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Note 1048303 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5: Installation and upgrade

Note Language: English Version: 14 Validity: Valid from 06.12.2007

Summary

SymptomYou want to use SAP server software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

More TermsRed Hat, Redhat, RH, Enterprise Linux, RHEL5, virtualization, XEN, x86_64,

ppc64, ia64

Cause and PrerequisitesYou want to use SAP server software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Solution

Environment

This document deals with the installation and configuration of SAP server

software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and upgrading an existing SAP system

from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3 or 4 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. In

the following, "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" means version 5 unless specified

otherwise.

The installation or configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the base

of a database server is not the primary purpose of this document although

some notes listed here are specific to DBMS. If you want to install adatabase server, consult the operating system and database system

documentation as well.

Certification of specific SAP products on specific versions of Red Hat

Enterprise Linux notwithstanding, the following hardware platforms are

certified for use of SAP software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

o x86/ia32 (Intel compatible 32bit)

o x86_64

o ia64 (Intel Itanium 2)

o PowerPC

o IBM System z

Supportability prerequisites

In order for your SAP system to be fully supported on Red Hat Enterprise

Linux, the following prerequisites must be fulfilled (this list is not

exclusive, other notes may apply):

o You need to use the Server variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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o You need to have valid support and update entitlements for Red Hat

Enterprise Linux and any additional layered components (e.g.

Virtualization, Clustering, Cluster Storage) on your machine.

Please go to http://www.redhat.com/rhel/ for more information, or

contact your local Red Hat sales representative.

o Your machine must be able to retrieve additional software and

updates, either directly, via an HTTP or RHN proxy or through an

RHN satellite server. If you access additional software or updates

by other, not officially supported avenues, some information in

this note might not be applicable in your environment.

o You need to use hardware that is certified for SAP use on Linux by

your hardware vendor. See the respective notes on certified

hardware which are listed in note 171356.

o You are allowed to run any version or variant of the Linux kernel

issued by Red Hat for your specific OS version as long as you usethe same (sub-) architecture as tested in the SAP LinuxLab:

- i686 on Intel 32bit and compatible or AMD64 or Intel EM64T when

used in 32bit mode

- x86_64 on AMD64 or Intel EM64T

- ppc64 on IBM PowerPC

- ia64 on Intel Itanium 2

- s390x on IBM System z

o To get a fully supported Java stack, you need to purchase separate

support for the certified JVM from the vendor or manufacturer.

Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Install the operating system as described in its documentation ("Red Hat

Installation Guide", either the handbook or from installation media).

Install the minimum operating system components mentioned below. Use

English as the installation and system language. Note that some things that

were configured during the installation in former versions of Red Hat

Enterprise Linux are now configured during the first boot after theinstallation.

Additional notes:

o Manually partitioning the disks is strongly recommended to reserve

space for the application.

o When asked about the desired timezone, choose "System clock uses

UTC" in order to automatically switch between normal and daylight

savings time.

o Set a short, not fully qualified hostname. Mapping the short to thefully qualified hostname is described below under "Hostname".

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o When offered to customize the software selection, choose

"Customize now". It is recommended to select the software groups

listed in the following at a minimum for an SAP server machine.

When customizing the list of optional packages for a software

group, keep the packages selected by default and add packages

eventually listed with the group:

- Development/Development Libraries (for Oracle databases)

- Development/Development Tools (for Oracle databases)

- Servers/Printing Support

- Base System/Base

- Base System/Legacy Software Support (add the compat-openldap

package)

- Base System/X Window System

The following packages can't be chosen during installation and have

to be installed afterwards:

- libXp

- libunwind (on ia64)

If you need to install or reinstall a package or a package group at

a later point, you can do that (after registering your system in

Red Hat Network ) with the following commands, provided that your

system can access Red Hat Network via the officially supported

ways (directly or via RHN Proxy or RHN Satellite):

- For installing individual packages:

yum install <package1> [<package2> [<package3> [...]]]

where <package*> are the names of the packages to be

installed, e.g.:

yum install libXp

- For installing package groups:

yum groupinstall '<group1>' ['<group2>' ['<group3' [...]]]

where <group*> are the names of the groups as used in the

installation program, e.g.:

yum groupinstall 'Legacy Software Support'

If your system can't use the officially supported ways to

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access Red Hat, it often means it cannot determine the

individual packages contained in a package group. In this case,

you need to install the individual packages as described above.

