SAP on IBM i – Update week 5 2014: Revision of Tool CONVUSRCPT

Welcome at the SAP on IBM i update! This time we will focus on the new features of the CONVUSRCPT tool:

The current situation

•All SAP Kernels in maintainance support the new userconcept

•System installation and system copy tools (SWPM, Software Provisioning Manager) always create new SAP systems and instances with new userconcept

•System upgrade and system update tools (SUM, Software Update Manager) require start releases >=7.0 to be on the new userconcept

•After upgrading from start releases <7.0 an immediate switch to the SAP Kernel 7.20 and the new userconcept is strongly recommended

•With the first SAP Product release that will not support an upgrade path from start releases <7.0 we will technically disable the classic userconcept

So there is no way to circumvent the conversion from the classic to the new userconcept!

…but we know the obstacle

•In collaboration with customers and consultants we learned about two constantly growing directory classes.

•The transport directories

•The j2ee directories below the instance directories

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Having at least one of these directories populated with many files slows down the conversion and drastically increases the downtime.

From this finding we invented a new conversion method ADVANCED consisting of three steps with two uptime and one shorter downtime step, while the former method now called STANDARD consists of one single large downtime step.

The three new steps creating the ADVANCED method are:

•PRE_ADV  (uptime)       Conversion of the transport directories and preparation of the j2ee instance directory trees (if existing)

•ADVANCED (downtime) Conversion of the remaining part (not transport or j2ee directories, but with the kernel lib and user profiles)

•POST_ADV (uptime)      Conversion  of  the j2ee instance directory trees (if existing)

During our inhouse tests and the pilot phase on customer side we made the experience using the new ADVANCED method can shorten the remaining downtime step ADVANCED in comparison to the former conversion (now called STANDARD conversion ) by a factor of 5-10.

For more information, please see the rewritten SAP Note 1149318 ‘User concept conversion using the tool CONVUSRCPT’ .

Stay tuned…

As the development team intends to maintain a consistent format, editions of the series will continue to be published.