Installing high availability clustering in an existing SAP environment

[Former Member]

Hello all...

This is probably a pretty easy question for you clustering gurus, but I am new to this.

We are running an existing ECC6 environment (DB2 - UNIX) and would like to set up clustering for high availability. Our basis team is saying that we will have to completely reinstall as this can only be done at the time of installation.

Question is, is it possible to implement clustering in an existing environment without having to completely reinstall? If so, can you point the way to some doc's and instructions?

Thanks in advance!!!

[Former Member]

Hello Joseph,

The only way to achieve this is by means of a homogeneous system copy. You can take an export of your current system and then during the installation of the target system use the high availability installation options.

You can take a look at the system copy documentation

http://service.sap.com/systemcopy

This is the only (Supported) way I know of to move to a HA environment.

Kind Regards,

David

[Former Member]

Hello,

Usually when you cluster an existing production system, you buy new hardware for the 2 cluster nodes.

You can so reduce the down time because you can install the SAP cluster in advance taking all the necessary time.

For the going live, you just stop the old non clustered system, do an offline backup and restore it on the new clustered system. You then reconfigure all the connected systems to use the new cluster.

Even if you reuse the old hardware, I think you'll have to reinstall completely because of the virtual IPs.

So, I would say that your basis team is right.

The official documentation is the installation guide from http://service.sap.com/instguides but it describes an installation from scratch.

Regards,

Olivier