Technical Articles
BI 4.x server migration from 2008 to 2016 and how to get the content to new server from old server
BI 4.x server migration from 2008 to 2016 and how to get the content to new server from old server
Note: This is not an in-pace upgrade of the server OS. Completely new servers with new names.
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Use case: IT decided to upgrade all of the BO servers from 2008 servers to 2016 servers. So we had to migrate to new BO servers.
Main intention of this blog post is not about how to install BO. Main focus on this blog post is how to move the content from BO 2008 SERVERS to 2016 servers.
Steps :
Prerequisites to go live:
- Build a new server 2016 system with BO version same as what you have in Server 2008.
- If the CMS DB is Oracle, make sure to install oracle client 12c on server 2016 servers.
- Install BO. Prepare the BO system.
How to move the content in Bulk to new servers:
Initially I decided to move the content using Promotion Management Wizard tool (PMW) thick client which is introduced with 4.2 SP5. I would not recommend to use this tool , if you are migrating large amount of content. This tool did not work for us migrating about 60k users/groups (All are enterprise users) and about 30k reports and universes. But it works great in our QA environment which did not have that much content.
Tool got hung at the summary page and calculating dependencies for long time and also promoting the content. We wasted close to 24 hours. Tool is doing something by looking at the CPU and Memory usage, but no logs are generated to see what exactly is going on even though I enabled high level traces. So I strongly suggest not to use PMW tool for larger promotions. I tried to split the job to smaller chunks, users separate, still issue exists.
Note: 4.2 SP5 version of the tool has issue migrating top level security, Application security and dependencies etc. So avoid using SP5 version of PMW. Suggest to use 4.2 SP6 and above. You can migrate the content with higher version even though your source and destination BO versions 4.2 SP5 and below.
Since PMW tool did not work, I opted for CMS DB schema pointing to new servers. Below are the steps I followed . This process is similar to DR exercise if the server names are different for source and destination.
Note: There are many blogs talked about how to setup DR , but I found, some of the key pieces missing . I thought I will put together all the steps we did, so the process will go smoothly.
- Stop SIA and Tomcat in source and destination environment
- Take cold Backup CMS DB schema and File store (Source DB schema and Source FRS)
- Create a new blank CMS schema for Destination environment
- Open CCM on destination environment (2016 servers)
- Right click on SIA and properties. Click on Tab “Configuration”.
- Click on “Specify”. Select “Copy Data from another data source”
- Select specify “Get data from” and enter source CMS DB credentials
- “Copy to the following data source” and browse and enter the Destination schema which was created in Step#3 . This copy process long time about an 1 hour to copy source to destination depending on how big your CMS DB.
- Change the cluster name to new name, different from Source environment.
- If the CMS DB is in oracle DB, login to PL/SQL developer or any SQL tool, run the below command to clean up all the old system server references
delete from cms_infoobjects7 where parentid=16 or parentid=59;
Commit;
14. Now we have to cleanup SIA in the destination environment manually.
15. Open services in Windows environment . Look for SIA in the services list, open the properties and get the service name.
16. Open command prompt. Run below command.
a. sc delete “Service name” got from services \SIA properties
b. delete all the bootstrap and dbinfo files in “D:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\win64_x64” related to SIA.
(Otherwise SIA will not be created.)
17. Repeat the same steps 14-16 in all the nodes in BO, Lumira and explorer nodes.
18. If explorer installed in a separate node , CCM will not be there in the application shortcuts. Browse to “D:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\win64_x64” look for svcmgr.exe , take a shortcut and place it on the desktop.
19. On each node, perform below steps to add new SIA.
20. On the CCM, click on “Add node”
21. 
21. Add Node name, SIA port (6410), select “Add node with default servers”
22. 
23. Select “Start a new temporary CMS”
24. 
25. Enter “New CMS port” as 6400
26. Click on Specify “ Enter the destination Environment CMS DB schema”
27. It will create new SIA with default servers.
28. Start the SIA to make sure CMS and other servers are added.
29. Make sure new SIA is pointing to new cluster, not to the source environment cluster and also make sure there are no remote servers SIA entries of the source system
30. Repeat the same steps 20-29 in all the nodes BO, explorer and Lumira
31. Start the all the services and point FRS to backup copy of FRS
Now your 2016 system has all the data of source system. Ready to go live with necessary testing is done.
