Hello and welcome to the SAP HANA Academy.
The topic of this video tutorial series is SAP HANA Express and in this video we will
take a look at the express solution in the SAP Cloud Appliance Library.
This video has been recorded in November 2018 on SAP HANA, express edition 2.0 SPS 03.
For earlier or later releases, please check the playlist on the SAP HANA Academy.
Hi, I am Denys van Kempen.
With the SAP Cloud Appliance Library you can quickly deploy and use the latest SAP Solutions
in the cloud.
The URL, the address, is cal.sap.com.
Get Started will show the current solutions available in the Appliance Library, at the
time of the recording we have got 99 solutions.
Some are big, some are small.
Solutions are preconfigured SAP software environments with all the components installed and all
the initial configuration done.
Ready for use.
Some can be quite complex indeed with multiple systems and components involved.
Here we have the latest S/4HANA release, we have Data Hub, a trial edition.
Some of these solutions require considerable expertise to set up, so this is a massive
time saver.
The SAP HANA, express edition is lightweight compared to this and there are a couple of
ways how you run this free developer or trial edition.
You could run it as a virtual machine, a VM, on your own computer.
You can run it in Docker, if you are familiar with that, or you can perform your own installation.
No problem.
There are templates in the cloud provider marketplaces, as well, so you can use the
Google Cloud Platform Deployment Manager, for example, to start up an instance of SAP
HANA, express edition and there are video tutorials in the Academy in the Express playlist
that cover all of these options.
Now, in my view, one of the easiest and fastest way to get started with express is by using
the solution template here in the Cloud Appliance Library.
It is available in Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, whatever
you prefer, multi-cloud, let’s dive straight in and create an instance.
For this, you will need an account, so you might be prompted to log on first.
If you do not have an account yet, go ahead and create one and if you get stuck, there
is a video tutorial about this topic in the Academy.
I will add the link to the video in the description below.
If you have your certificates set up for single sign-on, you will be connected automatically.
OK - In Basic Mode, all we need to do is select the cloud provider account.
If you do not have a cloud provider account, go ahead and create one and, again, if you
get stuck, there is a video about this as well (link in the description).
The very first time you create an instance of the SAP HANA, express edition you will
be prompted to Accept the Terms and Conditions, SAP Developer Center, Master Software Developer
license agreement.
To avoid any surprises later on, you’d be advised to read it and, if you want, provide
your feedback.
OK —Instance Details.
The name is just for use here in CAL.
It is for your own use, it is more of a description.
The region will depend on the cloud provider, so for AWS, currently, we have us-east-1,
eu-central-1 (that’s in Frankfurt, Germany) and South East Asia-1.
If you have worked with Amazon, you will be familiar with these regions and this is where
the actual HANA instance will run.
Typically, you would select a region close to where you work and live, to reduce any
latency.
The password should be 8 to 9 characters long, at least 1 uppercase, lowercase, number.
You can use dollars and pounds as special characters but not euros or yens, go figure,
but special characters are not required.
We get a cost forecast here.
The express edition solution is free: developer license.
However, the cloud provider will charge you for hosting the instance, and this is what
we see here.
It is a forecast, like the weather, actual costs could be different, hence the disclaimer.
We have some fixed costs when suspended (for the storage, the network) and an hourly rate
when Active.
What we see here is the default setting, we are in basic mode, and by default the instance
will be suspended after 8 hours.
You can shop around.
Here we have the cost forecast for Azure.
Charges differ per vendor, they differ per instance type, we will look at that in a minute,
and might differ per region.
And here we have GCP.
Google Cloud has by far the most regions, and within regions, GCP works with zones,
so you get to select them here as well.
At this stage you could click Create and an instance of SAP HANA, express edition will
then be created which means that the virtual machine will be created, the storage, the
network, the firewall rules, etc. — this can be a fair bit of work on the cloud provider
side, but all you have to do is to come up with a name and a password.
Very easy, plus, and I will also show you this in a minute, how to create all these
objects is quit different if we compare AWS with Azure and GCP.
But here, you do not need to be a pro in Amazon, Azure, or Google Cloud administration, all
you need to know is how to set things up in CAL.
Now, to show you what else can be configured, I will switch to advanced mode now.
This will be in wizard format, step-by-step but no worries, our selections are preserved.
Step 1: select the cloud provider account.
Step 2: Name, region, network.
We have a bit more control here over networking and subnetting
You might have, for example, already created a separate network for this instance, shielded
from the internet, and you can then select that here.
I do want to point out the option to allocate a Public Static IP Address.
If you select this, you will get the same IP address each time you start the instance.
As you can see, the cloud provider may impose, well in most cases, will impose a charge for
a reserved IP address.
It is small change, typically, but obviously, if you have a whole collection of reserved
IP addresses, over time, this will start to add up.
In the next video, when we talk about connecting to the different XS Advanced web applications,
we will see why having a fixed, static, or reserved IP address is actually quite convenient.
OK — Step 3 Virtual Machines.
