Upgrade strategy for SAP NetWeaver PI 7.1
By Julia Doll, SAP NetWeaver Product Management - SOA middleware
The upgrade to SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 (SAP NW PI 7.1) is supported for SAP NetWeaver 04 and SAP NetWeaver 7.0(2004s). That means that upgrading is possible from SAP NW XI 3.0 and SAP NW PI 7.0.
There are some restrictions given by the upgrading process like the following:
Since SAP NW PI 7.1 is only available for 64 bit operating systems the first step to take is to upgrade the operating system. During the upgrading process, SAP JVM will be installed, because no other JDK is supported. SAP JVM is the Java Virtual Machine provided by SAP.
Customer adapters and the adapter modules have to be adjusted to SAP NW PI 7.1. All Objects used in the integration Repository (IR) are available in the Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) after upgrading and can be used without change. Even the mappings will be taken over and the objects of the integration directory (ID) can be reused.
The Adapters Framework API changed between version SAP NW XI 3.0 and SAP NW 7.1 mainly to reduce the used packages and classes to enable higher performance. Due to that, the different versions are incompatible and a manual adjustment is necessary. The framework programming model, JCA technology as well as transactional and admin model have not been modified. Here is no adaptation during the upgrade process needed. To adjust an adapter the new libraries from the 7.1 PCK/AF installation have to be extracted. There are changes in the java code and the xml files that have to be done.
SAP NW PI 7.1 supports both ABAB Central Instance (CI) and ABAP SAP Central Service Instance (ASCS), however ASCS is recommended. That means the customer might need to change the high availability setup.
On the whole there are four upgrade steps to take:
- Migrate the operating system, if needed
- Upgrade the database, if needed
- Upgrade SAP NW to 7.1
- New High Availability setup, if needed
In previous versions the product was based on message interfaces that were stored in the integration repository. All these interfaces are going to be service enabled by upgrading to SAP NW PI 7.1. Since those message interfaces represented a method, they now represent a Service with one single method, which is named after the message interface itself. In the transformation process "Stateless (XI 3.0 - compatible)" is the only attribute that is compatible for these service enabled interfaces and therefore is preset as default value.
