Post Upgrade Cleanup

[Former Member]

Just upgraded from enterprise 4.1SP02P03 to 4.1SP04FP03. Small time operation with part time BO administrator.  What kinds of system cleanup is recommended post upgrades. I was horrified to find the C:\Program FIles (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\InstallData to be 52GIG in size. I am slowly running out of room on my C: drive. Is the install data required for reverting an install. WOW I thought windows was a pig! I have attached my add/remove programs with the complete history of BOBI installs. Do I need to remove fix packs or anything or leave it as it is. Seems like a ticking time bomb to me. Any post install/upgrade clean up advice would be appreciated.

Thank you,

[Former Member]

It has been a while since the original post here. Even as a small organization I was not able to afford the estimated downtime by cleaning up all old installs. Again as a small org I do not have a development platform to test on so I have to bite the bullet and perform a lot things on my production system. So, I ultimately performed the uninstalls on the production system and every thing went very smoothly. Monitored CPU and nothing unusual to note and experienced no performance loss for data consumers. The first uninstall took nearly 1 1/2 hours! As each uninstall was completed the times decreased. The last few uninstalls only took 12 -14 minutes. This cleanup returned nearly 40Gig of disk space. I have since updated to SP5P1 and performed the same clean up procedure end everything worked perfectly once again.

[alexdc12]

Hi George

Thanks for the update, I may have to schedule in some downtime to do the same! I upgraded to SP5 at the weekend and to install SP5, Explorer SP5 and Design Studio 1.4 Addon it took 11.5 hours which is crazy!

[alexdc12]

George

Say now I am on SP5 would you remove all previous updates and just leave SP5 or would you remove all updates then upgrade to SP5?

[Former Member]

The process that is working form me is to update then remove all updates between the new current install and base install (initial SAP install(s)). Each update, I update the platform, client tools and dashboards (Three installs). After post install clean up  I will have a total of 6 SAP Installs. Hope this makes sense.

[alexdc12]

Hi George

I am looking at doing this now and have started to uninstall SP01 but I wanted to check with you first, the install window that has opened is title SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.1 SP05 setup

does it always say the latest patch level even though I clicked on SP01 to uninstall??

I am the same as you and only have a production system so I don't want to uninstall SP05!

Thanks

Alex

Here is what I am seeing and you can see what I clicked on to uninstall

[vamshidharmitta]

Hi Alex,

From the screenshot I can observe that you have installed SAP BI 4.1 SP01 which is the base version and on top of which Support packs and Patches are installed.

Ideally you should not uninstall this SP01. You can uninstall the subsequent support packs like SP2,SP3,SP4 as latest Support pack is SP5.

The support pack has modified the version of your base install(which is SAP 4.1 SP01) to the latest SP5.

Thanks,

Vamshidhar

[alexdc12]

Thanks I will try to uninstall SP02 and see how that one looks!

Will keep you posted

Thanks

[alexdc12]

I'm guessing these uninstalls should be done out of hours while the system isn't being used??

Will the webapps need to be redeployed?

I'm pretty sure I uninstalled the client tools once and its stopped some of the services while it was working.

[vamshidharmitta]

Hi Alex,

Its is better not do any activity while you perform uninstall as in between it stops and starts the SIA.

Uninstalling will take roughly 20 min for each support pack update.

web apps will be not redeployed during uninstall.

Thanks,

Vamshdihar

[alexdc12]

Thanks for the help Vamshdihar, I removed all the Platform updates last night, explorer updates are next!

Thanks

[vamshidharmitta]

Hi,

To save disk space. Older Support Packs and Patches can simply be uninstalled. Select the ‘older’ product version from ‘Programs and Features’ and select ‘uninstall’. The installer will very cleverly remove the old product from the cache saving disk space.

Thanks,

Vamshidhar

[Former Member]

Thank you Vamshidhar, As I mentioned I am not a fulltime BI administrator so this is a little scary for me. Do I need to approach it systematically by removing the oldest packages first. For example, from my attached screen shot you can see the earliest version of the BI platform was 4.0SP4. This was my upgrade from BO3.1. Also very strange about this is this is showing an install date of 10/20/14 which is the date that I added Patch 3 for SP4 on platform 4.1!!! This upgrade was done in April of 2013??? In reality, if I uninstalled all unnecessary BI elements I  would I be left with just three Business Objects programs... SAP BusinessObjects BI platform 4.1 SP4 Patch 3 Update, SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.1 Client Tools SP4 Patch 3 update and SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1 SP4 patch 3 update? Sorry I am just very confused.

Thank you for your time,

George

[former_member185603]

Base install should also be left in with latest Patch update. In your case, SP4. Where ever you see update or patch update, you can uninstall them.

[Former Member]

Ok... Please be patient here. By base Install SP4 you mean the original earliest version of SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.0 SP4,  SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.0 Client Tools SP4. So leave these two and uninstall any program listed as an update excluding my latest updates 4.1SP4P3. Hopefully I am understanding you correctly! You have been very helpful. Thank you, George

[former_member185603]

Yes.

[Former Member]

Thank you once again. I am assuming I can run the uninstaller on a live system. Any rough idea of approximately how long it will take for each package to uninstall. Can I suppress a reboot until all old updates are uninstalled? Just about done bugging you!

George

[former_member185603]

You should not run uninstall on a live system. You need to stop SIA and Tomcat and run the uninstaller.

It may take 1 hour or above for each uinstall, depending on your system speed.

You can suppress the reboot. Sometime, installer will ask to reboot, before proceeding.

[Former Member]

OK... These should be the last questions then. If I uninstall a Support Package say in this case 4.0SP5 update will I cumulatively remove contained patches. Same type of question for patches... If I uninstall 4.0 SP5 Patch 11 update will it cumulatively remove prior patches 10, 9 etc. Man I have lots of work to get this cleaned up.

thank you for your time

George

[former_member185603]

No it will not remove. You need to remove each one of them separately. You need to start uninstall from latest one to old one.

[Former Member]

Holy smokes... Wish I would have learned this a long time ago. As it stands now I have 34 packages to remove. . Based on your previous comment it is an absolute no no to perform on a live system I suppose!

Thank you

[vamshidharmitta]

Hi,

yes trying on the live system/prod system will make it down for a long time as you have to uninstall 34 old packages.

Thanks,

Vamshi

[Former Member]

Sorry for my confusion. Is it possible to uninstall old packages on live production system or should this not be done. I have read prior that installs could be performed live. If I can uninstall old packages on my live system it would be very beneficial. If it should not be done I will just have to schedule several outages to finish the cleanup one by one.

thank you

[former_member185603]

I am not sure where you read you can perform install/uninstalls on a live system. That is wrong. System should not be available to users, while you are doing the maitainance. CMS should be up and running, but rest of the servers should be stopped. Tomcat as well.

[alexdc12]

Hi All

This is something that really bugs me! Installs take forever for Updates/Patches, Would best practice be to remove the Current SP Before updating to the new SP??

Thanks

[former_member185603]

It is not mandatory to removed. If you have space issue, you can remove older pacthes and install new one.

Time to take installation will take same amount of time. It will not improve. Rather it will take more time for you to remove and install.

[alexdc12]

I find the more I install the longer it takes, The initial install of 4.1 took 30 mins, patching is now taking about a day!

[former_member185603]

Day is too long. It might take couple of hours at the most. Check the CPU utilization while installing the patch.

[alexdc12]

It is right, CPU is fine.

I have to install, BI Patch, Explorer Patch, Design Studio Patch, Crystal patch, Information Steward and Dataservices

Goodbye day!