Is it possible to upgrade only NW stack without upgrading PI?

[Former Member]

Dear all,

We are currently on SAP PI 7.1 EhP1 with Netweaver 7.11 SP10.

As a prerequisite fpr an ECC Uprgade to EhP7, SAP says " When using SAP Portal, SAP BW or PI in conjunction with ERP 6.0 EHP7, the underlying Netweaver version of these systems must be NW 7.30 or higher before upgrading to ERP 6.0 EHP7"

Is it possible to upgrade only the NW stack to NW 7.3 or 7.4 without upgrading SAP PI to 7.3 (or SAP portal or SAP BW to the next available version) ?

Thanks and Regards,

Reena

[marksmyth · Accepted solution]

Hello Reena,

The official recommendation from SAP is that the PI system must be on the highest release in the landscape. See note 1043047 Compatibility of XI/PI in the system landscape. So the recommendation is to upgrade your PI first and then upgrade ECC.

However, some customers have successfully upgraded ECC first. Several issues were encountered. These are documented in note 1942289 Known issues with PI and ECC EHP upgrades

Regards
Mark

[Dimitri · Accepted solution]

Hi Mark,

Thank you for the valuable feedback!

Kind regards,

Dimitri

[marksmyth · Accepted solution]

Hi Dimitri,

Rigorous testing is advisable if you decide to go down this unconventional route.

Regards
Mark

[Dimitri · Accepted solution]

Hi Mark,

We recently decided to go for EhP6 on our SAP ECC system.

Next step is upgrade SAP PI 7.11 to SAP PO 7.4.

And after that we will upgrade SAP ECC to EhP 7.

Looks save to me, no?

Kind regards,

Dimitri

[marksmyth · Accepted solution]

Hi Dimitri,

This should be ok. If the PI system is on the highest release in the landscape, then you should not encounter any issues.

Regards
Mark

[Dimitri]

Hi,

We are on the exact same situation and you need to upgrade your complete PI system.

A SAP PI system runs upon a NetWeaver stack, but you need to upgrade everything.

Kind regards,

Dimitri

[Former Member]

Thank you for your reply, Dimitri.

• Does this pre-requisite apply even if we have Netweaver installed on separate servers?
• Is there by any chance a workaround to bypass the upgrade of SAP PI, BW and Portal and simply do an ECC EhP7 upgrade?