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Chapter 4. Upgrading an SAP NetWeaver system

Follow the Upgrading from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 guide to upgrade your SAP NetWeaver non-cloud or BYOS cloud RHEL 7.9 system to RHEL 8.10, with the following additional steps:

  1. At the end of the Preparing a RHEL 7 system for the upgrade procedure, remove the line containing kernel.sem from the /etc/sysctl.d/sap.conf file.

  2. At the end of the 6. Verifying the post-upgrade state of the RHEL 8 system procedure, verify that the value of kernel.pid_max is 4194304 according to SAP note 2772999: 

    # sysctl kernel.pid_max
    Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap

    If this is not the case, add the following line to file /etc/sysctl.d/sap.conf: 

    kernel.pid_max = 4194304
    Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap

    Save the changes, and reload the file: 

    # sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/sap.conf
    Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap

    You can run the sap_general_preconfigure and sap_netweaver_preconfigure roles in assert mode to verify if your system is compliant with the SAP notes requirements. These roles are part of the RHEL package RHEL System Roles for SAP or the Ansible collection redhat.sap_install.

The upgrade of SAP NetWeaver or other SAP application systems hosted on cloud provider PAYG instances is very similar to the upgrade of SAP HANA systems hosted on cloud provider PAYG instances. All non-HANA-specific steps listed in the SAP HANA systems upgrade on cloud provider PAYG instances procedure should be applied to complete the upgrade of SAP NetWeaver or other SAP application systems hosted on cloud provider PAYG instances.

After the upgrade, the system has the following Red Hat repositories: 

$ yum repolist
rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-rhui-rpms
rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-rhui-rpms
rhel-8-for-x86_64-sap-netweaver-rhui-rpms
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap

The list may contain other non-Red Hat repositories, namely, custom repositories of cloud providers for RHUI configuration.

Note

Do not use --channel option if you upgrade to RHEL 8.10, as it is the final minor release of RHEL 8, it is not E4S/EUS release, and its support cycle differs. For more information, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle Customer Portal article.

The rhel-8-for-x86_64-sap-solutions-rhui-rpms repository should not be present on RHEL for SAP Applications instances, as per the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Offerings on Microsoft Azure FAQ Knowledgebase article. At some point, it will be removed by Microsoft Azure (RHUI client rpm automatic update) and does not require any action from users. If the automatic RHUI client rpm update has been disabled on your system, for example, by removing the corresponding cron job, you can update the RHUI client RPM package by yum update <package_name>.

The in-place upgrade of RHEL 7 with SAP NetWeaver or other SAP applications hosted on cloud providers and using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications subscription can be performed only from RHEL 7.9 with normal (non-e4s/eus/…​) repositories. RHEL 7.7 or earlier must be updated to RHEL 7.9 first. For special instructions on how to upgrade from RHEL 7.7 or earlier to RHEL 7.9 on cloud providers, refer to How to Perform Update of RHEL for SAP with HA from 7.* to 7.9 on Cloud Providers Knowledgebase article.

Perform all the upgrade steps, including the preparation and pre-upgrade steps, on a test system first until you have verified that the upgrade can be performed successfully in your production environment.

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