2340655 - How to Request Tenant Refresh in SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Cloud for Customer

This document will help you to understand the following:

1. Tenant Refresh Process.
2. Different Type of Tenant Refresh Process.
3. How to Request Tenant Refresh.
4. Restrictions of Tenant Refresh activity.

Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental. 

• SAP Business ByDesign
• SAP Cloud for Customer

This process provides you the flexibility to refresh an existing tenant.

Tenant Refresh can be triggered from Service Control Center.

We provide two different types of Tenant Refresh and those are listed below:

1. Empty Tenant refresh:

• The Empty Tenant refresh process is comprised of the following steps:
1. An existing test tenant will be emptied of all residing data via this method.
2. The URL and tenant ID of the tenant remains the same.

This means that we will delete all the data from the tenant and keep the same tenant URL and tenant ID. You'll then have to rebuild your test tenant from scratch.

Empty Tenant refresh - Test Tenant: 

• An existing test tenant can be emptied of all residing data via this method. The URL and ID of the tenant remains the same; however, there will not be any data in the tenant.
• You can follow the below steps to trigger the Empty tenant refresh for your test tenant:
1. Go to Service Control Center Work center
2. Access the Systems view
3. Select the system which you want to refresh and click "Refresh System"
4. Under Refresh Type select "Empty System refresh" (as shown in the below screenshot)
5. Input the Downtime details and click Ok
6. Upon successful request, you will get the successful message at the bottom
   
   

2. Tenant Refresh from Source System:

• The tenant refresh from Source System process is comprised of the following steps:
1. Copy of the source tenant (which requires a downtime of at least 4 hours)
2. Switch of the tenant identities (switch of tenant ID and tenant URL)
3. Invalidation/decommissioning of original test tenant

This means that we do a full copy of a source tenant (source tenant can be a test OR productive tenant) to the target tenant (target tenant can only be test tenant) and switch the identities (tenant ID and URL) of the test tenant which should refreshed. In the end, the original test tenant will be decommissioned by this process.

• The result of this process is to retain the URL and tenant ID of an existing test tenant and to refresh it with data of a source tenant.
• Supported Scenarios for Tenant Refresh with Source system are Production to Test refresh & Test to Test refresh.

For example, a tenant refresh can be used for integration tests of an SAP Business ByDesign test tenant which is already integrated with an ERP system and testing requires new data from the productive tenant.

• You can follow the below steps to trigger the Tenant Refresh from Source system:
1. Go to Service Control Center Work center
2. Access the Systems view
3. Select the System which you want to refresh and click "Refresh System"
4. Under Refresh Type select "Refresh from System refresh" (as shown in the below screenshot)
5. Input the all the details and click Ok
6. Upon successful request you will get the successful message at the bottom
   
   

Please note that the refreshed tenant will only be available 8-10 hours after the release of the source tenant (end of downtime).

To check the status of the refresh, kindly access the Service Requests view under the Service Control Center work center.

Restrictions

1. When customer-specific solutions (PDI solutions/one-off projects) are in place, this will only work when the versions of existing customer-specific solutions are the same in both source and target system.
2. If you have open incidents on the tenant to be refreshed and you do not want them to be closed, we cannot execute this process.
3. Customers who have closed their first implementation project (go-live) have to ensure that all open change projects are closed in the source tenant. The tenant refresh process requires a clean-up of all change projects as it does not support open change projects.

Upgrades & Restriction for the Tenant Creations

1. During upgrade, it is not advisable to terminate the tenants.
2. When a customer requests a production tenant during the upgrade or close to it, then the tenant delivery is delayed because we have an upgrade version mismatch, i.e. the test is upgraded to new or higher version, but the production systems are not. Hence, we have to wait until the production systems are upgraded to the same version.

Important Notes:

1. A minimum downtime of 4 hours is required for the source tenant during a tenant refresh. Please note that over and above 4 hours, downtime is subject to the size of the source tenant and will be estimated during request creation.
   Once the copy of source tenant is done, the source tenant is setting LIVE and accessible, then target tenant is setting down for additional ~10 hours to the data be replaced. All refresh process duration is about 14~18 hours.  4 Hours of source (it also depends of the tenant size) + 10~15 hours in target tenant.
2. Tenant Refresh activity can only be performed outside of the contractual maintenance (CMP) window.
3. Initial User Credentials will only be sent in the Empty Tenant Refresh Scenario. If you request Refresh of your tenant as Copy of Source system it is advised to use the same Business User ID and passwords as of your source system. If you still want to reset the Initial User ID password in the second scenario, you can raise the incident to SAP Support with the details.
4. We recommend you to always provide us the downtime after the source tenant CMP.
5. All communication arrangements have to be rebuilt for the refreshed tenant.
6. Certificate mapping should be redone on refreshed test tenants. However, the production tenants will have the certificates already copied.
7. Incidents from source tenant will not be copied to the refreshed test tenant. Additionally, all open incidents from the refreshed test tenant will be confirmed automatically.
8. Tenant Refresh service request is free of cost and it can be requested any number of time based on customer's business needs.
9. The tenant refresh is generally provided within one business day from start of the scheduled downtime.
10. Tenant refresh process is only available for customer tenants. Demo, reference or partner development tenants are NOT supported.
11. Single-Sign-On (SSO) needs to be reconfigured in the target/refreshed test tenant.
    

    In order to avoid issue with SSO, there are prerequistes before perfoming the tenant refresh,make sure that there is at least 1 key user in production system (source tenant) who can login with password.
    So the same user login into the target tenant to re-configure the SSO configuration.

    Refer KBA 3300768 - Prerequisites on Tenant Refresh Request from SSO Configured Tenant.

12. After the refresh, same User ID & passwords of source tenant can be used to login to the target/refreshed test tenant (this will only be applicable when you request tenant refresh from a source system).

Further information:

SAP Business Bydesign Help Document: Refresh System

SAP Cloud for Customer Help Document: Refresh System

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