Our SAP servers, running Oracle DB, are still on Windows 2003 Enterprise.
We are planning a migration to Windows 2008 R2 (or possibly Windows 2012).
For our ABAP only systems (non-Java systems) why do we need to do an OS/DB migration to move our database to upgrade our Windows 2003 Enterprise platform.
Why can't we just install Oracle on new servers, do a homogenous system copy (so move our datafiles for the database) to the new server and start up our new database? Why do we have to do an export and import of our Oracle database? If the underlying file system was changing I could understand (and for our Java based systems I understand we would have to export the Java components) but I don't understand when the filesystem is not changing?
I have never been able to find an explanation for this so if someone can please enlighten me I would really appreciate it!
Thank you!