Food for thought for another productive system: until when must the system be identical, keyword: transaction log
Conclusion
The maturity and performance of automation tools for SAP system copying have evolved over a period of more than 15 years. The first tools for SAP system copy creation came from the mainframe environment.
To build a target system that can be used for testing, development and training purposes, there are two different approaches: Users can reinstall an SAP system and import all transports and support packages that have also made it into the production system to date. However, when their number reaches the hundreds and thousands, the effort becomes disproportionately high. In addition, the data still has to be imported from the production system, for example via a client copy.
Types of SAP system copy
Database: For some databases (MS SQL Server) there is the possibility to copy the database files and reattach them on the target system. For the following SAP installation you only have to specify that no SAP loads should be used, but that the database is already there!
There are various ways to tame this time robber and reduce run times. For example, through parallelization or the automatic generation of secondary indices.
Powerful and sophisticated automation tools for the creation of SAP system copies provide a remedy here and, in addition to time and cost savings, demonstrably also make it possible, for example, to increase the process quality in system copying or to maintain it at a consistently high level. In effect, they free up SAP Basis. With "Shortcut for SAP Systems", you can sustainably relieve your administrators of the time-consuming routine activities of an SAP system copy.
Nevertheless, the special system architecture and the peculiarities of the DB2 database integrated in the operating system, as well as the specific applications, also pose challenges for system tool developers.
In many places, this was supplemented by scripts created in-house, which, however, only automated partial tasks/processes of an SAP system copy.