Preparing BW system for Migration – Validation and Checks

After you have cleaned up your BW system successfully, you can go for sizing and identify the resource equipment for your SAP HANA appliance.

The next step now involves the system validation for smooth migration to BW on HANA. For this, SAP provides a checklist tool which you can use before migration.

This checklist tool details can be found in the SAP note 1729988. This note also has an attachment which allows you to download the zip file of the ABAP source code of the tool along with guide.

To install the tool, go to SE38 in your BW system and create an executable program in your development system. Name it as ZBW_HANA_CHECKLIST. Copy the source code from the zip file downloaded from the SAP note as per your BW system version (there will be two files provided- one for 7.0 and higher versions and other for 3.X versions)

Save and activate the program. Before executing this program, perform below check-

• Go to the top menu and click on System-Status. Click on magnifying glass icon. Observe the version for ST-PI component. For 7.X systems, the version should be 2008_1_700 or higher. For 3.X systems, the version should be 2005_1_640 or higher.

(SAP note 1031096)

Now you can run the checklist tool. In older versions (7.0 or 7.1), errors may occur at runtime or when activating the checklist program. Go through the SAP note 1729988 how to guide in such cases. Follow the recommendations in the note to comment out the parts of the code and then reactivate the report.

Ensure that you add comments to the changes so that they can be identified later and reverted back after a system  upgrade. You can transport this report to BW system which you want to migrate to HANA.

A screen will come where you can see the ‘Checks’ tab. Click on it and it will display number of options for checking. Some of the categories are-

• General
• Database
• Basis
• Corrections
• BW Data Warehouse Management
• BW OLAP Processor
• BW Enhanced Infrastructure
• BW system
• BW Technical Content
• Customer Objects
• Post Copy Automation (PCA)

You can select the required category and then ‘select all‘ or ‘select BW only‘ . It is advisable to run only one check at a time and observe the results. Also a user might not be having authorization to run all the checks.

Also, after selecting the checks, you can go to the ‘Options‘ tab and select if you want to execute ‘long running checks‘ or not. There is also an option to generate the logs (tcode SLG1) and also an option to select the version (whether same as current or BW 7.4)

Correct the errors first. This may take quite some time (even few weeks). Hence it is recommended to run the checklist tool well in advance before starting with migration.

Pay attention to the warnings (triangle icons) once you have corrected the errors.

Please note that once you have migrated your BW system, you have to rerun the checklist tool to check for any errors or warnings and ensuring smooth operation of BW on HANA system.

You can select ‘HTML download’ to save the results of checklist tool on your local desktop. This saves the result along with icons and colors.