Upgrade 4.7 to ECC 6

[Former Member]

Hi All!

I would just like to know if anybody from you have an experience in upgrading from R/3 4.7 to ECC 6.0 EHP4? I have some questions and hopefully you can give me some clear inputs about it:

1. How many days estimate is the downtime of the production system upon cut over if our database is already 1.5TB?

2. Is the uni-code conversion a very long process?

Thanks,

Francis

[Former Member]

Hi,

regarding the right settings for the upgrade which have been mentioned, also make sure you take a look at the

[SAP on IBM i Upgrade Performance Whitepaper|http://www.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP101412]

that describes available performance improvements.

I'm currently updating the paper with a new improvement regarding the latest TP available which comes with another improvement for the alter table PARCONV_UPG phase. If you want to take advantage of the improvement you need to patch the TP in the upgrade kernel to level 214.

Regards,

Mirco

[Former Member]

Hi,

As already said, database size is not that important, we did an upgrade from 4.6C to 6.0 with a 7.2Tb database in 6 hours and 20 minutes, then transported around 100 orders, and applied EHP3 in 7 hours and 30 minutes. What did makes a real difference is hardware, mostly Hard Drives. If you have many heads (HDD), enough memory and good CPU's times can be around 9 hours or less including EHP4.

The best you can do is to do an upgrade in a test system very similar to the Production system you have and you will get your numbers, then you can tune up the upgrade process until you get acceptable times.

During upgrades there are not rules of thumb, you have to do tests, read the results from the docs generated by the upgrade process and from then you can get better times applying some SAP notes that gives tips for your specific scenarios.

Good luck,

[Former Member]

Hi!

Thanks for all your answers. It's very helpful. But what if the scenario is I will use the same machine (iSeries 550) DEV server for the testing of the upgrade system? We currently have 2 iSeries 550 machines. 1 for Prod and 1 for DEV and QAS. Will this be ok or should I get a totally separate server for the testing? Due to budget constraints, what I can use is the only hardware resource we have. Will this affect the upgrade testing if I use the current iSeries server only? Let me know your thoughts. Thanks again!

[Former Member]

Hello Francis,

asi I do imagine, that the DEV or QAS load is pretty limited when you upgrade the other system, this is totally neglectable

=> Go ahead with your dev/QAS box and you will see 95% the result of PRD later on ...

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut international ag

http://www.consolut.net - http://www.4soi.de - http://www.easymarketplace.de

[Former Member]

Hi, I'm sorry for the delay to answer.

In your scenario you will probably need to use the resource minimized option instead of downtime minimized because you already are running two instances in the DEV/QAS server and if you use Downtime Minimized then in some time period this server will be runing three instances at the same time and I to be able to run it like this the Hardware resources have to be enough to do this, remember something, ECC 6.0 requires more HD, CPU and RAM than 4.7.

Could you share with us the HW resources you have in this machine? like RAM, available HD and CPU? also consider that HD I/O performance will be affected if you have limited Heads (HD's) in the array.

IF your HW is capable to start the three instances and work at a fair speed, then also QAS users and DEV users will suffer from low performance during some peak use of the shadow system but this can be adviced to users so they could take their actions.

Another important issue here is to know if you QAS or DEV is a copy of Productive system, if none of them is, then you won´t get a close idea of the posible problems and downtime you will need to run the upgrade process in Production system, this is very important.

Hope this will help and I will like to help you more so if you could then answer this questions.

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi AC,

I can only warn everybody using "resource minimized" - I didit once and will do it NEVER again. This has only disadvantages ...

If you think, your ressources were not enough, I can garantue you, they will not be enough with ecc6 ...

=> no problem with the shadow instance - this is a really great concept ... everybody should use this;-)

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut international ag

http://www.consolut.net - http://www.4soi.de - http://www.easymarketplace.de

[Former Member]

Hi Volker,

I also has not so good experience about resource minimized, looks like it was developed by some other SAP team different than the one developing dowtime minimized, but I know it works for this kind of situations where limited budget and HW could create a serios performance degradation during upgrade.

My real hope is that they have enough HW resources to use downtime minimized or at least with good luck their SAP users won´t be so sensible to performance degradation during upgrade process so they can use the shadow instance.

If poster would like to post the HW they have on DEV/QAS server we could gave him the appropiate suggestion.

[Former Member]

Hi Everyone!

Thanks for the replies. Here's the HW specifications of the machines:

PRD system - iSeries 550, 40GB RAM, 4CPU's

DEV/QAS/ DR System - iSeries 550, 20 GB RAM, 2CPU's

UPS system - iSeries 825, 20 GB RAM, 5 CPU's

Thanks!

[Former Member]

Hi FJ,

I wuld go for 4 processes everywhere with 0 h Import Time. (you could change the SAPup to prio 50 - then it runs perfect and eats all available CPUs

Then I would suggest for the parconv 16 parallel TPs and the new TP patch (that might not be official right now). Then Parconv runs perfect as well ...

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut international ag

http://www.consolut.net - http://www.4soi.de - http://www.easymarketplace.de

[Former Member]

Hi,

the TP change for PARCONV_UPG is officially available with TP patch level 214.

The current TP level on SMP is 215, so you can use this to patch the upgrade kernel lib.

Regrads,

Mirco

[Former Member]

Hi Mirko,

thanks a lot for this good news ))

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut international ag

http://www.consolut.net - http://www.4soi.de - http://www.easymarketplace.de

[Former Member]

HI

I am also doing the same . can you please give me the guide of upgrade from 4.7 to ECC6 EHP 4 with CUUC. CAn you please give me the steps to follow. and give me the guide.

[Former Member]

Hi,

you can find the guides in the SAP service marketplace for both procedures.

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut international ag

http://www.consolut.net - http://www.4soi.de - http://www.easymarketplace.de

[Former Member]

Hi Francis,

If you plan to upgrade to EhP4, please "try to be as conservative as possible with regards to the number of technical usages that you select" (copied from the practical guide). If all the technical usages are selected, the downtime required could be measured by days, not hours.

I would also start to upgrade/patch the solution manager system as soon as possible. It might take a while to get the Maintenance Optimizer working right to generate the XML file needed for EhP4.

Good luck!

Best regards,

Victor

[Former Member]

Hi Francis,

we did several of these upgrades.

The downtime differs and is not really dependent on the DB size more of the correct parameters during the upgrade. I'm sure, it will below 24h (we reached 23.5h for a 5TB database) - so I would assume, it should be possible to reach 10-15h downtime when you are doing the upgrade only.

If you are doing the unicode conversion at the same point of time, this depends on MDMP or not. If you using MDMP, it is first pretty long and second pretty complicated. If not, it is a pretty straight forward process and should be possible to be done in 15h in total or so. I would then strongly recommmend to NOT use the "combined upgrade and unicode" as this creates for non-mdmp more questions than solutions.

If you need more information & consulting, we should take this offline.

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut international ag

http://www.consolut.net - http://www.4soi.de - http://www.easymarketplace.de