Migrating Personal Folder Contents

server administration XI Server Discussion
1

We are in the process of upgrading from 4.0 to 4.2, to entirely new servers. We are getting various errors trying to promote personal folder contents, which I believe are due to either folder or user IDs not matching. The strange thing is we can promote from our old development server to the new development server and we can promote between our old dev/test/prod servers just fine*, and none of the user or folder IDs match there. But we cannot promote from the new dev server or any old servers to our new test environment.

*Disclaimer – I think we are unable to promote a user’s subfolders between servers in our current system, but reports at the root level are fine.

One thought is to migrate from our old production down to our old dev, then from there to the new dev. Then delete all the users from the new test and prod systems and promote them up from dev. But I’m wondering if we’ll lose the link between the active directory logins and the actual users. I assume that just uses the user name itself but want to make sure.

Or does anyone have any other ideas?

craiggsmith (BOB member since 2009-06-01)

2

Are you using and type of third-party authentication such as Windows AD or LDAP? If you are there’s a trick to getting this to migrate correctly:

  1. Configure the third-party authentication and import a single group to validate that it’s working correctly. DO NOT schedule any updates yet.

  2. Delete ALL of the users that you just imported. There is no guarantee that they will have the same SI_CUID value as what you’re trying to migrate so you’ll end up with errors and possible duplicates.

  3. Now migrate the users and personal folder content. You may have to break this down into batches of a couple hundred users at a time if you have a large user base - I do this by selecting specific user groups instead of users. Since you have the third-party authentication configured in the destination system, the users should all come over correctly from the old one.

  4. Once everyone has been migrated you can then set up scheduled updates for your authentication type if that’s what you’re currently doing in production.

-Dell

hilfy :us: (BOB member since 2007-04-16)

3

Yes, AD. Thanks very much, we’ll give that a try.

craiggsmith (BOB member since 2009-06-01)

4

What is the trick to get the personal folders and inboxes content migrated? I am planning an incremental upgrade and doing it in chunks of around 200 users at a time. Migrating from BI 4.1 SP4 P2 to BI 4.2 SP4 using promotion manager. I set up a group on the BI 4.1 server and added in the users. However when I build a promotion job and try to add dependencies all I get are the users. I chatted with an expert this afternoon on SAP support and he thought they would move with the user without having to select anything. My testing saw user move but not the content in either inbox or favorites.

I heard back from SAP support and it seems the only way to migrate personal folders and inboxes with users is to select them individually from the promotion manager. Now what should of been a few minutes job is going to take hours. Why would they add steps to a migration like this? Hard for me to believe this made it through any Beta testing.

Looking for ideas not involving 3rd party tools.

Does anyone know an easy way to identify empty inboxes and folders?

:hb:

Mike Murray :us: (BOB member since 2005-12-23)

5

How are you performing your migrations? Are you trying to migrate the users using the GUI tool or the Command Line Interface?

We are working on a migration from BI4.1sp7 to BI4.2sp4. I am following the new Pattern Book on Life Cycle Management - Promotion Management. It has instructions and provides the queries to pass to the Command Line Interface of the LCM. Note that there is an order recommended to how the content is migrated. I am primarily using pages 120 through 202 of this document.

I have not observed any issues as you describe while following these guidelines. I will be running a test of our script files again today because I’ve made some additional changes. I will pay more attention when I migrate the user Inboxes and Favorites to see if I observe anything unusual.

6

I have looked at the command line options but it looked to be more of a lift and shift of all content then small groups of users. I may have to go back in and take a closer look. We have over 1200 users.

I started looking at the book and what is on page 115 looks like it should work. If I migrate my users to the server then run this code it would only populate favorites for users that had been migrated to server. However I am getting an error. Error "The plugin does not exist in the CMS (FWM 02017)

My properties file
action=promote

LCM Node

LCM_CMS=TDWBI42:6400
LCM_userName=Administrator
LCM_password=xxxxx
LCM_authentication=SecEnterprise

Source_CMS=devntibixi4:6400
Source_userName=Administrator
Source_password=xxxxxxxx
Source_authentication=SecEnterprise

Destination_CMS=tdwbi42:6400
Destination_userName=Administrator
Destination_password=xxxxxxxxx
Destination_authentication=SecEnterprise

