Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Deployment

In this deployment, we will provision an Amazon EC2 instance for installing the SAP application servers and the CMS database (if you are using database on EC2). When using Amazon RDS for CMS database, follow Step 7. (Only for CMS Database on EC2 Instance) Installing CMS Database.

In this deployment, we will provision an Amazon EC2 instance for installing a standalone Oracle database standard system.

Step 1. Prepare Your Amazon Account

In this example we step through setting up a sample environment for the installation which includes a public subnet for RDP and SSH access via the internet. In our scenario, we are using Amazon Launch Wizard for SAP in a single-AZ deployment to create the VPC, subnets, security groups, and IAM roles. This is just an example setup and customers should follow their own network layout and comply with their own security standards. This may include:

In the command output, make sure that the default region that’s listed is the same as the target region where you want to deploy your Amazon resources and install the SAP workload.

Step 2. Create a JSON file for the Amazon EBS storage

Create a JSON file that contains the storage requirements for SAP BOBI Platform server volumes.

Below is an example JSON file with two EBS volumes for swap and SAP BOBI Platform installation directory. You can modify this file as per your requirements:

[
  {
    "DeviceName": "/dev/sdh", 
    "Ebs": {
      "VolumeSize": 32, 
      "VolumeType": "gp32", 
      "DeleteOnTermination": true
    }
   },
  {
    "DeviceName": "/dev/sdg", 
    "Ebs": {
      "VolumeSize": 50, 
      "VolumeType": "gp32", 
      "DeleteOnTermination": true
   }
  }
]

Step 3. Launch the Amazon EC2 Instance

Launch the Amazon EC2 instance for the SAP BOBI Platform installation in your target region by using the information that you gathered in the preparation phase. You will also be creating the required storage volumes and attaching them to the Amazon EC2 instance for the SAP installation, based on the JSON file that you created in the previous step.

$ aws ec2 run-instances \
--image-id AMI-ID \
--count number-of-EC2-instances \
--instance-type instance-type \
--key-name=name-of-key-pair \
--security-group-ids security-group-ID \
--subnet-id subnet-ID \
--block-device-mappings file://C:\Users\<file>.json \
--region region-ID

The JSON file is the storage file that you created in Step 2. Create a JSON file for the Amazon EBS storage.

When using the command, make sure to place the command and its parameters on a single line. For example:

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --count 1 \
--instance-type m5.large --key-name=my_key --security-group-ids \
sg-xxxxxxxx --subnet-id subnet-xxxxxx \
--block-device-mappings file://C:\Users\<file>.json

You can also launch EC2 instances using the Amazon Web Services Management Console. For detailed steps, see Launch Linux EC2 Instances using Amazon Web Services Management Console.

Step 4. Prepare the EC2 Instances

Update the Hostname

Log in to your SAP Instance with Secure Shell (SSH) using the private key pair, and switch to root user to update the hostname along with the DNS name according to your requirements. For detailed steps, see the Amazon Knowledge Center article for your operating system:

Alternatively, you can edit the /etc/hosts file and manually add this entry. For SAP systems, the maximum length of the hostname should not exceed 13 characters. The name should comply with SAP standards. See SAP OSS Note 611361 for details (requires access to SAP Service Marketplace).

Install Prerequisite Packages

Identify Amazon EBS Device from NVMe Block Devices

On Nitro-based instances, the device name specified in the block device mapping (Step #2) are renamed as /dev/nvme[0-26]n. Before you proceed with the next step, ensure that you are using the appropriate device name to create a file system.

Format Block Devices for Mounting SAP File Systems

To view the list of volumes attached to your instance and their device names, run the lsblk command as root user. The command displays the list of devices that are attached to your instance.

# lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme1n1     259:0    0  50G  0 disk
nvme0n1     259:1    0  10G  0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1 259:2    0  10G  0 part /
nvme2n1     259:3    0  50G  0 disk
#

Format the block device for /usr/sap, swap and other file systems that are needed to install SAP. As root user, format the Amazon EBS volumes attached to your instance to store local SAP files. You need to create a label for the file system as well. This label will be used to mount the file system.

 # mkfs.xfs -f /dev/nvme1n1 -L USR_SAP 

Create Directories and Mount the File System

As root user, create the directories to mount the file systems required for SAP installation. Start with the /usr/sap mount, using the syntax mkdir <directory-path>:

# mkdir /usr/sap

As root user, add entries to the /etc/fstab file and mount the file systems. Adding entries to /etc/fstab ensures that your file systems are mounted automatically when your Amazon EC2 instance is restarted.

Add the entries for local SAP file systems to the /etc/fstab file by using the following commands:

# echo "/dev/disk/by-label/USR_SAP /usr/sap xfs nobarrier,noatime,nodiratime,logbsize=256k 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

To mount the file system that has been added to /etc/fstab, use the syntax mount -a:

# mount -a
# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        3.8G  8.0K  3.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs           3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           3.8G  9.5M  3.8G   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p1  9.8G  1.4G  7.9G  15% /
tmpfs           3.8G     0  3.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           769M     0  769M   0% /run/user/1000
/dev/nvme1n1     50G   33M   50G   1% /usr/sap
# 

In the example code above, you can see that /usr/sap is mounted on device /dev/nvme1n1.

Create Swap for SAP Installation

Linux swap functionality can improve the overall performance of the system and is a mandatory prerequisite for SAP installation. To determine the value for swap, follow the recommendations in the SAP Note 1597355.

To allocate swap on device /dev/nvme2n1, use the following commands:

# lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme1n1     259:0    0  50G  0 disk /usr/sap
nvme0n1     259:1    0  10G  0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1 259:2    0  10G  0 part /
nvme2n1     259:3    0  50G  0 disk
#
# mkswap -f /dev/nvme2n1 -L SWAP
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 50 GiB (53687087104 bytes)
LABEL=SWAP, UUID=07291579-afb6-4e5f-8828-4c1441841f9b
# swapon -L SWAP
# swapon -s
Filename         Type       Size      Used   Priority
/dev/nvme2n1     partition  52428796  0      -1            
# 

Device /dev/nvme2n1 is now allocated to be used as swap by the SAP application that will be installed on this host.

Step 5. Create Amazon EFS Mount for FileStore

To create an Amazon EFS file system and mount it on the Amazon EC2 instance, do the following:

Step 6. Prepare and Install the CMS Database (Only for RDS Database)

This option is applicable only when Amazon RDS MySQL is used for the CMS database. You can create a separate database for the auditing database if it’s required.

Step 7. Install CMS Database (Only for CMS Database on EC2 Instance)

Install the CMS database with an SAP supported database version of your choice. Refer to the database vendor specific documentation for instructions. You can also install Audit database if you plan to use auditing. The Auditing database can be installed at a later point in time as it is not required for SAP BOBI Platform functioning.

Step 8. Install SAP BOBI Platform Nodes

Figure 3 is an example input for CMS database information for Linux installation. In this case, RDS MySQL database is used on default port 3306.

Figure 3: Example of adding database connection information when using RDS MySQL

This completes the installation of SAP BOBI Platform.

Step 9. Configure End User Access for Multi-Node Deployment

To distribute the user load evenly across the web tier servers, you can use a load balancer between the web users and the web servers. In this guide, we’ll discuss the use of Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for this purpose. You can also install other load balancers on EC2 instances for end user access, refer to vendor specific documentation for such installation. An Application Load Balancer automatically scales its request handling capacity in response to incoming application traffic. Follow these steps to configure an Application Load Balancer for SAP BOBI Platform: