Hello and welcome to the SAP HANA Ac ademy.
The topic of this video tutorial series is Getting Started with SAP HANA on the Google Cloud Platform
and in this video we will use the Cloud Launcher
to deploy SAP HANA, express edition to Google Compute Engine.
Hi, I am Denys van Kempen.
In the first three videos of this series, we briefly discussed the basics,
introduced the Google Cloud Platform and explained how to sign up and make use of the $300 credit
and also discussed the concept of a project in the context of GCP (Google Cloud Platform).
With that tackled, we can now create a HANA server in the cloud.
By far, the easiest way to do this is to use the Google Cloud Launcher.
You can use the URL cloud.google.com/launcher
This will return a page with some information.
The fastest way to get started on GCP.
Ready-to-go development stacks, solutions, and services to accelerate development.
So you spend less time installing and more time developing.
Here, we see a couple of the most popular solutions.
It is like a marketplace, the same you can find on AWS, or CAL - SAP’s Cloud Appliance Library.
If you want to know more, check the documentation
and here you can also learn how to create you own deployments.
For now, I will select Explore Launcher and here we see the solution SAP HANA, express edition
in the featured section.
If it is no longer there when you are watching, just enter 'hana' in the search area and it will show up.
Select it.
In the left pane, we can see the version: HANA 2.0 SP01 it says.
Now that’s an error.
No such thing.
Should be SPS 01.
Support Package Stack.
There are SP’s, support packages, for the options, like dynamic tiering or HANA cockpit,
but the HANA platform is released in Support Package Stacks (SPS).
We can also see when the solution was last updated.
It runs on Google Compute Engine and it is single VM - virtual machine.
There are many products and services on GCP, Compute Engine is one of them.
This is what typically would be labelled in cloud compute terminology as IaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
Virtual machines hosted by a cloud provider.
The operating system is SUSE Linux Enterprise 12.
Now, don’t we need a license for that?
Yes, we see the estimated costs here.
Eighty bucks for the VM, some small change for disk, and again 80 bucks for Linux.
Estimated costs are based on 30-day, 24 hours per day usage.
So, we get HANA for free but still we will have to pay SUSE and Google.
Now, of course - we have our $300 credit; so even if you are a big spender and let HANA
express run 24 by 7, you would still have to wait two months before your credit is gone.
Typically, when you are studying HANA you would only run it for a couple of hours a day, of course,
and you will have enough credit for a whole year of studying.
Just spend it wisely.
OK.
The point is that with a solution for cloud launcher, all costs are bundled.
Here is a bit of an overview of HANA express, should you need it, and below are links to
tutorials and documentation, we will cover some of this as we go along.
Let’s select Launch on Compute Engine.
Note the project in the toolbar.
If you have created multiple projects,
we have looked at this in the previous video,
you may want to check that the correct one is selected.
Then when the launcher is initialized
on the deploy page, you can change the name.
In the documentation, you can read about the restrictions.
Needs to comply with RFC1035, for domain name naming.
You can look it up here.
And then you can change the zone.
Typically, when you are in development or learning mode, you would select a zone close to you
to minimise latency.
In production, you would choose a zone close your customers, although in that case,
you would probably run the server in multiple zones.
Machine type: 2 virtual processors, vCPUs, and 13 gigabytes of RAM.
This you can change, of course.
Here we can see the different machine types.
n1-high-mem-2 is selected here.
Note that for the trial, we are limited to 8 CPUs.
You can find this documented in the Google Cloud Platform Free Tier section.
and if you feel a bit restricted
you can also customize the settings here
and this will allow for some fine tuning.
For now, let’s stick with the default.
13 GB of RAM is minimum; remember that you can also run HANA express on a VM on a laptop.
With 16 gigs of RAM and some allocated to the operating system, you will have about the same.
Once, we start to add tenant databases to our system, to enable features, or start to
load a bit of data, we probably need to add some more memory to our VM but this we can
do while we are up and running:
such are the joys of elastic computing.
Just move the slider up or down.
and of course that will be a bit tougher to do on a laptop.
You will need more memory also when you want to enable HANA XSA, the XS Advanced model
built-in application server.
For this, I’d recommend the 4 vCPU 26 GB memory machine type to get started.
We will look into this in a future video.
Then we have our boot disk.
Hoover over the question mark and we get some info.
Standard persistent is cheaper, SSD is faster.
SSD stands for solid state disk, a flash drive, like USB or on the latest laptops.
