Is this upgrade approach flawed?

[Former Member]

Hi all,

I feel like I am going round in circles at the moment and am hoping to gain some clarity on a few points relating to our migration/upgrade project.

There is so much conflicting information out there (in SAP docs and notes too) and I'm after comments regarding whether the approach we are going to take is flawed.

Current Situation

Windows 2003 32 bit

Oracle 11g Rel 2 (32 bit)

SAP 4.7

Target Situation

Windows 2008 64 bit

Oracle 11g Rel 2 (64 bit)

SAP 4.7 (once successfully migrated to the new hardware and OS version we will then upgrade to ECC6)

Due to hardware restrictions on the current infrastructure we cannot easily upgrade the systems in situ. We need to move to the new hardware first then upgrade - it makes sense to move to windows 2008 at this point to minimise outages required.

The SAP homogeneous system copy document for 620 based systems only recommends the R3load method. However I have attended the OS/DB migration course which suggests you can use database copy tools (backup/restore).

I believe the backup/restore method would be far quicker than the R3load procedure but I'm not sure if it is going to work - however I see no reason why it won't.

Proposed approach

Vanilla CI/DB install 4.7 SAP instance on windows 2008/64 bit server (We have confirmed with SAP that we will be supported running 4.7 on windows 2008 for a 4 week period until we upgrade)

Restore 4.7 32 bit system db into the new instance.

Run Oracle scripts to invalidate and revalidate the database as 64 bit

Does anyone see any problems with this? All we are actually changing in this step is the version of windows and going from 32 to 64 bit, but I'm worried I'm missing something glaringly obvious. I have read so many differing notes, docs, blogs and sites now I'm starting to question things that I'd been sure of before! .

Many thanks

Claire

[sunny_pahuja2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Your approach is fine if SAP supports Oracle 11g on R/3 4.7 on window 2008 server till the time you upgrade.

But another thing that I want to add is instead of installing 32 bit system on window 2008. Install 64 bit system and you can use backup/restore method as well since OS is not changing.

Thanks

Sunny

[former_member128291]

Dear Claire,

Regarding your doubts i would suggest you to kindly refer the following SAP Note and other referred notes in this:

960769 - Windows: Migration from 32-bit to 64-bit (x86_64)

Regards,

Abhishek