QA refresh of CRM and logical system name change

[Former Member]

Hi all,

We are about to perform a refresh of our production systems into our QA landscapes, and I had a few questions.  I have been reviewing posts here as well as reviewed SAP notes 588701, 765018 and 872533. 

I have two questions. 

1. Myself and the rest of the Basis team were looking to refresh our ECC and CRM systems simultaneously (per instguide) we're doing restore of a full Oracle backup.  However, business needs dictate that CRM be done first, and then ECC at a later date. Does anyone know if this is possible?  We always refreshed our ECC, CRM, and BW systems simultaneously in the past to keep DB's in sync.  Is it possible to only refresh the CRM system and then work with our BA team to get the system back in sync with ECC (customer master, deltas, etc) or must they be refreshed at the exact same time?

2. I have been reviewing many posts about changing the logical system name of systems after refresh.  When using the backup/restore method, we have always changed the SID and DBSID, but never the logical system name (ex: ECC QA always remained "PR*0000100" in SCC4).  Is it standard practice, and does SAP take a stance on BEST PRACTICE for this? I cannot seem to find an authoritative document that says whether logical system name should be changed on a refresh.  I know after it is changed then BDLS must be run, and there are many post configuration tasks in Middleware for CRM to have it begin communicating with ECC via the queues again.

Any input on this or links to relevant documents would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[former_member188883 · Accepted solution]

Hi Ben,

1) It is a good practice to refresh ECC, CRM and BW systems simultaneously. The reason being CRM and ECC are interlinked based on a GUID. So if you refresh only ECC and do not refresh CRM then there are problems appearing in data replication between both the systems. There are work arounds available but good practise is to refresh all the connected system to avoid inconsistencies in communication and data replication

2) Apart for GUID , these SAP systems communicate via logical system name. Each connected system is identified by logical system name and data transfer queue is generated based on the same.

So after the copy if you do not change the logical system name, there are changes that data transfer happens in the wrong system. If the source system is production then you can imagine the impact of such incorrect connections.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Deepak Kori

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Deepak,

Thanks for the folllow up.  This is very helpful information.  One of the issues we ran into was we were using a proprietary copy method (based on hardware) per the copy guide in the past. Part of that process was we left all the logical system names the same when we refreshed PR* systems back to QA* systems.  So the logical system names lined up, but all the QA boxes continued to "think they were production".  SID and DBSID changed, LSN unchanged. 

We are now on new hardware which no longer supports this proprietary method, hence I am fact finding since we're moving towards a more standard refresh procedure and I want to stay as close to best practice as possible.  We have seen issues with GUID's in the past between CRM and ECC, and I will look into trying to refresh them all at the same time to avoid inconsistencies, and making sure all QA systems get an LSN change to <QA*>0000XXX

Thanks again.

[former_member188883 · Accepted solution]

Hi Ben,

There is a good document on SDN

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/6931413f-0b01-0010-c190-c21bc6711...

Hope this helps you get aligned to best practices.

Regards,

Deepak Kori

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks again Deepak. 

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Deepak,

thanks very much for your useful link.

I have done system refresh for ECC and BW but never done for CRM(ABAP+JAVA)

can you please share me, pre and post steps for CRM systems.

regards,

balaram

[karthikeyan_natarajan4]

Hi Ben,

Regarding the whenever you do the client copy or system refresh, you were changing the SID and DB schema ID as well,  when you are doing that logical system name should be changed as per new SID.

Eg: SIDCLNTClientNo. You can't have the old SID as your logical system name. please change it.

Please refer the below link about the logical system naming convention.

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/da/5990df015b5b43a36f6ce7fa1ee8c0/content.htm