NetWeaver 2004s SR2 installation. Whew. :)

Saturday, August 2, 2008

About a month or two ago I did a NetWeaver 2004s SR2 installation ABAP+JAVA stack.
I encountered many errors during that.
Mostly because I was inexperienced about the SAP installation and how the SAP is implemented.

Below is a little guide to the installation.
I installed SAP NetWeaver on Solaris.
Even though first I disagreed to use Solaris as the OS, later I found out that it is much more stable, server software wise.
And there is much more support from the SAP side to solaris installations as well.
Solaris installation is so smooth.
So you don't have to worry about any errors during the installation.
Prepare the disk spaces the way you want

Create a home partition with enough space for installation dvds to be copied (/export/home)
So create a partition with at least 10GB to hold the installation dvds.
After creating the relevant partitions use the rest of the partition for the oracle db.
Oracle is the database that you are going to hold your data so you got to think of your future requirements and allocate accordingly.
For my installation I used the rest of the partition after creating other partitions since I had a 500GB hard disk.
It was about 300GB or something. :)
So there should be six partitions

1-root
2-swap <-- this should have twice the amount of RAM you have installed in your server
3-/usr/sap
4-/oracle
5-/export/home
6-/sapmnt

After installing the solaris OS get the 1.4.2_17 java 64 bit version from the sun site and install it in /usr/jdk
Copy the 8 DVDs that you have to install.
Then set the JAVA_HOME variable in /etc/profile (export JAVA_HOME=path of the java home not the binary)
Then get the java policy file for 1.4.2 (you'll need it during the installation).
Edit the /etc/project for shared memory purposes.
Put the sap_inst home in the /etc/profile file.
Now start the installation using the sapinst in the MasterDVD.
You can do a prerequisite check if you want there is an option in the main installation screen for that.
When the installation asks for the password use the same password that you have for the root.
The installation will ask to create the user home directories.
You'll have to create them in the /export/home directory.
There will be two new users added to the /etc/passwd file SIDadm and oraSID where SID is your system ID.
At about the phase 14 it will ask you to install the oracle db by switching to the user oraSID.
First allow more than one client to connect to your xserver by executing 'xhost +' command and then in a terminal su oraSID and go to the folder where sapinst is telling where the oracle installation folder is then ./RUNINSTALLER.
This folder is extracted to /oracle by sapinst The oracle home and oracle sid must be set before running the ora installation.
It will do a prerequisite check before the installation and tell you the errors that it encountered.
After successfully installing oracle, install the latest OPatch application and patch the oracle to the latest version using that app.
Then resume the sapinst from where it stopped.
I got some error regarding memory saying not enough space could not fork process. So it is best to have at least 8gb during the installation if you are doing a netweaver java+abap one (Thanks Anthony).
And there was another error about creating java users.
So if that error comes you have to put java_startup/signal_handling = 0 line to the default.pfl file in the profile directory and put the same line in the /tmp/sapinst/Usercheck.pfl file as well.

And another error occurred saying j2ee_admin is locked.
If that error comes up you have to manually unlock the user by logging in to the netweaver sap using the GUI interface.
To log in to the netweaver you must first first enable sap* user by invoking the configtool which is in the j2ee directory.
Then you might have to restart the cluster.
To do that use the web console http://sid:50013.
After that every thing should go smoothly.

3 comments:

Thilanka Niroshana said...

I know this should be written in a much more organized way. Later on I will do that.

Unknown said...

Yeah, it could be more organized, :) not that I intend to do any NetWeaver installation in near future.

Thilanka said...

@Gaveen yeah like you'll ever get the chance to do that. :p