More often than not and at many customers I have worked for earlier, solution manager upgrade is a trivial task. Purely because not everyone implements the entire ALM suite and not everywhere will there be a plan to scale solution manager to accommodate more than 2000 systems, just for active monitoring! It’s easy to imagine the amount of content that was there in solution manager at SP08 where we started and safe to say it wasn't an easy task to upgrade it to SP11.
The main intention behind this blog is to give an overview of the drivers behind this upgrade, challenges we faced, recommendations and our learning.
Drivers behind the decision:
First and foremost, a lot of landscapes that were connected already to solution manager went through an upgrade early this year. With an intention of bringing solution manager to pace, the need was all the more strategic. For eg. Monitoring of netweaver releases 7.4 and above is not possible in SP08. Please refer SAP Note#1478974 for further details.
Another selling point for the upgrade was a lot of new features that SP11 offered. An overview of the same can be found here
Plan and the execution:
We had a 3 system landscape of DEV-->QA-->PRD and in addition a sandbox system. Preparations were on from March this year in terms of getting the sizing and forecast right (at least for coming 12 months). However, the real execution of the upgrade started 2 months back. With a detailed plan we actually took less time to upgrade QA and PRD systems when compared to DEV and sandbox systems. The adjustments i.e. SPAU and SPDD were only done in Dev and then transported across so that they get automatically handled in QA and PRD. We actually finished the production upgrade over the weekend in 2 days [not considering the times for download media, preparation and post upgrade activities likes testing]. We released the system for production usage after 5 days.
SMEs from every module were given the task of testing their respective functionality and issues were tracked individually.
Issues we encountered:
I am mentioning only the standard SAP issues we encountered which were resolved by a SAP note here. Apart from these, obviously, there were several other customer specific issues we encountered.
- Editing a document in RMMAIN was causing runtime errors – Resolved by SAP note 1979874.
- Opening an ITSM incident lead to a runtime error in transaction CRM_UI/SM_CRM - The root cause of this were the new SAP Standard Page Attributes introduced with SP11 which were missing in the old Enhanced View, we added these attributes to the custom Enhancement Set.
- Background job : CCMS_BI_SETUP had errors in its logs - The errors were due to bugs, the resolution is to follow the recommended activities in KBA: 2022565 & Implement SAP Note : 2016251
- Jobs related to CCLM were failing - Initial CCLM Setup that was required for SP11 was performed, Notes : 01957735, 02015424, 02021553 & 1991568 were implemented for Specific Issues.
- Agent Authentication via 'certificates' are not supported in SP11 – Backward compatibility issue. This is a bug in SP11 and the Authentication Mechanism via Certificates doesn’t work, will have to be switched to Basic.
- BW monitoring configurations were giving an error on saving – Resolved by SAP note# 1952450
Recommendations and Learnings:
If and when you plan to upgrade, do keep the notes 1953075, 1843689 handy. These notes provide an overview of recommended corrections.
During the pre-processing phase of SUM the Document Repository is also locked along with the Development Environment so no changes to SOLAR01/02 Documents are allowed. End Users will not be able to edit documents in SOLAR01 & SOLAR02, other production operations can go on till the downtime phase of SUM.
With a fond hope that this blog will help you in planning and executing the upgrade better. Do let me know of your experiences as well. Happy upgrading!
