Audience
Although this blog is aimed primarily at Basis consultants interested in performing the BW/4HANA system conversion activities, it is also intended to appeal to a range of SAP consultants and customers interesting in getting a better understanding of the steps and effort involved in undertaking such activities.
This blog will try to offer some insight into unexpected issues and challenges that came up during the conversion of the system to BW/4HANA, so that you might avoid some of these pitfalls or at least be prepared for them when you come to perform your own conversion.
Setting the Scene
Our BW system has undergone several significant changes prior to this migration project, including...
- Migration from Sybase ASE to HANA.
- Migration from on premise IBM Power hardware into the cloud onto an AWS instance.
- Additional scale out nodes installed and configured.
This is the final blog in a three part series documenting the steps from BW 7.4 to BW/4HANA which includes...
- Version upgrade of BW 7.4 to 7.5 (Blog Part 1: https://blogs.sap.com/2016/12/05/steps-from-bw-7.4-to-bw4-hana-part-1-bw7.4-to-bw7.5-upgrade/)
- Installation of the BW/4HANA starter Add-on (Blog Part 2 : https://blogs.sap.com/2016/12/14/steps-from-bw-7.4-to-bw4-hana-part-2-installation-of-the-bw4hana-st...)
- Running the conversion process to deliver a BW/4HANA system (Blog Part 3)
Running the conversion process to deliver a BW/4HANA system (Blog Part 3)
I will cover the following areas in part 3 of this blog series...
- Compatibility Mode
- Uninstalling the BW4HANA Add-On
- The Object Conversion
- Solution Manager Synchronisation and new Maintenance Plan
- Installing the B4 Add-ons - switching to BW/4HANA
Compatibility Mode
Following on from part two of the blog series, our BW system was in a 'compatible mode'
Running report RS_B4HANA_CHECK_ENABLE now brought up some different options. Previously the 'Add-on not installed' radio button was selected. Now we are in compatibility mode...
Running the simulation generated the same alerts as previously...
Uninstalling the BW4HANA Add-On
Before proceeding we wanted to test that the add-on could be successfully de-installed. In SAINT it was listed under the 'deinstallable components' tab...
The answer was yes it can be de-installed easily...
The object conversion
Our BW consultant Glen then worked through the conversion of the objects. Rather than repeat those steps here, you can read in detail about this in Glen's blog here...
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/12/15/road-to-bw4hana-bw-7.5-on-hana-to-bw7.5-edition-on-hana/
Once everything was green in report RS_B4HANA_CHECK_ENABLE, the new mode could be saved as shown in the following screenshot.
Solution Manager Synchronisation and New Maintenance Plan
The next step was to ensure solution manager synchronisation was working correctly, replicating system data back to the SAP Support portal. We now have our Solution Manager system back online and the synchronisation process is working as can be seen in the maintenance planner tool...
Next, choose 'Plan' to proceed with a new update and select 'Plan a conversion to SAP BW/4HANA' then the options as shown below...
Choose the OS/DB files as needed for your installation...
Download the stack xml file and push the files to your download basket.
In addition to those files added to the download basked by the planner tool I also had to manually add several of the files to my download basket.
Installing the new B4 Add-Ons - switching to BW/4HANA
The following components were to be installed in SAINT.
However I got the following error
I was pointed by our early adopter care team at SAP to this recently released and comprehensive document which suggested there were missing some attribute change packages...
SAP First Guidance – complete functional scope (CFS) for SAP BW/4HANA
However these were already installed in our case. So I raised a ticket with SAP. The response to this issue was that a new ACP for the SAP_UI 751 component was required which SAP subsequently created.
I downloaded and applied this ACP along with the ST/A-PI ACP as per note 69455 (see Q&A section, question number 20) and was able to proceed with the Add-On installations.
After running for approx an hour lots of error started to appear until eventually the procedure short dumped. Many of the errors were memory related so I decided to increase the size of the AWS instances from r3.xlarge to r3.2xlarge.
The import then continued and ran for approx 5 hours.
Next step was to reset objects to original in SPAU...
The remaining tasks from the document SAP First Guidance – complete functional scope (CFS) for SAP BW/4HANA were then completed and concluding the conversion process steps.The system status confirms that the system is now BW/4HANA...
This concludes my series of blogs on migrating from BW 7.4 to BW/4HANA. Thank-you for following this blog series. I hope you have found the information useful and informative.
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