SAP Basis : Fun to learn

SAP Cluster improvements - Windows 2012

2014-10-04T23:57:00.003+05:30

SAP Cluster improvements – Windows 2012 WSFC

A large number of SAP customer these days use HA (High availability) Solutions for their Production landscape to increase the uninterrupted SAP usage. Out of all the HA solutions available, MSCS is the most widely used method across the world.

SAP announced its support on Windows 2012 in Q2 2013. MSCS in 2012 is renamed as WSFC (Windows server failover clustering). WSFC brought many benefits for SAP landscape of which most important is – Continuously available File server.

This feature makes sure that there is zero downtime for sapmnt file share and SAP Global file system during the failover of instance. In case of file share failover, access to file share will be guaranteed, and all open file handles will be restored during the failover in a fully transparent manner to clients without any downtime! Technology behind is called SMB transparent failover.

In Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster there are two types of clustered file shares:

File Server for general use - This file server option is used to provide central location on network for users to share files or server applications that open and close files frequently.
This type of file server is used for SAP SAPMNT file share.
Scale-Out File Share for application data - This file server option is used to provide central location on network to provide storage for sever applications (like SQL Server) or virtual machines (e.g. Hyper-V) that leaves files open for extended period of time.
This type is primarily used as remote storage for Hyper-V and SQL Server.

How to enable Continuous Availability File Server - Currently SAP installation tool doesn’t activate continuous availability feature for SAPMNT share. You need to enable it manually.

To enable continuous availability feature, after the SAP installation, open failover cluster manager, select SAP <SID> cluster group, on the lower tab select Shares. Notice that Continuous Availability for sapmnt file share is set to No.

Double click on sapmnt share, and choose Settings tab.

Make sure that Enable continuous availability is checked. Notice that now Continuous Availability for sapmnt file share is set to Yes.

Powershell can also be used to enable this feature using below command –

set-smbshare -Name sapmnt -ContinuouslyAvailable 1 –Force

Advantages of sapmnt Continuous Availability file share - If during runtime of SAP Batch job activities (or any other SAP process that writes to global file system) a failover of (A)SCS instance happens, file server service will offer UNINTERRUPTED file and folder access! If there are any files opened, all file handled will be moved to another server that is fully transparent to clients.

Practically, this means that SAP batch job activities will not be stopped and they will continue to run during and after the (A)SCS instance failover!

SAP Upgrades – Tactful decision or a Luxury

2014-10-04T23:51:00.000+05:30

SAP Upgrades – Tactful decision or a Luxury

Most of the times, it’s always a difficult decision for an organization to decide, do they really need to upgrade their existing SAP landscape or not. On one side upgrading SAP systems provide them the advantages of newer functionalities, optimized processes, the environments adapted to future innovation and probably better utilization of hardware and infrastructure. But then to other side there is extra cost involved in the upgrade project, might be some considerable downtime as well and probably a month or two of hyper care which will be required for the company to get settled with upgraded environment.
Just to discuss this in further details, I would say here are a number of reasons why companies should undertake a upgrade of their SAP system, most of which boil-down to a single essential rationale: technology and businesses evolve, and companies need to maintain a technological infrastructure that can support that change. There are many secondary reasons, including the fact that SAP, like all software vendors, limits the number of years it will actively support a given version of its software. The basic notion of upgrading to support technical and business evolution, however, is a factor behind all other rationales for upgrading core enterprise software functionality like SAP.

Generally, there are 5 key drivers for an SAP upgrade –

1. Industry Innovation - Technological evolution as it impacts the entire enterprise software market is the first major issue, and the advent of service-oriented architectures (SOA) is a key example of a form of technological evolution that drives large numbers of user organizations to consider upgrading their SAP infrastructures. Unicode support, enhanced Java support, and support for other key emerging or established technologies to which existing SAP systems can be integrated with are other major industry innovation reasons to upgrade existing SAP systems.

2. Company chosen – Second most important reason for any company to initiate upgrade project is to get enhanced business process in their system. SAP switch frame work and Enhancement packages are very well bundled for these kind of approach and are less complicated compared to a full fledge SAP upgrade.

3. Business trigger requirements – A change is always inevitable, we all do know about this theory and in corporate sector merging and acquisitions cannot actually be avoided. Consider an event where a company merges or splits into separate units, the best practice would be to undertake consolidation and diversification based on latest version of SAP product installed. This will strongly help in cleansing and rationalizing the business activity while the merger or spilt.

4. TCO Reduction – It does make a lot of sense that ultimately everything comes down to monetary figures. It’s all about the Total Cost of Ownership when you invest in something. SAP upgrades could help in lowering the IT maintenance costs by introducing optimized technical and business processes, cleansing system for obsolete transactions, processes and custom codes. It may also help unleashing major technology integration which will further lower the maintenance costs.

5. Out of Support – Regardless of the innovations an upgrade can bring in for your business, some organizations initiate this process only due to the reason that the current version would no longer be supported by Vendor and to continue with critical production required support they will have the upgrade their systems to at least the version which is still in available maintenance for next few years.

SAP Server sizing

2014-01-09T21:58:00.004+05:30

Golden rule is as below :)

Per 10000 SAPS 1 Processor/6 cores/12 Threads More important figure here is the cores.

Per 1000 SAPS 4000 MB of RAM = 4 GB RAM

Increase SWAP Size on Red hat Linux Server.

2011-05-25T02:49:00.001+05:30

I had a issue once where my SAP Installation would not start and keeps throwing SWAP Size incorrect error. To add to it no LINUX OS expert was available at that point of time.

Below are the steps which could help you if you are caught in same problem :
We are going to create a new swap file in location /u01, name of the file is extraswap.

1. swapon -s

This would show you the current swap size and file on your server.