To find out which packages fulfil a certain requirement or are part

of acertain package group, please contact your operating system

support.

When you first boot your system you will be presented with "firstboot", a

post installation configuration tool:

o If you leave the firewall enabled, you need to open up the ports

for your SAP product either in firstboot if you already know them

or by e.g. using the system-config-securitylevel tool at a later

point. These ports are listed during the installation of the SAP

software but can also be found in /etc/services after it is

installed.

o Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses SELinux technology for additional

security which is enabled by default. Because several components of

an SAP server system (like the installation tools or some

underlying RDBMS) are not aware of SELinux, we recommend setting

it to "Permissive" for the time being so that these components

won't break. We don't recommend setting it to "Disabled" as this

would require relabeling the whole filesystem if you want to enable

it again at a later point for additional security when these

components are made compatible or suitable procedures exist to make

them function properly with SELinux. You can change SELinux

settings by editing /etc/selinux/config for future boot processes.

On a running system, you can switch between "Enforcing" and

"Permissive" modes using the command "setenforce".

o If you can access an NTP time server from the machine, we strongly

recommend choosing "Enable Network Time Protocol" in the "Date

and Time" dialog to keep all SAP applications servers' time and

date synchronized.

o You should register the system in the Red Hat Network to retrieve

update packages for your machine. In all cases it is recommended

that you update all program packages (including kernel and glibc)

to the latest version available in the Red Hat Network.

Hostname

Ensure that the system hostname is set to the short name as described

above, i.e. both commands "hostname" and "hostname -s" must return the

hostname without domain, "hostname -f" must return the fully qualified

hostname and domain. To do that, check that HOSTNAME is set to the short

name without domain in /etc/sysconfig/network and set up /etc/hosts so

that it is configured like this (besides any additional configured hosts):

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

192.168.0.1 server.example.com server

It is important that the fully qualified domain name is in the second

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column, followed by any alias names and that the hostname of the machine is

not associated with the IP address 127.0.0.1. Afterwards run 'hostname

<shorthostname>' to set the hostname without rebooting.

Linux kernel

You may use any Linux kernel as long as the conditions described above in

"Supportability prerequisites" are met.

Updating the Glibc package

You may use any glibc package for your OS version provided by Red Hat.

After updating the glibc package you need to (re-) install the saplocales

package:

rpm -Uvh --force <saplocales.rpm>

See note 171356 for details on the saplocales package.

Linux kernel parameters

Some Linux kernel parameters have to be adjusted to meet the requirements

of SAP software. To do this append the following lines to /etc/sysctl.conf

(or change them accordingly -- these are minimum values, higher values are

okay as well):

# SAP settings

kernel.msgmni=1024

kernel.sem=1250 256000 100 1024

vm.max_map_count=300000

Activate these settings with the command "sysctl -p".

Process resource limits

Some components (e.g. the SAP J2EE engine, Oracle RDBMS software, ...) need

to keep a large number of file handles opened simultaneously. You need to

increase the limit of files one process can open at a time by extending

/etc/security/limits.conf with lines similar to these:

@sapsys hard nofile 32800

@sapsys soft nofile 32800

@dba hard nofile 32800

@dba soft nofile 32800

These lines grant the users in the sapsys group (J2EE engine) and the dba

group (Oracle) to open up to 32800 files simultaneously, you need to logout

and login again for the setting to take effect. If needed, adjust these

lines to match your setup. Please refer to the comments in said file for

information about its format.

