On April 25th, 2017, I attended our local Northern California ASUG Chapter quarterly meeting hosted by our friends at Varian Medical Systems, and the hot topic was S/4HANA, which is also a hot topic for many other chapter meetings around the US, as well as the upcoming 2017 SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG event. Customers, partners, and SAP discussed business process simplification, performance, or staying on the innovative edge, while some expressed concerns about the complexity or enormity of the change. It was good to have SAP's Best Practices group (formerly known as the Simplification group) there as they presented a session: SAP S/4HANA 1610 Trial Systems: How to Use and Explore Key Business Processes and Innovations.
We've already taken the journey in the last month to explore S/4HANA on Azure and will write a little here about our experience from a technology walk-through, not a functional discovery. Why on Azure? We've had lots of experience on AWS as both a technology partner and running our production workload there. Recently, IT-Conductor also joined the Microsoft startup ecosystem through the BizSpark program, so it's time for us to explore the platform alongside our partner OZSOFT at Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider. Several customers have also asked us to integrate our SAP monitoring on Azure, so we set out to explore S/4HANA, Azure, and IT-Conductor monitoring, which we expect to be fully functional.
S/4HANA on Azure
The fastest and most economical way to get started with S/4HANA would be on a public cloud platform such as AWS or Azure. Here are some key points:
Tips
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- If you plan to start the entire stack of S/4HANA best practices applications, you'll need to request the Microsoft Azure team to raise the Limit on the number of cores (from default 20 to at least 30 cores). Do this from within the Azure Help + Support section and request the category Subscription Management.
- Create a separate virtual network (vnet) if you want to start instances inside a network with a custom configuration rather than the SAP CAL Default Network. This may allow you to have a VPN connection to your on-premises network.
- Keep watch of your Notifications: to check on your remaining credits (updated daily), it would be nice if they could update more frequently, but this is the same as AWS cost reporting.
SAP Cloud Appliance Library (CAL)
This is where SAP provides the best practices trial systems as images that can be instantiated at a supported public cloud partner. This helps you with pre-configured systems and using some automation to deploy your copies of them in your virtual private cloud. Here's what you'll need:
- Visit https://cal.sap.com and create an account. You can use a personal or corporate account, such as your S-user ID, to log in, find the solution, and activate it. There are free trials and paid subscriptions, so if you use a corporate paid subscription, you must use the authorized ID to log on.
- Associate your CAL account with a public cloud account. Use Wiki instructions to connect the accounts CAL to Azure: https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/ATopics/FAQ+-+Specific+questions+for+Microsoft+Azure#UploadCertificate
- Test connection between CAL and Azure
- Search solution '1610' for the S/4HANA 1610 Fully-Activated Appliance. SAP's cost is FREE, but you'll incur an Azure charge of about $5 USD per hour if you keep the solution running or about the same amount if left suspended.
Tips
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- Once you provide the Azure subscription ID and download the CER certificate, you must use the Azure Classic Console (https://manage.windowsazure.com, which is no longer active), not the new portal, to upload the certificate.
- When you activate a solution, set your local timezone so if you choose to schedule suspend times, they are the right time. Otherwise, you may find your time is in UTC, and your systems may run extra hours and incur costs.
- Use public IP because VPN may not work on the CAL network, and if possible, change the security settings before activating to restrict to only IP (like your on-premise public gateway) so it's not open to the whole public internet
- Although it is optional to include the Windows RDP server in the deployment, it's highly recommended as it already has some front-end tools like SAPGUI and BI Design Studio, and the local host's file has already aliased the various virtual hostnames to your instances' IP addresses
Issues
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- If you did not request Azure to raise the CPU limit, you will encounter an error when activating the solution.
- It seems the solution is only available currently in the Azure West Europe Azure region. Although you are supposed to be able to pick a custom Network and Subnet to deploy, it does not see them from CAL, and thus, only the SAP CAL Default Network was used. Thus, your Azure network may not connect to your on-premise network without setting up a new one.
- During activation, CAL did not prompt the download of the SSH keys to access the VM at the OS level afterward, and there was no way to find and download them afterward on Azure or CAL.
- Despite the documentation, HANA Studio was not pre-installed on the Windows RDP server.
S/4HANA
The core we looked at for this deployment is the 1610 edition with Best Practices. There is supposed to be a revision SP1 coming out for SAPPHIRE in May.
Here is the summary:
- The Walkthrough scenarios are detailed Demo Guide
- The technical stack includes:
- SAP S/4HANA 1610 (based on SAP Netweaver AS ABAP 7.51) (S4H instance 00)
- SAP HANA 1.00.112.04 (HDB instance 02)
- SAP NetWeaver 7.50 AS JAVA with Adobe Document Services (J2E instance 00)
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.2
Tips
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- SAP recommends Chrome browser, but they could not bundle it in the Windows RDP server, so download it onto the RDP and use it instead of IE, which has pesky security features
- If you are accessing the applications directly from your PC, you will need to edit the local host's file (with admin privileges) and set an alias for various hosts used by the configuration.
Issues
- For the trial, the system is relatively slow unless you leave it running continuously, which can be costly. We left it running for a few hours, which was still pretty slow!
- The Finance demo requires a fiscal year change since they are likely still set to 2016, so many Fiori tiles are empty until the change is made.
- The SD demo often encountered errors like "Unable to load the data. This can happen if you are not connected to the Internet or if an underlying system or component is unavailable."
SAP Monitoring of S/4HANA on Azure
We configured the SAP monitoring to see how our cloud-based IT-Conductor can quickly discover and provide SAP performance monitoring of the environment above. Once the systems are activated, it takes less than an hour to discover and monitor the SAP S/4HANA on Azure. There are three options to monitor the cloud environment:
- IT-Conductor Gateway installed on the cloud, in this case, Azure, and specifically on the Windows RDP server (or the Linux servers) - this is a 10-minute task
- IT-Conductor Gateway installed inside your corporate network, similar to 1). This is a good option if you'd like to monitor on-prem systems as well and have Va PN or connect your network to the virtual private cloud (Azure)
- Public network via specific IPs and Ports
We went with option 1. The configuration is easy and documented on our IT-Conductor Knowledge Base. Below, you can see the full stack being monitored within an hour without any application agent deployment. Further monitoring is possible for the SAP ASE and the Linux instances if needed.
Summary
Automated software deployment has come a long way with the cloud and best practices. This allows customers and partners to quickly assess and consume vendor solutions to keep up with innovation. With AWS and Azure, this is a very attractive way to start your S/4HANA journey besides the on-premise installation (also available from the Best Practices team via download or Blu-ray).
You can test drive it for 30 days, and if you like, you can even bring your license and extend its usage for Development, Demo, or even the sandbox for your S/4HANA project.
We recommend continuous monitoring and management to better manage these new platforms. If you don't have tools readily available with S/4HANA, cloud monitoring solutions like IT-Conductor are very easy to subscribe to and use.