I would start with this article from our knowledgebase: http://knowledgebase.serena.com/InfoCenter/index?page=content&id=S132704&actp=search&viewlocale=en_US&searchid=1617301496647

I know the article was written for Dimensions 10.x, however, this has not changed much. 

If that doesn't solve it, can you tell us how the base database and the pcms_sys database were copied/cloned into the Oracle instance you are using with this latest upgrade attempt?  I don't really think this is the difference in Operating System for Dimensions -- most likely the database was not copied or setup the same way.

Thanks.

I'm ultimately going from Dim v10/Oracle v10g > Dim2009r2/Oracle 11g > Dim14.5.2/Oracle 12c. When I originally imported everything, it was successful for pcms_sys.

On the first step, runnning pcms_sys/pcms_sys@Oracle12c gives me ERROR: ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied. 

To remove and readd, should I do this in sqlplus?

drop user pcms_sys cascade;
create user pcms_sys identified by pcms_sys default tablespace PCMS_data temporary tablespace PCMS_temp;
grant dba,connect,resource to pcms_sys;

Then this?

imp file=dim11export.dmp fromuser=pcms_sys log=dim12import.log
dmdba system/[password]@Oracle12c
upgrade pcms_sys /force
then run VRS

When you perform the import, the pcms_sys user will now have the pasword from the source database, the database where you performed the export.  This is probably why you get the authentication error logging in.

If you are missing grants, it may be the export or import statement is not including them, it may be that your new basedb (schema) has a new name that is different from the source.  This is why you may need to grant the access to the pcms_sys tables/views.  I don't do much import/export with Dimensions these days, but I usually omitted the grants from my exports -- it just took too much time with the Oracle utilities to process grants and I could replace them so much faster with the statements in the Knowledgebase article referenced earlier.

I'm not certain I understand what the problem or question is here.  There are many ways to copy data, not certain we have a recommended method.

Uh, I figured out the issue.

The process was right, but I used a dmp file I was testing with which only had one thing in it and it didn't include pcms_sys. ‍

I got an export with ALL the data and now I'm back in business lol.

Thanks for helping.