need help mapping a few concepts into SAP Solution Manager (4.0)
short description of how we work today. organization is a government agent in sweden which develops upwards of 50 applications that have very strong dependencies to each other (not only through code libraries/data relationships but also logically via service calls). application lifecycles (dev/test/prod) are managed in releases (time aspects) of roughly 3 per year. each release marks a new version or lifecycle for applications (which due to their strong interconnections mean the majority of applications go through a release together). right now our middle ware platforms are Tuxedo and Weblogic which application code is version managed by ClearCase. when an application needs a domain for a specific lifecycle stage it is fairly ease to allocate resources necessary (machine CPU/disk space). during integration test (for example) an application may be added to an environment (collection of domains in ITIL terms) by setting up a domain and linking it to other applications through domain gateways.
this dynamic configuration of lifecycle landscape (environments) has advantages/disadvantages. but one process we go through often is pulling an image of an application from production back into development to do acute fixs or that project have parallel release work (2 or more versions of an applications) active parallel. this isn't a major problem since different versions of application code are seperated by ClearCase (here development doesn't have to occur inside a domain like in a SAP system where the configuration/source is strictly associated with a logical client). application development is done disconnected from the middleware platform (only inclusion of platform specific libraries is necessary) and only in the first test stage is a Tuxedo/Weblogic domain allocated.
alright what does this have to do with Solution Manager? trying to map the concept of releases into Solution Manager. in a standard SAP landscape there are 3 SAP systems (DEV/QAS/PROD) with a transport mechanism between them. when the transport has nothing queued the images between the SAP systems should be the same (ie. same configuration in DEV/QAS/PROD). at project startup time the DEV system i assume an initial step is to assign a logical component (so development links up with the landscape and has a configuration workscape). right? is a logical component a client (0-998 within a system)? where application changes are encapsulated with a client instance.
the latter questions were just build up to a release question. could a client instance be similar to our concept of releases. namely that a specific version of an application tied to a release (ie when it should be merged into production with other applications) can be propagated in the SAP landscape with a client? assuming a client houses all configuration data (communication to other SAP systems, Non SAP system through XI, application source changes, etc).
thanks / Matthew Young
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