ECC5 upgrade to ECC6: about the upgrade path

[former_member459694]

Dear experts,

we will upgrade our current ECC5.0 system up to ECC6 together with the hardware upgrade.

currently we have AIX5.3+oracle 9.2+ECC5 unicode

we plan to upgrade our hardware and finally have AIX 7.1+Oracle 11.2+ECC606

It seems a very complex process so I would like to ask you some questions:

1. Shall we first migrate the system(with OS upgrade from 5.3 to 7.1) and then upgrade oracle database and SAP, or first upgrade ECC5 to ECC6 in current servers and then migrate the upgraded ECC6 to new servers (with OS and DB upgrade)? seems very complex to follow the rule defined by PAM...

2. What is the feasible and most appropriate path for this upgrade?

Very appreciate if you can give your advises on it. Thank you so much!

Best regards,

Freshman

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

My suggestion would be to first upgrade OS/DB and hardware and to run the old version on the new platform BUT ONLY if it's supported. Older SAP versions (kernel, SAP_BASIS) might not be supported on newer OS/DB. Check PAM and SAP notes.

I'm quite certain that the other way around isn't supported meaning having old OS/DB with new SAP version.

If you can't do it in steps, you will have to do everything at once but ofcourse one system at a time (sandbox, dev, test, prod).

[former_member459694 · Accepted solution]

Hello Samuli,

Thank you for your reply.

By the way, I feel that PAM is not that so accurate, for example for ECC6.0 EHP6, the PAM indicates only Windows Server 2008 is supported however actually I can install it on Windows Server 2003 + Oracle 11g, why PAM doesn't include Windows Server 2003 as an supported OS version for EHP6?

Best regards,

Freshman

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Are you looking at migrating from AIX to Windows at the same time?

That's true that sometimes technically something works but being supported means that it is guaranteed to work. SAP support is usually bound to the support of other vendors, in case of Windows 2003 the support is bound to what Microsoft supports. Maybe Windows 2003 is no longer officially supported by Microsoft? Or SAP has chosen not to support it, because there are actual problems with it or because they want to streamline their offering. EHP6 is based on the 7.20 kernel for instance, that kernel has some OS specific requirements.