Note: Make sure your source environment is down until all the steps are complete until Step#29
Great blog! Out of interest, what issues were being faced in Promotion Management Wizard? It's always helpful to know if there are opportunities to enhance our tools!
Thank you Graham Farr. PMW, as I mentioned above in my blog, it was doing something, no logs generated even though I enabled the traces "HIGH" . SAP support was helping me to see if they can get some logs, nothing was generated. I even excluded the dependencies to calculate, but still tool hung either at calculating dependencies or running query on browser. We left it more than 10 hours.
I increased the XMX value to 24 gb and we have enough space for temp file. We followed all the best practices mentioned for using the PMW tool.
Thank you Jawahar - will keep an eye out for similar issues.
I'm working on moving our Business Objects environment (4.2 SP6 Patch 5) from 2008 R2 server to 2016 server. I have run the install and receiving several errors:
Identifier not found in lookup [ins00270]
Exception in Poco SpecialPropertybank!_dirs.empty() in file "src\Path.cpp"
Any ideas?
B
hi,
is not more faster and optimal do a fresh install in 2016 server and then use LCM_CLI to promote all content ?
Sorry for replying so late. I did do fresh install in 2016. Uisng LCM_CLI may not be optimal solution especially Big environments like us.
Hi Jawahar, thank you for the valuable info 🙂 We are dealing with the same issue and trying to change our servers 2008 OS to 2016. I have tried the above steps and successfully migrated my system to new environment.
However there is a problem. After changing the cluster name to new name, I could not change the cluster key, it gives "Failed to change cluster key. Reason: Database Access Failure. (FWB 00089)" error. I tried many times and same problem occurs.
Did you face with this problem, are you able to change the cluster key?
Thank you so much, waiting for your kind response.
Regards.
why do you need to change cluster key ?
Hi Denis,
Our system is very huge, nearly 100k reports and 20k users. We managed to migrate two smaller systems with LCM and PMW however unable to migrate it the biggest one.
The only way we found is that copying the cluster however SAP doesn't suggest copying database that belongs to a different cluster.
After migtarion everything works fine, the only problem is the cluster key change. I know it is not necessary to change it however I'm suspicious if it cause a bigger problem after some time: during the in-place upgrade, adding new nodes to new cluster or migration the system to a new hardware,..
Waiting for your response and suggestions.
Thanks and regards.
Cluster key is not related to any of the activities you have mentioned.
Hi Denis,
What I understood is that; I can use the above scenario for migrating the whole content from old server to new one and it is reliable.
The error that I've encountered during the cluster key change is not a big deal and won't cause a problem for my environment.
If yes, then I will proceed with this procedure.
Thanks a lot.
your issue with cluster key change is not directly related to the above process, it needs to be properly investigated.
Before doing any migrations/updates - they should be tested .
Hi Jawahar, I have a single Business Objects server that I created in our Oracle Cloud environment. I followed the steps laid out above, migrating the database and file system from our current production environment. Everything went as expected until I got to the "Add Node". There I got the FWB 00008 error, could not log into CMS with provided credentials. I have documented every step of installing Business Objects and your steps of migrating production to the new server so I know the credentials are correct. Any thoughts?
Thanks Todd
if you're adding node in the new env after DB copy - the credentials will be from old/source env.
Check this KB
2601555 - Could not Recreate Node after copy DataSource get AddNode ERROR: (FWM 23002) and (FWB 00008)
Nice blog Jawahar.
We are running BOBJ app( services spread across multiple systems) on Windows with ORACLE as database.
initially, we moved oracle to HANA using "Copy data from another source".( this was planned early 2020)
Now, we want to move BOBJ app to Linux from Windows(early 2021). how do we go about it?
Thanks
Hi Jawahar,
what method to use, if we have a constraint that target server , cannot directly connect to the source server.