Installation advice for xMII V12.0

[Former Member]

Hi all,

xMII is my first foray into the SAP experience. We are planning a POC using xMII to build a simple MES system with communication to existing SAP ECC/ERP, various PLCs and Proficy iHistorian and printing to Zebra label printers. We have a sandbox xMII V11.5 installed and working with ECC via RFCs/JCO.

It makes sense to use xMII V12 for the POC as we will not be going live for a year and the work we are doing now is discovery work. We are planning a new installation as the requirement for NetWeaver changes requirements quite dramatically.

I have been looking through the mountain of documents on Wikis, document sites, and Blogs and have found Master guides, Installation Guides, Upgrade Guides, Release Notes, Config Guides, SAP Notes... Then there is JCO, SAP JRA, UDSs of various types, Netweaver (UME, WebAS, CCMS, ...), JRE, database, Windows... I am attempting to make a list of what needs to be installed and in what order for the POC. I have not found a definitive source of information on the installation of an xMII server. -Does one exist?-

Here is my current list of what to install on the xMII server, in the order they must be installed. I could use some feedback!

The server: Dell Optiplex GX620 - 1G RAM - 2.8Ghz - 40Gb HD -Is this adequate? More RAM? More Disk?-

Windows Server 2003

MS SQL Server 2005

Sun JRE 1.4.2_16 (When will this be upgraded to 1.6, or even 1.5!)

Is JAVA_HOME required? Does it matter which JRE is in the Windows PATH environment variable?

SAPCAR 7.0

NetWeaver 7.0 (2004s) SR2 Usage Selection - Application Server Java - and configure JRA

xMII V12.0 SR3 - and configure users

XMII 12.0 Migration Tool SP02 XMIIMIGRATION02_0-10004466.SCA

JCOlibs for XMII 12.0 JCOLIBS00_0-10004406.SAR

XMII Framework UDS SP00 XMIIFRAMEWORK_0-20001475.zip

XMII OPC UDS SP00 XMIIOPCUDS_0-10005336.ZIP

XMII OPC HDA UDS SP00 XMIIOPCHDAUDS_0-10005335.ZIP

XMII iHistorian3 UDS SP00 XMIIIHISTORIAN3_0-20001465.zip

Label printing - TBD

What did I miss? Is everything in the correct order?

Thanks all,

--Amy Smith

P.S. I have been impressed by the quality of the posts on this forum. I look forward to joining the community!

[salvatore_castro · Accepted solution]

Amy,

I'll have a guide coming out in the next couple of weeks pertaining to installation/configuration of:

Service Marketplace (Software to download, S#, etc...)

Solution Manager (Installation Keys)

AS Java Stack

xMII Deployment via JSPM

NetWeaver Configuration (SLD, TMS, ICM, JRA, etc...)

- Clustering & Load Balancing (Hopefully)

It should be pretty comprehensive so if you can wait it might be worth while. Just to give you some insight when I installed Sol. Mgr it took 20 hrs. on a Dual Dual-Core machine with 2GBs of RAM and required > 32GBs of space. The AS Java and Rapid installs only took 2 hours on a similar machine, and finally the deployment of the xMII SCA only took 5 minutes.

Sam

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Looks like the sandbox PC we have 11.5 installed on will be capable of running xMII V12, even as a POC server.

I look forward to Sam's installation guide. I do have a BASIS person to help, but I would like to be as efficient with their time as possible.

Thanks again,

--Amy Smith

[sufw · Accepted solution]

Hi Amy,

I'm assuming you're using the 64bit version of Windows on this box? I would definitely recommend this as the old 32bit version will severely limit your ability to upgrade the RAM. And on this point, I also second Udayan's recommendation on having 2-4GB of RAM for a production server.

For comparison, one of our xMII prod servers (v. 11.5) has 8GB RAM and runs very nicely. I wouldn't go with less than 4GB for a v 12.0 prod server, but "individual results may vary" depending on how many concurrent users you have and how many complex Business Logic Transactions you have running frequently.

Sascha

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Maybe I should be asking this question in the Netweaver forum, but after seeing Amy's question, it seems like it fits here.

We are also evaluating upgrading from xMII v11.5 to 12, and I have or had some of the same questions as Amy.

We just installed v12 on our development xMII server (which also has v11.5 installed). Amy - if you are going to do this also, please be sure and check your SQL Server collation settings as someone else mentioned. I had to re-install SQL Server in order to change this.

Here is my question - does NetWeaver really require SQL Server "Enterprise" edition, or can it run on standard edition? There is a significant licensing cost difference between the two.

