1757132 - BI4 Support Pack Upgrade and Patch Install Best Practice Guide

Symptom

A guide to best practices for upgrading to BI4.x

Environment

• SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 4.0 and above (Windows platform)

Resolution

When upgrading your installation to a Support package (eg: SP04) from a lower version, always use the update installer, but never use SP04 full build* for this scenario. A Support package full build is applicable to you in case you are starting a new installation.
*using a full build SP04 to upgrade from a lower version like SP02/FP03 can cause undesirable results and make the installation unsupported*

Best practices when performing an upgrade or patch install on your BI4 Platform:

1. Make sure to go over the latest support & feature pack release notes available at SAP Help Portal
2. Make sure to Turn OFF ALL servers Except essential servers: CMS, FRS (input/output),Tomcat (or other App server)
1. If needed, use a task manager, kill all processes* other than those essential servers listed above.
   1. Using Windows Task Manager: Show all processes from all users, right click on the process you wish to terminate, select End Process Tree 
   2. Optionally you may wish to use another task manager such as process explorer to kill the processes
2. If you use the DB2 bundled CMS DB, do NOT kill that process*
3. Kill all JAVA.EXE processes that may still be running and taking up CPU / RAM (using task manager: right click, end process tree on each java process; or use process explorer)NOTE: This will ensure that there won’t be any issues with missing libraries which is primarily caused by the java processes locking up files not allowing them to be updated or deleted.
3. Once you have completed the above steps, look through the task manager to be sure all processes are still down and did not auto-recover, or restart.
4. Also make sure that the Anti-virus, Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and User Account Control (UAC) is turned off.

This section is specific to clustered or distributed environments :
Use this methodology up to BI 4.0 version Support pack 4 (SP04)[Sequentially]

1. Always run the update installer one server at a time [sequentially].
2. DO NOT run simultaneous update installs; run each update, on each tier independently - starting with the intelligence tier (CMS)
1. Update ALL intelligence tiers first (all machines with a CMS being actively used), then move on to the processing tier, then the web tier.
3. The installer updates metadata in the CMS database. Updating concurrently is known to cause failures in the installer and will severely impact the success rate of the install.
   NOTE:This is because the installer did not support parallel patching of distributed environments until SP05.

• For more details on this methodology, refer to the SAP kbase 1807514 on how to patch a BI4.0 cluster.
• For patch specific prerequisites and documentation, refer to the update documentation at SAP Help Portal.

Use this methodology for BI 4.0 versions Support pack 5 (SP05) and above (including  BI4.1 and above) [ using Parallel Patching ]
As of BI 4.0 support package 5 (SP05), patching of servers or nodes in a distributed environment can be performed in parallel. This methodology can also be referred to as parallel patching.

• For more details on this methodology, refer to SAP kbase 2013616 on How to patch BI 4.x servers in a distributed BI Platform deployment simultaneously ( in parallel ).
• For patch specific prerequisites and documentation, refer to the update documentation at SAP Help Portal.
   

An Interactive tool  is available on the SCN to help you determine how best to patch your SAP BI 4.x server or cluster environments. 

Keywords

BI 4.0 4.1 sp04 sp05 SP patch package installer intallation BI4.0 BI4.1 distributed cluster node sequential parallel