Minimum patchlevels

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Some installation media contain old patchlevels of the SAP software. For

proper functioning of your SAP system, ensure that you have installed at

minimum the patchlevels listed here:

o SAP kernel 4.6D_EXT: patchlevel >= 1811

o SAP kernel 6.40: patchlevel >= 12

Memory Management

The Intel-compatible 32bit Linux kernels contained in RHEL 5 allow to

allocate more than 2GB of memory in a single chunk. You can adjust your SAP

profile parameters accordingly to use more SAP buffers and extended memory

at the expense of heap size. For more information refer to SAP note 386605.

Patching SAPINST

In some cases SAPINST will fail during start or terminate abnormally and

needs to be patched. Please refer to and proceed according to note 722890

for information about where to download SAPINST patches and how to apply

them.

Threading on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

RHEL 5 exclusively uses the Native Posix Threading Library, a

POSIX-compatible threading implementation, for threading. Unlike former

versions of RHEL, using LinuxThreads for older applications by way of

setting the environment variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL isn't possible anymore.

Additional notes for installing SAP systems

o You may get a warning from the Prerequisite Checker that Red Hat

Enterprise Linux 5 is not supported. Ignore this warning.

o Use JDK 1.4.2_14 instead of 1.4.2_13 on Intel-compatible 32 bit and

ia64 platforms, otherwise you could get problems when starting the

Java Application Server. See note #1009962 for details.

o When installing an SAP system based on kernel 640, you need to

update the SAP kernel to a current patchlevel, then continue with

the installation of the DB instance, see note #19466 for details.

In the DB installation, when asked whether you want to extract the

SAP kernel SAPEXE and SAPEXEDB archives, uncheck these options so

that the updated kernel files don't get overwritten with old

versions.

o When using SAP software in an LDAP environment on RHEL 5/x86_64,you need to install a symbolic link for two libraries because the

binaries used to access LDAP where built against versions of these

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libraries with a non-standard SONAME:

ln -s libldap-2.2.so.7 /usr/lib64/libldap.so.199

ln -s liblber-2.2.so.7 /usr/lib64/liblber.so.199

o When using R3SETUP to install older product releases, you might

encounter an error looking like this:

[...] error while loading shared libraries:

libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such

file or directory

In this case, run the following command as the root user to create

a symlink to the newer version of the library:

ln -s libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2

Backup

When using BRBACKUP, don't use the cpio tool as a backend because it

can't restore archives larger than 4GB. See note 20577 for details.

Additional notes for installation with Oracle RDBMS

The following examples are for the x86_64 platform. You might need to

adjust paths according to your setup.

o When running the runInstaller/RUNINSTALLER commands, you may get a

warning like the following:

Checking installer requirements...

Checking operating system version: must be redhat-3, SuSE-9,

redhat-4, UnitedLinux-1.0, asianux-1 or asianux-2

Failed <<<<

In this case, create or change

/oracle/stage/102_64/database/install/oraparam.ini so that it

contains these lines:

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[Certified Versions]

Linux=redhat-3,SuSE-9,redhat-4,UnitedLinux-1.0,asianux-1,asianux-2,

redhat-5

o When installing Oracle on Itanium hardware, apply the necessary

patches as described in note #986578.

Header Data

Release Status: Released for CustomerReleased on: 06.12.2007 20:02:03Priority: Recommendations/additional infoCategory: Installation information

Main Component BC-OP-LNX-RH Red Hat Linux

The note is not release-dependent.

Related Notes

Number Short Text

1122387 Linux: Supported virtualization technologies with SAP

1066142 Linux: libj9vm22.so: cannot open shared object file

1009962 jdk 1.4.2_13 does not work together with jlaunch

986578 Oracle support on Itanium 2 (Montecito) systems

962334 SAP on Linux on XEN virtual machine

936887 End of maintenance for Linux distributions

788272 Compatibility of Linux Kernel 2.6/NPTL with MaxDB

784391 SAP support terms and 3rd-party Linux kernel drivers

386605 SAP Memory Management for Linux (32-bit)171356 SAP software on Linux: Essential information

81737 DB2-z/OS: APAR List

19466 Downloading SAP kernel patches

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