Strategy to Upgrade S4HANA1610 to S4HANA2021(Based on Personal Experience)?
Hi in This blog we will discussing on strategy for S4HANA upgrade
SAP BASISSAP HANAS4HANAFIORISAP BASIS ADMINISTRATION
Biswa Ranjan
6/7/20233 min read
Welcome to Another blog of Odia Engineer Learning Platform
Today we are going to Discuss on One of the Key topic i. e: How can you plan an s4hana upgrade from 1610 (quite older ,released back in 2016-17) to 2021 (the most recent release of S4HANA) and s4hana1610 is out of support since December 2021.. When any product is out of support then SAP doesn't provide free support for those product and of course they charge to client. That's why it is important to upgrade your existing system to newer version which is in support period just to save the additional costs. And of course with newer versions you get better features n new functionalities
Understand we are upgrading 5 years release at a time. Ofcourse this will be challenging. So I'm going to share the strategy based on my experience.
Source : s4hana 1610, FES 3.0 (Fiori Front end server)
Target : S4hana 2021, FES 2021
So the very first question , is it possible to upgrade S4HANA 1610 to S4HANA 2021 in a single downtime?
Answer is Yes, it's absolutely possible. But you need concrete planning for this.
A. Let's Talk on the Prerequisite on Infrastructure and Database Version Requisites For S42021 Upgrade
1. Minimum OS Version required : SLES 15 SP2
2. Minimum HANA Revision Required: HANA 2.0 SPS5 REV 50 and above (Ofcourse You can update go the latest revision as well or go for N-1)
B. Fiori Dependency on S4HANA 2021 Upgrade
1.S4HANA upgrade is totally dependent on the fiori. Incase you are upgrading to S4HANA2021 ensure you have embedded fiori setup.
2. In case you have standalone fiori (hub setup) you should convert it to Embedded. You can follow SAP Guide for Embedded Fiori Setup. If possible will cover that in my future blogs
3. As you know Our Fiori version FES 3.0 in S4HANA 1610 setup. To update the Fiori to FES 2021 minimum FES 6.0 is required. So in this situation we will require two downtime , one is for FES 3.0 to 6.0 upgrade, second is FES 6.0 to FES 2021 Upgrade.
Do you think two downtimes for a single upgrade, a viable option. Ofcourse No.. The reason being you Need to Run SUM tool two times, similary two time you need to do modification adjustment (SPDD) which is absolutely bizarre
4. Don't worry we can achieve it in single downtime. All we need to do while generating stack xml In maintenance planner you need to add the current version as FES6.0 manually. That way when SUM tool reads the XML file it will interpret as current version as FES 6.0 instead of FES 3.0 (ofcourse it's cheating the system, but the best way to reduce two downtime to single downtime)
SIMPLIFICATION ITEM CHECKLIST:
This is really painfully area as you are upgrading 5 years release at a time. There will be bunch of notes to be implemented. In general it takes minimum one week to max two weeks time based your working bandwidth.
My suggestion: Don't continue using the hub setup for the fiori , better to convert hub setup to embedded before the upgrade. Embedded fiori gives better user experience, and definitely it reduces cost. As hub setup in the standalone server incurs additional cost . In case your client wants to continue the hub setup ,then you can directly upgrade from FES 3.0 to FES 2021. Just while generating the stack xml you need to manually insert the fiori version as 6.0.
Once You complete all the steps mentioned above, you can generate the stack for S4HANA 2021 and Run the upgrade (you can consider using silent data migration)which is supported for target versions s4hana 1909 onwards.
That's all folks.....
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