Allows you to size the virtual machine, the storage and define the access points (configure
the firewall).
For AWS, we have two SAP certified configurations: r4.2xlarge for those familiar with Amazon
machine types (8 cores, 61 GB memory) one with regular hard disk drives (HDD) and one
with solid state drives (SSD) similar to USB or your iPhone).
SAP HANA is an in-memory database and does not rely all that much on disk performance,
so this is not hugely important.
System startup will be a bit faster, making backups, loading tables into memory, stuff
like that, anything involving disk I/O but you will be charged a bit more for this although
cost is coming down.
This is what Azure offers, we have E8 and D13 machine types, at the time of recording,
SAP Tested, not certified, SSD and regular hard disks, 8 cores and 64 or 56 GB memory.
For GCP, we have n1-highmem-8, 8 cores, 52 GB, HDD, SSD, SAP Certified.
So, to run express in the cloud comfortably we can say that we need 8 cores and 50-60
GB of RAM.
Back to AWS.
Expandable Storage.
10 GB for the operating system, 45 for HANA and 93 for the database.
This is the same on GCP and similar on Azure.
We also have our access points here.
A firewall will be created, called Security Group on AWS and Azure.
For example, port 22 for secure shell (SSH) so we can connect with a terminal to the HANA
system and maybe start and stop HANA that way.
IP range is all zeros, which means from anywhere.
Now you might not feel that comfortable with the thought that anyone could potentially
try to connect, try to guess the very complex password you just provided, right?
So, you can restrict that here.
Maybe enter just the IP of your computer, if you have a fixed IP address, or otherwise
the network range of your office.
Then we have the SAP Web Dispatcher, the SAP Host Agent that is, on 4390 and 8090, that’s
for HTTPS (43) and regular HTTP (80), the 90 comes from the instance number of HANA
Express, which for our CAL systems is always 90, it is the default as well.
With the SAP host agent we can remotely stop and start the SAP HANA instance and also access
the Platform Lifecycle Management tool to update the system, for example.
Then we have the SQL port of the first tenant, the SQL port of the system database, some
additional ports, the ports for the XS Advanced application server and web applications, for
the Data Provisioning Agent, and a some more.
Step 4 is the Solution Password.
Make sure to memorise or note it down.
It is the master password, for most of the active accounts, for the SYSTEM database user,
for the XSA Administration account, and so on.
Step 5 allows you to schedule instance startup and shutdown.
By default, as mentioned, the instance will be shutdown after 8 hours, so it is up to
you to start it up again.
If we switch to Manually Activate and Suspend, we get a forecast for monthly charges in case
you keep it up and running.
Review and then Create.
Access points and steps 4 and 5 are exactly the same for the other cloud providers.
We are then prompted to store the private key in the Cloud Appliance Library for later
use and or to download and save the key.
Do not forget to do this otherwise you will not be able to connect to the virtual machine.
The key allows you to connect without a password so you might want to protect the key with
a password but this is not required.
Then we are prompted to wait for 90 minutes until the whole solution is up and running.
Today, for me, things went much faster but bear in mind this whole operation will take
some time.
Once the instances are active, you can start to connect.
We will look into this in the next video.
From the Operations menu here, you can suspend (stop), reboot, or terminate (delete, trash)
the instance.
Back-up and restore, or create a new solution from it in case you have done any customisation.
Note that the system comes with a temporary license.
You will need to install a valid minisap license.
There is a video tutorial on this topic as well.
Solution info has a link to the Getting Started Guide.
Take a look at that.
You will find some interesting information.
Virtual Machines shows us the machine type and status, and access points, again, which
you can change.
OS process monitoring, schedule and backups, of the instance, the virtual machine, that
is, not of the SAP HANA database.
You can edit the configuration, maybe enable Termination Protection, so you cannot easily
delete the instance, or change the access points.
OK — quick look at the AWS Management Console.
This is how it looks at the cloud provider side, should you have chosen for Amazon.
We have a VM, a virtual machine instance.
You can start and stop it from here as well, or connect.
We have the disk volumes, the storage.
The fixed, reserved IP address, elastic IP in AWS terminology, and the Security Group,
the firewall rules, which you can also enable and configure here.
It is the same thing.
In the Azure Portal, on the Dashboard, pretty much the same view.
Couple of disks, a network interface, a security group, public IP and virtual machine.
You can configure your rules here.
Inbound, outbound, priority, a bit more flexibility.
And Finally, Google Cloud.
Here we have our VM, the network interface, network and subnet, external IP, and the firewall
rules.
Very good.
In the next video, we will show you how you can connect to the instance using a terminal
client on Linux, macOS and Windows.
How to connect to the web applications, perform some additional configuration.
For those already familiar with this, I can highly recommend the Developer Center on sap.com
for SAP HANA, express edition.
There is new tutorial navigator with excellent tutorials about how to get started with XS
Advanced, with Analytics, Machine Learning, all great stuff.
Highly recommended.
OK — so much for SAP HANA, express edition in the SAP Cloud Appliance Library.
Thanks for watching.
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