Number of Queries

exportQueriesTotal=1

Queries

exportQuery1=SELECT TOP 1-1000 static, relationships, SI_PARENT_FOLDER_CUID, SI_OWNER, SI_PATH FROM CI_INFOOBJECTS, CI_APPOBJECTS, CI_SYSTEMOBJECTS
WHERE DESCENDANTS (“SI_NAME=‘Folder Hierarchy’”, “(SI_KIND=‘FavoritesFolder’)”) ORDER BY SI_NAME ASC, SI_ID ASC

Dependencies

exportDependencies=false
includeSecurity=false

Options

stacktrace=false
consolelog=true

Mike Murray :us: (BOB member since 2005-12-23)

7

That is close to what I ran. I moved the users over first along with the universes and some other dependent items.

The script I use for the Favorites reports is a little different than yours.

exportQuery1=SELECT TOP 100000 static, relationships, SI_PARENT_FOLDER_CUID, SI_OWNER, SI_PATH FROM CI_INFOOBJECTS WHERE DESCENDANTS("SI_NAME='Folder Hierarchy'", "(SI_KIND='FavoritesFolder')") And SI_INSTANCE = 0

This query only moves the reports themselves, no instances. We are doing this to shorten our outage window for the upgrade. I have another script that I ran later to migrate any recurring instances.

exportQuery1=SELECT TOP 100000 static, relationships, SI_PARENT_FOLDER_CUID, SI_OWNER, SI_PATH FROM CI_INFOOBJECTS WHERE DESCENDANTS("SI_NAME='Folder Hierarchy'", "SI_ID in (23)") And SI_INSTANCE = 1 And SI_RECURRING = 1

After these are run we will bring our environment up. Afterward, we will migrate any instances with this code:

exportQuery1=SELECT TOP 100000 static, relationships, SI_PARENT_FOLDER_CUID, SI_OWNER, SI_PATH FROM CI_INFOOBJECTS WHERE DESCENDANTS("SI_NAME='Folder Hierarchy'", "(SI_KIND='FavoritesFolder')") And SI_INSTANCE = 1 AND SI_RECURRING = 0

The only other difference other than the query that I see in my properties file from yours is I set

includeSecurity=true

I successfully migrated the following:
[list]2,176 Users and Groups
3,201 Favorites Reports with folders
14 Recurring instances
32 historical instances[/list]

This error almost sounds like the Windows AD might not be installed or something wrong with it. The Pattern Book says to configure it but then disable it while you are doing the migration. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible to perform the migration if you don’t do this. In my test, Windows AD was still configured and active in the source environment because I can’t bring it down right now. The source environment did not have Windows AD configured at all.

One thing that might help you figure out what the error is would be to add

-Dtracelog.logdir="D:\PromotionScripts\Logs\." -Dtracelog.configfile="D:\PromotionScripts\LCMCLI_trace.ini"

to your lcm_cli.bat file. You can put the locations where ever you want and set the LCMCLI_trace.ini settings to the information that you want. This will provide you with more specific log files while you are running lcm.cli.bat.

8

Error was related to white space in properties file. SAP support figured that out.

Thanks for the help and a couple of new ideas. I so miss the old import wizard …

Mike Murray :us: (BOB member since 2005-12-23)

9

It runs now states it is successful however content is not getting migrated for AD users. I migrated users first then shut off AD authentication and ran script on my test BI 4.2 against my test BI 4.1 server.
:hb:

Mike Murray :us: (BOB member since 2005-12-23)

10

Hmm, content migrated fine for me. This was for both Favorites folders and Inboxes.

The pattern book says to have AD authentication disabled from the beginning and not to re-enable it until you are through with the migration. That would be the only difference that I see between what you are doing and what I did. I still have AD authentication disabled.

11

Hi, can anyone please guide on where to find the pattern book on Life Cycle Management - Promotion Management? The link given here is no longer working. Tried searching for it, but all sources quote the same link which is no longer working and giving me “Page not found” error. I really need it urgently.
Please Help!

mehak83 (BOB member since 2011-06-28)

12

It isn’t showing up on the Pattern Book index page either. I tried the link for the Performance & Load Testing Pattern Book and I got the same “page not found” error. It may be a system issue. You might have to contact SAP regarding the broken links.

13

OK, we’ll raise a ticket with SAP then. Thank you for your reply.

mehak83 (BOB member since 2011-06-28)