Automatic determination of delta states after SAP system copy/recovery
SAP system startup and shutdown, including virtual hosts
"The creation of SAP system copies used to represent an enormous effort," says Martin Schulz from SAP Basis Administration. Almost 4,000 employees worldwide access our SAP systems directly. If the SAP systems are down, then nothing works in many departments - and that certainly happened in the past. Although the actual copying process is completed in just a few hours, the manual post-processing - which includes, for example, adjusting parameters, users and rights, profiles, system settings and interfaces - can take up to a week. This keeps the entire seven-person SAP Basis team busy.
The solution described in this document can be summarized as follows: The goal is to create a homogeneous copy of an SAP system. The source of the system copy is a production system. The target of the system copy is an existing non-production system. The focus is on a specific use case, a system copy created for updates. Backup and restore are performed at the SAN device level and supported by HP System Copy software. Pre- and post-processing is automated using the UC4 Automated System Copy for SAP solution. Thus, the proposed solution allows you to optimize the automation and acceleration of SAP system copies generated for upgrades and reduce IT administration costs. Automated, fast and powerful upgrade capabilities enable shorter and more flexible SAP software lifecycles, enabling more agile business processes.
SAP system/instance move
The process of creating system copies for updates can be broken down into different activities, as shown in Table 1. For each group, the software used for automation is shown, where "UC4" stands for UC4 Automated System Copy and "HP" stands for HP System Copy. All these activity groups are described individually below.
Tests are already worthwhile for the introduction of SAP solutions in the company and also for release upgrades and migration projects, the import of patches, customizing, modifications and in-house developments. A three-tier SAP landscape typically consists of development, test and production systems. In addition, there are often training systems.
"Shortcut for SAP Systems" offers the possibility to backup and restore any tables. Not only those that are considered in the PCA tool (Post Copy Automation) but also self-developed tables. Thanks to the simple and clear interface, backup and restore of self-developed tables can be integrated quickly and easily. The command line interface can also be used to automate the process: for example, a simple line command can be used to perform a complete backup of table contents before the system copy, and a simple line command can also be used to restore these tables after the system copy. This means that the complete backup or restore process can be integrated into any automation software.
Understanding the structure and functioning of the system is especially important for IT administration. It is not for nothing that "SAP Basis Administrator" is a separate professional field. On the page www.sap-corner.de you will find useful information on this topic.
Since these names usually need to be passed to numerous tables in a given system that have not yet been customized, SAP has the BDLS transaction that can be used to safely analyze and change logical system names.
The important thing is to think about the target system before building it.