Upgrading Tomcat for BI 4.x on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x step-by-step

Hello SCN,

In this blog, I will go through the steps necessary to upgrade the Tomcat embedded in an SAP BI 4.1 SP05 on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 system. Before start reading this blog, please know the following important things :

• The process of upgrading Tomcat externally will fall under Limited Support/Out of Scope of SAP Support.
• In case the upgraded version is not stable and giving issues then you may have to degrade it to a supported version of Tomcat.
• Once Tomcat is successfully upgraded to a supported version then it is supported by SAP.

More Information can be found in the following SAP Note :

2280098 – Does Apache Tomcat belong to Product Support scope?

Embedded Tomcat version :

The following methods are used to get the exact version of Tomcat that is embedded in SAP BI 4.x :

1 – Using version.sh script :

The script is located under : <Installation_Directory>/BI41/sap_bobj/tomcat/bin

Run the script : ./version.sh

You will get the following result :

2 – Using Tomcat home page :

Connect to http://hostname:8080

You will get the following result :

As you can see using both methods, the version of the embedded Tomcat is : Tomcat/7.0.55

We aim to upgrade Tomcat version to Tomcat/7.0.70

Download :

Access the following link to download Tomcat/7.0.70 :

http://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-7/v7.0.70/bin/

And then choose apache-tomcat-7.0.70.tar.gz as explained in the below pictue.

Once the compressed Tomcat package is downloaded, extract it using the following command :

tar -xzvf apache-tomcat-7.0.70.tar.gz

Upgrade :

These are the different steps needed in order to upgrade Tomcat :

1 – Change the name of the new tomcat folder obtained from apache-tomcat-7.0.70 to tomcat :

mv apache-tomcat-7.0.70 tomcat

2 – Navigate to <Installation_Directory>/BI41/sap_bobj/ and stop the Tomcat service using ./tomcatshutdown.sh

3 – Take a backup of the old tomcat folder :

mv tomcat tomcat.bkp

4 –  Copy the new tomcat folder under <Installation_Directory>/BI41/sap_bobj :

cp -R <new tomcat folder path> tomcat

5 – Navigate to <Installation_Directory>/BI41/sap_bobj/enterprise_xi40/wdeploy and run the Wdeploy utility :

./wdeploy.sh tomcat7 deployall

More information can be found in the following SAP Note :

1608960 – How to deploy war files in BusinessObjects BI 4.x using the wdeploy command line utility

6 – Wait until you see the message : BUILD SUCCESSFUL

After deploying the war files, Tomcat needs to be configured.

Configuration :

Tomcat needs some memory configuration : we need to specify values for -Xms, -Xmx, MaxPermSize, …

More information can be found in the following SAP Note :

1954346 – How to manually configure external Tomcat for BOE XI 3.1 and BI 4.0 on UNIX/Linux

Luckily we already have this configuration in the old Tomcat folder :

1 – Navigate to <Installation_Directory>/BI41/sap_bobj/tomcat.bkp/bin

2 – Copy the scripts setenv.sh and bobjenv.sh under <Installation_Directory>/BI41/sap_bobj/tomcat/bin : 

cp -R <old tomcat folder path>/bin/setenv.sh bin

cp -R <old tomcat folder path>/bin/bobjenv.sh bin

3 – Run the script : ./setenv.sh

4 – Navigate to <Installation_Directory>/BI41/sap_bobj/ and start the Tomcat service using ./tomcatstartup.sh

Enjoy !

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