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Upgrade Discussion .............................................................................................. D–2

Upgrade Issues ...................................................................................................... D–3
Other Considerations ............................................................................................ D–3

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Appendix D: Upgrade Discussion
Upgrade Discussion

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An upgrade is an updating of your R/3 System.

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The question of whether to upgrade your system to a new release depends on many
complex factors. Most importantly, the decision to upgrade should be based on “business
need.” Some of these factors are outlined below:
< Desired functionality in new release
 This can be found in the release note for the specific release.
< Problem fixes and resolutions
< The need to be on a supported release

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Some reasons not to upgrade include the following:
< Cost—the following items could increase the cost of your upgrade.
You need to:
 Upgrade the database and operating system (if required)
 Purchase and install additional hardware (if required)
 Test to find problems with the upgrade
 Upgrade the SAPgui on the users computers
 Find the time to do all the above
< Disruption for users, especially if there is no functional enhancement for them.
< Diversion of resources (Company resources that could be applied to other tasks would
be assigned to upgrading the R/3 System.)
< Desire to be on the latest release (While desirable for a personal resume, this reason is
not a valid business reason to upgrade your system.)

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In deciding to upgrade your system, ask yourself the following questions:
< Have the reasons for upgrading and not upgrading been analyzed?
< Has the “business need” criteria been met?
< If you installed any Industry Solution (IS), are IS patches available for the new
release?
If the patches are not available, you cannot upgrade.

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 Appendix D: Upgrade Discussion
Upgrade Issues

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An upgrade can be more complex than a new implementation because:

< There is “real data” on the system that is being upgraded.
If the upgrade fails, the company’s operations could be affected and business could stop.
This failure would require you to recover the database (refer to the section on disaster
recovery).
< The system is unavailable for users during a portion of the upgrade process.
The technical downtime is 6–12 hours. In addition, many other tasks are performed
around the backup that could increase this “downtime” significantly. System downtime
could significantly impact the operations of the business during this period.
< Upgrade changes could require changing configuration, testing, training, and
documentation.
< Changes require regression testing:
 Do business processes function as they did before?
 Does custom code need to be changed due to changes from the upgrade?

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The following software has to be compatible with the R/3 release you plan to upgrade to:
< Database
< Operating system
< Third-party applications that compliment the R/3 System (for example, external tax
packages, job schedulers, system monitors, spool managers, etc.)

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< The upgrade requires free working space on disks to run.
 The amount of space required differs with operating system and database.
 Some of the space is released after the upgrade; other space is permanently used.
< As each release adds functionality, the required disk space, processing power and
memory required generally tends to increase.
A system configuration that was adequate for one release may be inadequate for a later
release. This is especially apparent when jumping release levels; example upgrading
from 3.1H to 4.6B. The following table is compiled from SAP notes:

System Administration Made Easy

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Appendix D: Upgrade Discussion
Other Considerations

SAP Release CPU increase % Memory increase %

3.1H to 4.0B 30 30
4.0B to 4.5B 20 20
4.5B to 4.6A 10 30

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Upgrade performance is difficult to predict. Performance is sensitive to a variety of
variables, some of which can have significant impact. Therefore, an upgrade of the test
system should be done to determine timing values for your configuration.
The following are a few of the factors that affect the performance of an upgrade:
< Database and operating system
< Hardware
 Processor (number of processors and speed of each)
 Memory (amount available)
 Drive array
– Performance factor (especially for writes)
– Configuration (minimize or eliminate drive or channel contention)
– Other I/O hardware (minimize or eliminate data channel contention)
< Data volume for changes to tables that contain data

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