Hello and welcome to the SAP HANA Academy.
The topic of this video tutorial series is SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 02 - What’s New
and in this video we will discuss Installation and Update.
Hi, I am Denys van Kempen.
We have seen quite a bit of innovation concerning Platform Lifecycle Management
in the later support package stacks of HANA 1.0
but for HANA 2.0 there have mainly been some smaller enhancements.
For this minor SPS 02 release - there were about 7 weeks for development - this concerns
updating AFL components and support for XSA, the extended services advanced model built-in
application server, in high availability scenarios with reverse proxies.
Not mentioned in the release notes but we might as well mention it here, is the warning
we now get when we run ourselves one of the lower level tools that the platform lifecycle
management tool, hdblcm, uses.
Let me show what I mean by starting up hdblcm, the SAP HANA Lifecycle Management tool, in
graphical mode: hdblcmgui, and if we skip the first screen, then we see we can make
two selections: update existing system or install new system.
If we launch the resident version of lifecycle management, you can see that we have even
more options: add host role, configure system landscape directory registration,
rename the system, and so on.
Now, what happens when we make our selection and enter the required parameters is that
hdblcm will run for us in the background another tool.
To install, for example, hdbinst is used - a command line tool.
But what’s important to know, is that the platform lifecycle management tool (hdblcm)
it does a lot more than just run the installer tool.
So, it is not a good idea to run the these underlying tools directly.
They are not documented and it is not supported.
Now for some reason, unfortunately, there are still some folks out there -
not you, of course, I know -
but they keep on using these tools and
this causes some trouble at some times.
You might say it is a bit of revenue of for our support organization,
but in the end it is waste of time for everybody.
So, what we now have done now is explicitly print out a warning that
direct usage of these underlying tools is not supported.
You can find this all documented in the SAP HANA Server Installation and Update Guide,
section General Troubleshooting for the SAP HANA Platform LCM Tools.
Next topic: Updating AFL components.
AFL, application function library, stores application functions, which are a bit like
database functions and procedures but they are written in C++, not SQL or SQLScript,
and they are stored outside of the database.
Here we have an example, the SAP HANA business function library, BFL, which is an AFL specific
to financial functions.
Obviously, SQL is not the best language out there to model finance.
With these functions you can execute highly complex code and get great performance.
However, as you are executing C++ code directly at the HANA kernel level, this needs to be
sandboxed somehow because we don't want an error in the function code to crash the HANA server.
These sandboxes are called wrappers and this is what we would be installing.
Here we have SAP note 2198403 with all the currently available AFLs listed and let’s
take a look at the lifecycle management tool again.
Note that when you install an AFL, as marked by the asterisk, the database needs to be
restarted, so there will be a bit of downtime.
Now, what's new for SPS 02 is that for AFL online upgrades are now available.
Before you all start cheering, this does not mean that all the currently available AFLs
we just saw in the note support this feature.
Nope, they do not.
But it does mean that in the near future, more and more AFLs can be installed without
any database downtime.
I understood the first one to support this flag will be released after the summer.
Keep an eye on the mentioned AFL Note, if you are interested.
Then, also a bit of an advanced topic, we have the installation of the XS advanced runtime
in high availability scenarios.
Here we an illustration from the SAP HANA server installation and update guide, system
concepts for XS Advanced runtime installations, showing a multi-host system with a standby
host, xs_standby, that will take over or failover in case of issues with the worker hosts.
To make this work, you need to configure XSA to use a failover router, which is documented
here in this section: Establishing Trust with a Reverse Proxy.
I won’t go through the specifics - we would be here for a while; we might do a video on
the topic some day - but the important part is that the failover router is not part of a HANA system.
It could be software, it could be hardware, but is managed by you, the HANA customer, not SAP,
and you would have to setup some certificate trust between the HANA XSA hosts and the router.
There are a couple of ways how you can do this, but to make it easier, three new parameters
have been added for hdblcm: xs_cert_pem, xs_cert_key, xs_trust_pem
So, you can now specify the paths to the certificate file for the default domain and its key and
the path to specify the trust certificate for the reverse proxy.
Before, you had to use this workaround to temporarily map the default domain to the
XSA web dispatcher.
This also still works, of course, but may not be possible or desirable in some situations.
So, now you know.
New features for SPS 02: high availability support for XS Advanced installation, and
updating AFL components without downtime (coming up, that is).
That’s it for the Installation and Update.
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