Chapter 4. Upgrading SAP NetWeaver System

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

# sysctl kernel.pid_max

If this is not the case, add the following line to file /etc/sysctl.d/sap.conf: kernel.pid_max = 4194304 and then reload the file with:

# sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/sap.conf

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 paths, as the Supported In-place Upgrade Paths section states.

The desired target release version is defined by the --target option. For SAP HANA systems, it is either 8.8 or 8.10. For SAP applications, there are two latest EUS/E4S RHEL 8.x minor versions (even numbers usually), which are supported by Leapp for non-HANA systems as per the Upgrading from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 document. Please use the --target option according to your preferences. For more information, please see leapp --help.

The repo channel for standalone SAP NetWeaver hosts on Microsoft Azure PAYG instances.

When upgrading RHEL for SAP Applications virtual machine on Microsoft Azure PAYG instances, use --channel eus instead of --channel e4s. In other cases, --channel e4s is always used. After the upgrade with --channel eus, the system will have the following Red Hat repositories:

$ yum repolist
rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-eus-rhui-rpms
rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-eus-rhui-rpms
rhel-8-for-x86_64-sap-netweaver-eus-rhui-rpms

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

Please keep in mind that the rhel-8-for-x86_64-sap-solutions-eus-rhui-rpms repository should not be present on RHEL for SAP Applications instances, as per Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Offerings on Microsoft Azure FAQ. At some point, it will be removed by Microsoft Azure via the 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, the RHUI client rpm can be updated 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/…​) repos. 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.

As always, run 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.