2. dd if=/dev/zero of=/u01/extraswap bs=1M count=9000
=>dd is data dump
Replace 9000 with the number of megabytes you want in your auxiliary swap file. if= and of= are short for infile and outfile. The /dev/zero device file will give us zeroes to be written to the output file. If you want this file on a different partition, say your /var partition, you would replace /extraswap with /var/extraswap.

3. mkswap /u01/extraswap

4. cd /etc edit fstab file

We need to edit this fstab file because even if the server is rebooted changes would be permanent.

Now edit the fstab file and make entry of this new file.

5. vi fstab

Add the same line below the entry already there.

Replace the first column with the location of your new swap file.

Save fstab file.

6. swapon /u01/extraswap

7. sync

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SAP SNC Router installation on Windows and UNIX

2011-02-08T02:55:00.000+05:30

1. Open a OSS message with SAP to setup new SAP Router and provide them following details:

a. Internal and External IP address

b. Fully qualified hostname

c. Bandwidthof the server

d. % of utilization:

2. Download SAP Cryptographic software from the following location

http://service.sap.com/

Goto to location software downloads -> installations and upgrade -> browse our download catalogue -> SAP Cryptographic software.

3. Create a new folder/directory anywhere in /usr/sap , name it as “router”.

Extract all the files just downloaded in a “router” folder.

Also copy saprouter.exe from the KERNEL directory to “router” folder.

UINX users : make sure that new directory “router which is created should have owner as SIDadm and permissions as 755

# sapcar –xvf “sarcrptofiles”

4. Now go to service.sap.com/tcs click on SAPRouter certificates click on Apply now

This would show the new router details which are set up for you by SAP, for which we raised the OSS message before.

5. Set these variables.

Windows: set these environment variables

SECUDIR as “/usr/sap/router”

SNC_LIB as “/usr/sap/router/libsapcrypto.exe”

UNIX:

Setenv SECUDIR “/usr/sap/router”

Setenv SNC_LIB “/usr/sap/router/libsapcrypto.so”

6. Type this command in cmd or terminal window to generate the pse.

Window users:

sapgenpse get_pse -v -r certreq -p local.pse "CN=yourhostname , OU=123456, OU=SAProuter, O=SAP, C=DE "

UNIX:

# Cd /usr/sap/router

# sapgenpse get_pse -v -r certreq -p local.pse "CN=yourhostname , OU=123456, OU=SAProuter, O=SAP, C=DE "

7. This will generate CERTREQ file , copy the content of this file and paste it at SMP -> SAPRouter certificate.Click on request certificate , Next screen will display the certificate. Copy and paste the generated certificate in a new file named 'srcert' at /usr/sap/router.

8. Now import the generated certificates

# ./sapgenpse import_own_cert -c srcert -p local.pse

9. Now provide secure credentials to the generated PSE

# ./sapgenpse seclogin -p local.pse -O SIDadm

10. Create saproutab file at /usr/sap/rout with details mentioned in the first OSS message.

11. Start SNC router

Windows:

<Drive>:\SNC-SaprouterDirectory\ saprouter -r -G routerlog -S 3299 –K "p:CN=YourHostName, OU=12345, OU=SAProuter, O=SAP, C=DE"

UNIX:

# ./saprouter -r -G routerlog -S 3299 –K "p:CN=YourHostName, OU=12345, OU=SAProuter, O=SAP, C=DE"

12. Once your router is started go to OSS1 anmd maintain the technical parameters and you are all set to connect to SAP securely.

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How to Install and use UNRAR on LINUX

2011-02-08T01:44:00.001+05:30

Hello everyone, this was the first time I was working on any LINUX flavor to install SAP application on it.

First problem I faced was how to UNRAR the SAPCDs.

I searched on Google= GOD but still found nothing much helpful, finally I figured out what shall be done.
Below are the steps which could prove helpful for you if you are in the same situation I was once in.

1. Install UNRAR command : run the below command this will download the package UNRAR

# cd /tmp

# wget http://www.rarlab.com/rar/rarlinux-3.6.0.tar.gz

2. Untar file : untar the package we just downloaded

# tar -zxvf rarlinux-3.6.0.tar.gz

3. Now unrar and rar commands are located in rar sub-directory. Just go to rar directory:

# cd rar

# ./unrar

4. Now copy rar and unrar to /bin directory of your server:

# cp rar unrar /bin

So now we have rar, unrar command installed in our server, elaborating on how to use it :

1. To UNRAR files in current directory you are located at:

# unrar e “name of file.rar”

2. To UNRAR files inside rar archive:

# unrar l “name of file.rar”

3. This is what I use mostly, To UNRAR files with full path type command:

# unrar x “/location/name of file.rar”

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Workload Analysis : ST03N

2010-05-23T01:13:00.000+05:30

Workload Analysis

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Kernel Upgrade : Most Important Information

2010-05-21T01:50:00.009+05:30

Whenever we are planning to do a Kernel upgrade activity, most important thing is which kernel version we need to download from SMP, and that too it depends on OS of the server also. So we need to be sure about the BIT information of the OS too.

Though we can get the concerned details by typing the command disp+work in command prompt.
But still to be sure about the OS details, login to your SAP system -> system -> status.

Here compare you PLATFORM ID with the folowing image and then you can get the OS/Kernel details of your SAP server

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Customer Support Messages

2010-05-20T09:02:00.002+05:30

Follow this pdf to create OSS Support messages to SAP

Create Support Message

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SAP Memory Management

2010-05-20T08:28:00.002+05:30

Memory Management guidelines for ABAP System.

SAP Memory Management

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SAP Basis overview

2010-05-20T07:53:00.008+05:30

Here is the SAP Basis overview for all the begineers to make them familiar with Basis

SAP_BASIS

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