PI and Local SLD and Central SLD

[Former Member]

Hi there,

I am trying to get a clear understanding about SAP PI, Local SLD (PI SLD) and Central SLD (using SOLMAN SLD in our case) . According to OSS Note: 939592, I understand that we can configure the PI to use Central SLD, and with note: 768148

Our Company:

We are using the Solution manager SLD as a Central SLD.

Our company Landscape: All sandboxes are connected to SOLMAN Development box SLD and other SAP Systems, DEV, QA, and PRD will be connecting to Solution Manager Production box SLD.

I am also aware of that SLD becoming a critical component of SAP with PI Implantations

My questions would be that, what is PI exactly using it for? I see that in-order to have Runtime workbench (Integration Monitoring) working; you need to have all of your Business system defined in SLD with integration link: http://<hostname>:<port>/sap/xi/engine?type=entry? ... According to SAP’s How To …Handle the SLD for SAP XI.PDF document, they are maintaining one master SLD and few Sub-sld? Why do we need to maintain sub-SLD, if we can maintain all the information’s in the Master SLD about each System?

Is ok go to connect all systems to one Master/Central SLD rather than having these sub-slds and then importing/exporting SLD contents from SUB-SLD to Master SLD? Having sub-SLDis really pain to maintain the SLD.

How to SLD Document Link: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/9e76e511-0d01-0010-5c9d-9f768d64...

Any clarification or comments would be much much appreciated

Thank you all in advance

Kumar

[Former Member]

Kumar,

With respect to SLD there are a lot of consdierations that extend beyond PI into eSOA going forward where we need to start centralizing the information in the SLD.

To put it in a quick and very simple bucket - the SLD is a registration point that allows all systems to know about other systems, what software is installed on which clients and so on. Because of this there are a lot of ways to do business so long as you come up with a way to have all the information about the environments in all the SLD's. Take Solution Manager for example, it will pull data from the SLD to figure out what objects to populate with which clients and which software components. So Solution Manager can only generate what is registered in the SLD - in short everything must register to the SLD for it to do its job.

Next step to take when you understand that you should have everything registered in all SLD's is how many of them you want to have - 1? Many? How many and how do I keep them all synchronized and who is the system of record? These questions and what reliance you have on the SLD will determine your landscape (also remeber that the Portal needs the SLD to figure out how to communicate to back-end systems with JCo RFC's - so when it goes down, Porals and PI are at risk).

When PI comes into play - Interface developers will start creating customer software components and applying them to systems in the SLD Manually. I would assume that you don't want someone tickering away on your Production SLD by hand which means that you should have a prototype place that receives a copy of the SLD image from the production SLD but such that Interface Developers (and other developers) can logon and make changes without risking the productive systems.

Anyhow - I can go on for hours but just wanted to let you know that it is something that should be a serious consideration as when you start using eSOA - as PI, CE and ERP will use these repositories extensively for development and execution.

[Former Member]

Hi Kumar,

There are different scenarios where you need more than One SLD. OSS note 764393 will give you more idea about Configuring SLD in different environment.

-Pinkle

[Former Member]

Why do you think we need to have more than one SLD, when you can configure the CENTRAL SLD to have all the system informations? Wouldn't this be easy to maintain since it is single repository?

Kumar

[VijayKonam]

Hi,

That would be easy to maintain. Right. But any mistake picthches in while development, might hit production which is not desirable. That would be one of the most important reasons why atleast 2 SLDs are needed in order to be safe from any experimnets taken up in development.

VJ

[Former Member]

Hi VJ,

still debating my self about this Central SLD and Local SLDs....when said we need to have 2 SLD at least, this mean for an example...1 SLD for PRD and 1 SLDs for DEV and QA Systems, and then synchronization them by exporting/importing the SLD contents from (DEV and QA) SLD to PRDs SLD?....I am not stil convicned with this yet, if that is the case, don't you think CMS setup and transport will become more complex to setup and etc?

Let me know what do you think?

Thanks

Kumar

[Former Member]

This is more for Production environment.

There are couple reason for this.

1. As VJ point out, Only one SLD could be single point of failure

2. Also as in OSS note explained, company with more than 2 production site should have atleast 2 SLDs either due to Security reason or Network issues.

-Pinkle