If you were a fly on the wall in my house this time of year, you’d hear my wife say “Time to clear the decks!”. Every time.
It is sort of a tradition. We both have home office space, and both of them get cluttered and piled up with stuff over the course of the year. During the quiet hours of the last week of the year, it is a natural time to clean everything up and start the new year fresh. I think we hauled about four bags of garbage total out of each. Junk mail. Newspapers and magazines we never read. Amazon.com boxes.
So what does this have to do with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4? This quiet week is the perfect week to do some housekeeping on your system while most people are on vacation and (if you aren’t crippled by an end-of-year freeze) easy to push through change requests.
Number 1 on your list; clear out those old patches. As of BI4.1 SP03, you only need to keep the base install plus the current patch installed. Otherwise, you’re leaving a whole mess of unnecessary patch history on your disk and in your registry. This chews up disk space, slows down backups, and can really slow down your patches the next time you have to apply one (oh yeah, you’ll be patching again…).
Case in point. Here we had an early BI4 adopter. We started out in BI4.0 SP4.
Tons of history in there. Yuck. Here’s what the disk looked like before I cleaned it up:
After I applied BI4.1 SP04, I went back and uninstalled everything except the base 4.0 SP4 install and the current 4.1 SP04. Take a look at the disk again:
That’s nearly 20GB of disk reclaimed! 19.5GB to be exact. And this was just a single-node development server. The savings are even greater when you think about a multi-node production system. For this landscape, production is 12 servers. 20GB x 12 servers = 240GB of disk reclaimed and no longer needing to be backed up daily. Wow! So do yourself and your servers a favor. Clear out those old patches!
Next on the list should be clearing off any leftover installation media that might be lurking around. After a patch is done, the installers are frequently left in a temp folder hanging around somewhere taking up even more space. They’re likely being backed up as well. Ugh! Clear them out. Delete them. You can always download them from SAP Service Marketplace if you need them again. Chances are you won’t ever need them again. You’ll need new ones. If you really must keep them around somewhere, move them to a NAS or SAN share somewhere in one place, instead of in multiple places all around your BI4 landscape.
This week is the perfect time to clear the decks and start your new year off right. Or if you are stuck in year-end config freeze, you can have a plan to clear your decks in just a week or two. Time for a fresh start. Happy 2015!
This technique is still useful in BI 4.2. I just reclaimed 5 GB per node by removing BI 4.2 SP1 from a cluster that had BI 4.2 SP0 (beta) as well as the BI 4.2 SP2 GA release.