If you can’t hear it, it’s SSD.
If we switch, you can see that the hourly rate goes up with 5 cents.
It is probably worth it.
Of course, as an in-memory database, HANA does not depend on I/O that much for its operations
unlike a traditional disk-based database.
However, when we are developing or learning, you probably do not leave the database up
and running 24x7, but you will be starting and stopping the database often.
When starting up, HANA will need to load the data from disk, and this will be a bit faster when using SSD.
So, I would recommend to use SSD
but if you are not in a hurry and prefer to save a few cents, standard is fine here as well.
It is the default, so we can assume it is not for nothing.
Disk size 36 GB
Again, hover over and we can see that performance is tied to the size of the disk.
Now, why is that?
It has to do with RAID, R-A-I-D, striping and mirroring of disks - if you not familiar,
you might want to look it up on Wikipedia, it is a bit off-topic for here but on GCP,
the larger the disk size, the more virtual disks your data will be stored upon, so the faster
it will be to read and write.
It is a feature.
For more information, you might want to check the documentation on storage options.
So, how much do we need?
Well, 36 gigs will certainly be enough for HANA, the executables, scripts, tools, etc.
But obviously, a 50 GB database will not fit on a 36 GB disk, so only you know how big
this disk needs to be.
Depends on your data.
Some would argue that it would be best to store the database on a separate disk,
apart from the operating system, on a separate device.
Easier t o move around, to clone databases, and there is some truth in this.
If you have performed any HANA server installation in the past, you know that to install HANA
we need two locations, one is for local files in /usr/sap
and the other for shared files in /hana/shared.
The locations, the mount points in UNIX vocabulary, /hana/shared and /usr/sap are just default names,
they could be any name you want, but the point here is that any HANA installation assumes
a distributed system, which is SAP terminology for a cluster, so multiple servers, multiple
hosts running a single database.
Performs better and provides high availability.
/hana/shared is the location we care about; the database data and log file but also the installation files.
/usr/sap is the lo cation where local data resides, links to the executables, log and
trace files, and so ; no one will loose sleep if any of that gets lost.
So, once you start getting serious with your HANA system; consider to add a second disk,
SSD, for the HANA database; /hana/shared and use boot this for the local files /usr/sap
For now, let’s stick with 36 GB drive.
For Networking, no need to change the name and subnet
but you might want to take a look at the ports that are opened for us.
22 for SSH, Secure shell; that’s for the command line, PuTTY on Windows, Terminal Mac.
If you take a good look at the rest of the ports we see a 90, nine zero, in each of one.
That’s not coincidence.
HANA uses the instance number to customise a number of standard ports.
So, if we start below, we have 80 90 and 43 90 for the HTTP and HTTPS traffic, the built-in
application server, HANA XS classic model.
So the default HTTP and HTTPS ports with 90 appended.
Then we have 5 90 13 and 14, this will connect us to the HANA name server process, that’s
the system database.
You will need this for a HANA studio connection, for example.
And finally 3 90 13 and 15 will connect us to the SAP host agent, installed on every
HANA server, which is used to start and stop HANA, for example.
It is the same host agent as found on Netweaver systems, so SAP Basis administrators will
be on familiar turf here.
Well that’s all there is to it.
Note that the only change I have made is the zone and I have set the boot disk to SSD,
which is entirely optional.
To deploy the virtual machine, click Deploy.
The Deployment Manager is launched.
We see Jinja, the template engine, running a python script to create the VM and the firewall rules.
In my case, it took about 3 and a half minute to create the VM.
So I will push the fast-forward button here for you.
sap-hanaexpress-public-1 has been deployed, we can see in the left pane and on the right
side, suggested next steps are provided, with links to the documentation, the same links
we have looked at before.
If you select the back arrow, you get the deployment manager console and if you select
the deployment we get back to the result page.
If you select the GCP menu, Products and Services, and scroll down a bit under tools, we have
our deployment manager, you can pin it if you want, so it will stick to the top, under Home.
This way, we can always get back to the next step suggestions and the provided documentation
for the SAP HANA, express edition solution.
When you click the Deploy Cloud Launcher Solution here on the top, the launcher page displays again.
Which brings us back where we started.
So, let’s wrap up.
If you want to quickly deploy a SAP HANA, express edition virtual machine, take a look
at the GCP Cloud Launcher solution provided by SAP.
You will spend less time installing and more time developing.
In the next video, we will connect to HANA express, look around a bit, and perform the
suggested next steps.
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