Solution Manager Upgrade - Our Story..

[gerard_christopher2]

We recently embarked on a SAP  solution manger upgrade for one of our esteemed customer .

It’s a  customer with a complex heterogeneous landscape with applications running on varied OS and DB platforms  while at the same time the account its highly  sensitive with very high expectations.

They were running on SAP Solution Manager 7.0   and as part of the contract they had to be at a 7.1l . The driving factor for the upgrade was the  "SAP CHARM" implementation which was planned later which required the SAP Solution Manager product to be at a higher level.

After the  initial kick off meeting with the  stake holders  it all came down to these three important requirements

• Reduced Downtime

• Ensure the configurations are intact

• Apply all the relevant Notes and bug fixes as part of the Solution Manager upgrade

• Solution Manager Setup need to be completed as part of the upgrade

• No disruption to the existing environment

Based on which we decided on  few things

• SAP "Downtime minimized"  strategy  was decided to be used wherein most of the upgrade uptime activities will be run when the system is up and running .

• The upgrade was planned in such a fashion that many of the uptime activities which can be resource intensive  were done during off-hours

• Plan the prepare well  in advance so that the software download and packages are put in place well before hand .

• "Solman_setup"  was identified as a time consuming process so sufficient room was given to complete it .

We embarked on the development upgrade  2 weeks in advance and as part of the initial prepare we understood that the Oracle client , Kernel and  Database libraries needed an upgrade.

We also had to update the SLD to the latest along with several SAP notes  that needed to be applied along the process  of creating the stack  for the upgrade .

Some of the activities required downtime so we wanted to put all these together in one downtime to avoid reaching out to the customer for further dowtime.

The learning were also  taken forward  in the production upgrade where we upgraded these three components much in advance so it did not impact our timelines for the production upgrade.

The uptime processes were optimally selected  which resulted in no performance degradation during the upgrade

Once the prepare activities were completed it was estimated that an additional   100 GB of storage was required to create the new tablespaces . With the help of the infrastructure teams we managed to get this provisioned within a short span of time so that it didn’t impact our overall upgrade runtime. The provisioning  of this space was taken care much in advance when we performed the production upgrade.

The dev  teams  response was the key when we had several transports to be released and also to perform  "modification adjustments" and  they responded  well and also gave resources in standby during  weekends.

The technical upgrade was completed much ahead of time and the last hurdle in the way  was a whole lot of configurations that need to be completed.

We started the solution manger configuration(Solman_setup)  as part of which  a whole gambit of checks and configurations were completed in over a  2 days period.

The Solution Manager Systems both the development and  then the production a week later were released ahead of schedule  with perfection and flawless execution

One of the key reason for the successful completion of the upgrade project was the ability to quickly learn from the development  environment and transform the learning's in the production upgrade.

No  Project work can be successful without support from the infrastructure teams and our infrastructure teams both storage and OS supported us exceedingly well.

The  upgrade was very  highly appreciated by the customer  and was also discussed as a success story when they visited  us .

Overall it was a great demonstration of how far team work can go ..