

Note 1316558 - System hang situations on Windows Server 2003

> Do I really need to buy a server for just this purpose?

No - of course not

Markus

[Former Member]

Markus,

Thank you very much for the detailed (and MUCH appreciated) response...the notes provided explain the situation very clearly, because it isn't clear in the Product Availability Matrix.

Thanks again,

Troy

[markus_doehr2]

you're welcome.

Markus