How do you upgrade to SAP Integration Suite (Part 2)

UPDATE: this blog has been update to reflect changes in SAP policy. 

Migration Path

Let’s start by answering the questions

“where am I?”, and
“how do I get from here to there?”.

In the rest of this blog we will focus on how to move from CPI to Cloud Integration on Integration Suite. Much of the strategy will apply to SAP API Management as well, however, detailed steps on how to migrate API management can be found here.

Evaluate

So, where am I?

• What type of landscape do I have? How many tenants or sub-accounts do I have? What type of licenses do I have on those sub-accounts?
• How many integration scenarios do I have in my landscape? What is the total number of integration flows that I want to move to Integration Suite?
• What type of integration scenarios do I have? Do I only use packaged content, or is it mostly custom? How complex are my scenarios and what external dependencies do I have?

Answering these questions will help you evaluate what you need to migrate (move to your new Integration Suite tenant), how best to migrate it and how much effort and time you will need to invest.

Things to consider during your migration are:

• Do you have a two-tier landscape (test and production) or if you have three tiers or more?
• Am I only migrating a hand-full of integration flows where I can manually move them from one tenant to another or do I have hundreds of flows where I need to use an automation tool?
• Am I using only packaged content where I am only interested in maintaining the configuration as I move to IS? Do I have more complex scenarios with a lot of external dependencies? Do I have a lot of custom integration flows where my integration team makes regular updates and adds new features? How complex are my security requirements?

These questions will help you determine if you have a simple time moving to you upgraded IS tenant or if you have a complex journey that requires more time devoted to planning and testing, or if you are somewhere in between.

Security requirements can also lead to complexity, even for standard packed solutions. For example, Document Compliance scenarios have external security dependencies and may require a custom domain configuration in you new tenant.

If you would like help during the evaluation phase from experts, you may contact the SAP Enterprise Support Advisor Council and ask for a Journey Check. They have a specific service dedicated to helping customers upgrade from CPI to Integration Suite on our Multi-cloud environment.

ESAC

Plan

Once you are done evaluating your requirements it is time to plan.  As you might have intuited from the picture of our journey path above, we advise a blue-green deployment approach. If you are concerned about the cost of this double usage please reach out to your SAP account executive. This allows you to perform a side-by-side migration to your new environment and reduce your downtime to near zero.

Migration landscape

With this approach, you can move your integration scenarios, security artefacts, value-maps, number ranges, etc. to the new tenant while keeping your existing tenant running. This allows you to test your scenarios in the new environment and transport your tested scenarios to production before you switch-off your existing integration tenant.

Nota Bene: your planning depends on your evaluation. If you have a simple 2 or 3 tier landscape, you can follow a simple migration plan. Start with the lowest tier (this is usually development for 3-tier and test for 2-tier). Move your integration flows, value mappings and number ranges to your new Integration Suite tenant. Connect your business systems to the new landscape and test your scenarios. Transport to the next tier as you normally would do after testing. Migrate tertiary artifacts like number ranges and value maps from the corresponding CPI tier and re-test. Repeat until you reach the highest tier, your production tenant.

Simple strategy

However, if your scenarios are more complex, are ever-changing, or have external dependencies you might need to plan differently. You might need to secure security artefacts before you begin, set-up custom domains on the new tenant, or track versions of integration flows across your system landscape.

Complex strategy

For example, your company has a two tier landscape with 200 integration flows in test and 100 integration flows in production. Migrating from test in NEO to test in Multi-cloud (CF) might be an issue.

1. You will need to know which of the 100 integration flows you need to transport from test to production.
2. You will have to check the version of these 100 integration flows to make sure they are the same version as in the NEO production tenant.

For this reason it might be better to migrate from production in NEO to test in CF. Then:

1. You know which 100 integration flows you need to transport.
2. They are on the correct version.

So, if you are developing new flows and extending the capabilities of existing flows in you lowest tier tenant (development or test). Then you might be better off migrating your production integration flows to your new lower tier IS tenant, and then reconnecting your development business systems to this tenant for testing. In this scenario, you might also need a strategy on how to migrate related artefacts like number ranges and value maps.

Once these flows are tested and transported to production, you would then go back and migrate the integration flows you have in development in your lowest tier (and corresponding artefacts) to the corresponding tier in the new multi-cloud environment.

Finally, you need to plan your security requirements for your new environment. Your new tenant will run using a new domain name and new sub-account so users and roles will have to be assigned to the new sub-account, certificates will have to be updated or regenerated, and security authorization grants will have to be added to the new tenant. This brings us to the preparation phase…

Prep

The preparation phase is probably the simplest, if not the easiest. Here, you just need to set up and prepare you new tenants. Provision the Integration Suite on the new multi-cloud platform based on the n-tier system landscape. This includes:

• Provisioning the sub-account
• Adding entitlements to the sub-account or subscribing and letting SAP do it (based on your license model)
• Adding users and roles for the integration suite services and configuring Cloud Integration, API Management, Integration Advisor etc.
• Adding authorization and grant types to these service instances to allow them to be called from other services.

This might sound like a lot, but the online help guides you through it and we are working on videos to take you through these steps in detail. Many of these steps are easy and straight forward like provisioning Cloud Integration using a BCP (customer support) ticket using the component LOD-HCI-PI-OPS-PROV, adding users to the sub-account and assigning those users to role collections. More complicated tasks like adding certificate authentication grant types for external messaging are described in blogs like this.

In part 3 of this blog series, I will cover the final 3 phases of the upgrade.

In case you can’t find it, here is part 1.