Tips on Portal Upgrade

[former_member182313]

Background

My client is currently upgrading all systems. As I've been working on migrating SAP systems to virtualized & compressed (Oracle's compress_for_oltp) environment and POC on exadata, I was not working actively on upgrading systems. That changed last week. As my colleague who was working on upgrading portal sandbox was preparing to go on vacation, I was asked to handle Portal upgrade. Our target to upgrade all systems is March 2013. As we already missed almost a month since the upgrade began, I didn't have a luxury of spending two weeks of preparation as recommended by SAP. As the sandbox was in an inconsistent state, my first task was to copy development system to sandbox; right after system copy, I began the upgrade. I didn't realize I was going in wrong direction for 3-4 days.

I don't want to list all details and experiences I had while upgrading Portal from Dec 19th to 26th but suffice to say that I had fun. I learned a lot as a result.

Lessons Learned...

1. First and foremost, SAP's upgrade philosophy has changed. Several of us may not realize this even after upgrading several systems to 7.3 because there is one-to-one relationship between Product Systems and Technical Systems in most cases. Put it another way, as long as there is one to one relationship between Product Systems and Technical Systems, you could use most of your previous upgrade experience. In 1:1 scenario, life is good. However if your usage scenario is a bit more complicated, then review this blog. Tip: Configure your systems correctly in Solution Manager. I don't want to restate what  has already been eloquently discussed by ping.tong and wolf.hengevoss . Use LVSM (Landscape Verification tool) to make sure the product system/technical systems you want to upgrade are in a consistent state. Make sure the status is green.
2. As I understand it, the software components used by SAP products are reused meaning SAP would like to keep common software components between two or more products of the same product systems at the same level. Backward compatibility has become obsolete to a certain(or full) extent. This is done by defining one technical system as sidecar or hub of a product system.
3. Run MOPZ for the parent. By parent, I mean the technical system which is accessed directly by the users. In SRM/Portal sidecar scenario, the users access SRM transactions so in this case, SRM is the parent. When you run mopz for SRM, it would automatically generate stack.xml for portal system as well.
4. If you upgrade your system to NW 7.3, the upgrade will automatically take care of switching from vendor based JVM to SAP-JVM. In this case, make sure you add SAP-JVM6 software when MOPZ asks you to pick OS/DB dependent software. Note: As petr.solberg commented, NW 7.3x systems use JVM6 whereas NW 7.0x use JVM4.
5. As SAP-JVM usage is mandatory going forward, SAP Upgrade Manager(SUM) would complain that you're not using SAP-JVM. If SUM displays this-see screenshot- error, perform step (6).. For upgrading to NW 7.3, see tip (4) above.
6. Download SAPJVM4_<XX>-10009720.SAR and SAPJVMSWITCH00P_<XX>_20008219.SAR. SAPJVM switch tool is required to change vendor based JVM to SAP-JVM. Follow the steps listed in this blog. For upgrading to NW 7.3, see tip (4) above.
7. In case your system is Oracle based, NW 7.3 or EhP2 supports only Oracle 11.2 or greater. Even if your Oracle database has been upgraded to 11.2, SUM still may complain that the database is at 11.1 during DETERMINE-DB-VERSION step. If you run into this issue, you will need to go back and perform the checks again after ensuring you're not using Oracle 10 client. Make sure <SID>adm environment is pointing to 11x client if you had already installed Oracle 11x client. If not, install 11x client and update the environment(LD_LIBRARY_PATH for Solaris).This would require bouncing of SAP and SUM. In case you had already installed but forgot to update the environment, then you can use this workaround to save sometime: Delete the contents of 10x dir and create a symbolic link 10x_64(64 bit system) pointing to 11x_64. After performing this, you click on continue in SUM--> Pick option Exit. At this point, Back button will become visible. Click back and perform Checks again. The checks would be successful assuming Oracle DB has been upgraded to at least 11.2 and client to 11x.

Good luck.