3    Installation and Setup

Installing any SAP application can be a daunting task. In this chapter, we’ll try to take some the edge off of the process with a walkthrough of how SAP BW/4HANA is installed, configured, and made ready for general operation.

In this chapter, we’ll walk through the installation and configuration of SAP BW/4HANA. We’ll start by discussing the requirements of SAP BW/4HANA, the Product Availability Matrix (PAM), and the installation media collection and extraction. Then, we’ll dive deeper into how to handle the installation process step by step and the postinstallation configuration activities.

This chapter will be focused on installing SAP BW/4HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. There are several other operating systems supported, which we’ll go into detail about later on, but there are only minimal differences between the OSs for the installation process. For this installation, we’ll be using the following applications: WinSCP, PuTTY, Xming, SAP GUI, and SAP HANA Studio.

3.1    Preparation

Before we begin, we must verify that all the requirements of the landscape have been met and that the installation media is up to date. Then, we’ll walk through preparing the installation media.

3.1.1    Requirements

There are several combinations of operating systems and hardware in which SAP BW/4HANA can be implemented. Be sure to verify the current supported operating systems and databases on the PAM. The requirements for SAP BW/4HANA are as follows:

There are several supported operating systems for SAP BW/4HANA (see Table 3.1).

Windows (*2) AIX HP-UX Solaris Linux SLES 11, 12 RHEL 6, 7 IBM i z/OS
Server 2012 x64 (*3) 7.1 (*4) Power 11.31 IA64 10 (*5), 11 SPARC, x64 x86_64 Power BE (*6) Power LE (*7) System z 7.2, 7.3 Power 1.13, 2.1, 2.2 System z
SAP HANA DB 1.00 AS AS AS AS AS & & AS AS HA (*8)
SAP HANA DB 2.0 (*1) AS AS AS AS AS & AS & AS HA (*8)
  • *1: See SAP note 24020699
  • *2: See SAP note 362379
  • *3: Including Windows Server 2012 R2
  • *4: Minimum AIX 7.1 TL 3
  • *5: Min. Solaris 10 (U11)
  • *6: Linux SLES 11 only
  • *7: No SLES 11, RHEL 6, 7
  • *8: See SAP Note 2177085
  • AS: ABAP Application Server only
  • HA: High Available Solution only
  • &: Available for SAP HANA and AS

Table 3.1    OS Availability for SAP BW/4HANA

Installing SAP BW/4HANA works almost the same way on any supported operating system with the use of Software Provisioning Manager (SWPM), a tool for installation, system copy, duel stack split, and several other operations for SAP’s core application servers. The differences between operating systems in the installation process lie in user permissions, file/directory permissions, and how to launch SWPM.

Note

Installing SAP BW/4HANA on the same system as SAP HANA isn’t supported for production systems.

3.1.2    Installation Media

SAP provides installation media in three different ways:

  1. Physical CDs containing the required media
  2. Download via the maintenance planner
  3. Download directly from SAP Software Download Center

We recommend that all installation media be downloaded from SAP whenever possible from either SAP Solution Manager’s maintenance planner or the download center. This guarantees that the software is up to date and will save time down the road.

There are five required pieces in the installation package:

  1. Software Provisioning Manager (SWPM)
  2. SAP BW/4HANA Media (Export 1, Export 2, etc.)
  3. Kernel
  4. SAP HANA Database Client
  5. SAPCAR, SAP’s unzip utility (required for manual download)

If you’re using SAP-provided CDs, please skip to Section 3.2.

Once you’ve downloaded the required files from SAP, you’ll have to extract the files before they can be used. We’ve found that downloading, extracting, and then transferring the media from a Windows computer is the simplest way. Be sure to keep track of what you’re downloading. The file names will be a series of numbers, so there’s no easy way to identify which file contains what elements. Our recommendation is to create a directory named for what’s being downloaded. Most of the files will be in SAR format and therefore will require SAPCAR for extraction. The process is as follows:

  1. Move SAPCAR to the folder/directory where the SAR files are located.
  2. Open a command prompt and change the directory to the location of the files.
  3. In the command prompt, type “sapcar.exe -xffile.sar” (if you would like to see each file as it unpacks add “v” to visualized what the computer is doing, like “-xvf”).
  4. Run the unzip utility and extract the files.
  5. Repeat the process until all the SAR files are extracted for SWPM, media, the kernel, and the database client.
  6. Once all files have been extracted, move them to the server on which SAP BW/4HANA will be installed. Then, if required, change the file permissions recursively for the installation package to read, write, and execute for the user installing SAP BW/4HANA (see Figure 3.1).
    Installation Package Example

    Figure 3.1    Installation Package Example