Running mySAP ERP 2005 on 'old' 825-AS/400 ?

[Former Member]

hi there,

we are planning to upgrade vom SAP R/3 4.6.c to mySAP ERP 2005 SR2.

we are running the upgrade for the TEST-Enviroment now and it is VERY slow. i think the biggest problem is the hardware we are using. it is an 825-AS/400 with power4. there are 2 LPARS, one for test, one for production.

we have 3 CPU',S.............2 for the production, 0,4 for the 'management' of the machine, and only 0,6 CPU for test. RAM is 8 GB. about 1,5 GB for Test, and about 6,5 GB for production.

we are on V5R3 on OS/400. there are sapnotes which say that we have to upgrade to V5R4 to avoid some performance problems with ATAB-pool-table.

But the question is:

with the above configuration, can we even run mySAP ERP 2005 with this very poor configuration ?? R/3 is running okay now. i have seen a post for example where there was a MINIMAL RAM of 8 GB recommended. is this true ?

regards, Martin

[Former Member]

Hi Martin,

what you are seeing was really "forseeable" :-((

That is all pretty bad in the configuration ...

You are on slow CPUs already, but with this 0,6 CPUs you even cut them by 40% performance again ! You should definetely change to 1,0 CPU for the upgrade. 8 GB RAM is pretty limited for 3 LPARs ...

but: 1,5 GB for one LPAR is no option at all ! You should grap at least 3,5GB more for the upgrade and then move it down again.

But, when you move below 4GB you can expect bad performance.

In general: The responsetime on old hard when you come from 4.6x to 6.0 will increase by 30-100% depending on the RAM. So, I can only agree with Victor, that the performance will be a lot poorer ...

One question would be a hardcopy of WRKSYSSTS adn QPFRADJ ?

Perhaps there could be optimized a bit at least ...

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut.gmbh

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

[Former Member]

Hi Victor, hi Volker,

thank you very much for your statements.

The main problem is the following: i am responsible for this project and i want to put a big STOP behind the project (for production upgrade in April, not for the test-upgrade which is running now since Tuesday last week) if the hardware we have now is not 'enough'. I can find NO official statement for it.

so is there any official paper from SAP and/or IBM saying e.g. that 8 GB is the minimum ?

i will send you the screenshots ASAP.

p.s. we are now in phase TABIM_UPG of the upgrade for about 20 hours now !!!!!! there we had kind of 'standing still' when it comes to table T030 (ATAB-problem !!!). it is excactly the point which is described in sapnote

Volker has a solution for it in the mentioned post ! And some weeks later (january 17) the official sap-note 1017718 came out saying that the problem is with V5R3 !!!! And it says that is recommended to upgrade to V5R4 BEFORE the upgrade. Well, for the prod. update (if we will do it on this 825-hardware in April) we should install V5R4. Anyway, the upgrade is still running, and hopefully it will be finished the next days

Again, my biggest problem is that i need OFFICIAL statements for my boss.

Only then i can say 'I will do NO upgrade to mysap ERP 2005 on this hardware'

[Former Member]

Hi Volker,

as you are in this phase, you should create this index as described there in order to speed things up !

V5R4 is not needed, but with V5R3 you need such an index ...

memory needed and official ? I think, I'm the wrong person for that ...

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut.gmbh

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

[Former Member]

Hi Volker,

of course you are the wrong person for an 'official' statement, i understand this ,-)

i took a look to sysval of syspfradj, and it has the value 0 (zero), saying 'Keine Anpassung'. i must mention that i am only responsible for SAP and not for the machine, as it is outsourced to an external company ! What does this value say anyway ?

Here is wrksysval-output (from the TEST-LPAR !)

Mit Systemstatus arbeiten ATWDE405

07.02.04 19:41:43

% CPU benutzt . . . . . : 99,8 Zusatzspeicher:

% DB-Kapazität . . . . . : 38,6 System-ASP . . . . . . : 493,9 G

Abgelaufene Zeit . . . . : 00:00:00 % System-ASP benutzt . : 74,3568

Jobs im System . . . . . : 918 Gesamtsumme . . . . . : 493,9 G

% perm. Adressen . . . . : 0,013 Unges. Platz akt.

% temp. Adressen . . . . : 0,068 belegt . . . . . . . : 12299 M

Max. ungeschützt . . . : 23709 M

Änderungen (falls zulässig) eingeben und die Eingabetaste drücken.

System Pool- Reserv. Max. -DB-Seiten-- Nicht-DB

Pool Größe(M) Größe (M) Aktiv fehl. geles fehl. geles

1 250,00 76,30 +++++ 0,0 0,0 0,0 0,0

2 1145,46 0,64 100 17,8 56,7 5,5 18,9

3 50,57 0,12 15 0,0 0,0 3,3 3,3

4 50,00 0,00 5 0,0 0,0 0,0 0,0

Ende

Befehl

===>

F3=Verlassen F4=Bedienerführung F5=Aktualisieren F9=Auffinden

F12=Abbrechen F19=Erweiterter Systemstatus F24=Weitere Tasten

regards, Martin

[Former Member]

Hi Martin,

this value is correct, I would suggest, that you get rid of pool 3 & 4, but this will help only limited. You should have a look at note 428855 and apply this one useful. You should NOT reduce QMCHPOOL, as this is small right now already.

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut.gmbh

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

[Former Member]

concerning the uprgrade to V5R4: is it a problem to uprgrade to v5r4 on a 825-machine ?

i have read that it maybe also applies on OTHER pool-tables, not only on ATAB. So you can do solve the problem for atab with the logical file, but what about the others ? so I think its better to upgrade to v5r4........just my opinion.

regards, Martin

[Former Member]

Hi Martin,

it is your decision, but this problem will NOT occur with another table - it is just a theoretical chance on that.

So, you should go for the release of your choice.

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut.gmbh

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

[Former Member]

okay, if that is so, we should NOT go for an update, because we WOULD have the test-upgrade with v5r3 and the production-upgrade with v5r4, i am not sure if this is a good idea, because the production upgrade should have the same 'basics' as the test-upgrade.

so when the logical file solves this problem, we will stay with v5r3. the time is not very high available and i have to concentrate on the testing between test-upgrade and prod.-upgrade, a os/400 upgrade would take some time for testing too.

reg, martin

[Former Member]

Hello Martin,

Using the "quick sizer" tool againt the latest ECC release might be the only "official" result I could think of. Based on that, you can argue that the number of CPU and the amount of memory should be referred with the latest technogolies, not something manufactured 4 years ago.

The latest ECC release, based on NetWeaver 7.00, does offer more functions than R/3 4.6C though.

Best regards,

Victor

[Former Member]

Hello Martin,

For the ATAB performance issue, Volker has a great solution posted in thread 311763 (or search "ATBA Volker" in this forum) to speed up the upgrade process. Check that out first.

Likely ERP 2005 will run, but performance will not be as good as before... After upgraded from 4.6C EBCDIC to ECC 5.00, the response time could be doubled (or more).

For your case (3-way Power4 with multiple instances), 8GB is minimal - based on the IBM Info APAR.

If you run the SAP quicksizer again and contact your IBM partner, they might propose a reasonable solution. For example, 1-way Power5+ could match 3-way Power4 on CPW, and model 550 (P20 with 1/4-way) could have lower software (either P group or number of CPUs) and hardware (1st-year free at least) maintenance. And there is no "primary partition" overhead for Power5 architecture.

Regards,

Victor