The servers that we are using for xMII are dual processor dual core, with 4 GB RAM and we are running 32-bit Windows (2003), so we will not be using any of the extra functionality that SQL Server Enterprise gives. The only reason we will use Enterprise is if it is truely a requirement for NetWeaver.

Thank you in advance.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Sam,

We are also considering upgrading from 11.5 to 12 at this time and we are also a little overwhelmed with all of the various documents currently available.

How is your guide coming along? Any chance you could pass along a draft copy at this time to help get us started in the right direction?

Thanks,

Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Sam,

How close are you on releasing this guide? We are eagerly awaiting.

Thanks,

Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hey,

I found out about SAP note 990322 Setting up xMII to work with SQL 2005. You have to download the JDBC driver from Microsoft and the URL is different than for SQLServer 2000 which the xMII manual is based on.

Whoever can put a request in, could the SQL Server 2005 info be added to the xMII docs? Or at least put a note that says where to go to get more information so I know that I need to get more information.

Thanks all, just adding this note so I have it documented in one thread.

--Amy Smith

--Haworth

[salvatore_castro · Accepted solution]

Amy,

This is probably not what you want to hear but the guide will most likely not be updated since the JDBC driver and it's configuration is specific to the vendor and not SAP. This is the reason for all of the various configuration fields you see in the xMII Data Server configuration screen. It allows the xMII system to support a connection via any JDBC driver. The MS site where you downloaded the 2005 driver from has the Server URL defined there and there are plenty of supplementary sites on configuring the URL properly for your system. If you still think it should be added then please create a CSN/CSS message requesting the change.

To cover some previous comments on the NW installation, plan for approx 2-4 days in installing and configuring Solution Manager; if you don't already have it in your corporate landscape. The actual installation took me 20hrs on a 2GB RAM Dual-DualCore 2 GHz CPU machine and took approx 45 GBs of space (This is now required by SAP and last I checked was free). You'll need this because it will help you maintain/manage your various systems corporate wide. Also it is needed to generate "Solution Manager Keys" which are required for NW installations and to download NW support package updates from Service Marketplace.

Once that's done it's about 3 hours for each successive NW AS Java installation and about 5 minutes for the xMII v12 deployment and finished off at around 5GBs of space.

This is all in the guide I am putting together along with a "High-Availability" section which is adding some extra time to it's release but I can guarantee it's worth the wait!

It's nice to see that you've done your homework on this, hope this helps to explain and clarify...

Sam

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Sam,

I kind of expected that answer about the manual! I totally understand.

Regarding collation sequence for SQL Server 2005. I only saw an xMII thread regarding collation for SQL Server 2000. There is an SAP note 987436 about using SQL Server 2005 for SAP installs. May I assume that the install for SQL Server being used as a local xMII app database needs the same collation sequence as a NetWeaver install of SQL Server and that this note applies to me?

Thanks again,

--Amy Smith

--Haworth

P.S.

I believe the install selection for MS SQL Server 2005 is "Binary order based on code point comparison, for use with the 850 multilingual".

[salvatore_castro · Accepted solution]

Amy,

Happy to hear that, it makes my life easier....

Depends on what you mean by the xMII database....is this the database you are installing NetWeaver on or your production system database? If it's the NW database then the collation has to be set properly as per the note you mention. Since xMII will install ontop of NetWeaver we "inherit" this dependency 'One System Built on Another'. As for the production system DB the Data Server connection configuration is collation independent...

Just as a heads up you may have to run an additional executable to update the collation from BIN to BIN2

*Install MSSQL 2000 SP3 or newer – Set collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP850_BIN

*For MSSQL 2005 see note 799058 Setting Up Microsoft SQL Server 2005

*Run instcoll.exe to update collation to SQL_Latin1_General_CP850_BIN2

*For more information on the collation for MS SQL Server, see SAP Note 600027.

*If you are using MSSQL be sure that mixed mode authentication is enabled in order for the installation to properly connect.

I have these in the "Before You Begin" section of the NW Guide as well amongst other configuration parameters, hope this helps.

Sam

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I did mean the "production system DB" with our custom information. Thanks this will make the DBA happy! Well at least happier.

Take care,

Amy Smith

Haworth

[former_member4529 · Accepted solution]

Hi Sam,

Is the installation guide you were preparing published already in SMP? If yes, can you please provide the link?

Thanks,

Dipankar

[salvatore_castro · Accepted solution]

No it is not...still waiting on the High-Availability scenario which should be soon.

When it's posted it will be in the MII Wiki under Guides and Guidelines.

Sam

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Sam,

I was reading this thread and came to know that you were preparing installation guide.

Is the installation guide you were preparing has been published in SMP? If so then can you please provide the link?

Thanks,

Haresh Solanki