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).

Operations

Tagging Amazon Resources

A tag is a label that you assign to an Amazon resource. Each tag consists of a key and an optional value, both of which you define. Adding tags to the various Amazon resources will not only make managing your SAP environment much easier but can also be used to quickly search for resources. Many Amazon EC2 API calls can be used in conjunction with a special tag filter. See Amazon Tagging Strategies and use it as a starting point to define the tags you need for your resources. Below are the examples on how you can use tags for operational needs:

Monitoring

Amazon provides multiple native services to monitor and manage your SAP environment. You can use services like Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudTrail to monitor your underlying infrastructure and APIs, respectively. CloudWatch provides ready-to-use KPIs for CPU and disk utilization, and also allows you to create custom metrics if your specific KPIs that you would like to monitor. CloudTrail allows you to log the API calls made to your Amazon infrastructure components.

Operating System Maintenance

In general, operating system maintenance across large estates of EC2 instances can be managed by:

Here we outline some key operating system maintenance tasks.

Patching

You can follow SAP recommended patching processes to update your landscape on Amazon. For operating system patching, with Amazon Systems Manager Patch Manager you can roll out OS patches as per your corporate policies. There are multiple key features like:

Amazon Systems Manager Patch Manager integrates with Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon CloudTrail, and Amazon CloudWatch Events to provide a secure patching experience that includes event notifications and the ability to audit usage. For details about the process, see How Patch Manager Operations Work. If Amazon Systems Manager Patch Manager does not fulfill your requirements, there are third-party products available as well. Some of these are available via the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

Maintenance Window

Amazon Systems Manager Maintenance Windows let you define a schedule for when to perform potentially disruptive actions on your instances such as patching an operating system, updating drivers, or installing software or patches.

Administrator Access

You can access the backend SAP systems for administration purposes in a number of ways:

Backup and Restore

Snapshots and AMIs

A common approach for backing up your SAP NetWeaver application servers is using snapshots and AMIs.

All your data is stored on Amazon EBS volumes attached to the SAP NetWeaver application servers. You can back up the data on these volumes to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups of Amazon EBS volumes, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your most recent snapshot are saved. For more details on this, see Creating an Amazon EBS Snapshot.

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information required to launch an instance along with a block device mapping of all EBS volumes attached to it.

Amazon EC2 powers down the instance before creating the AMI to ensure that everything on the instance is stopped and in a consistent state during the creation process. If you're confident that your instance is in a consistent state appropriate for AMI creation, you can select the No Reboot option. You can use the Amazon Systems Manager Run Command to take application-consistent snapshots of all EBS volumes attached to your instance using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to make it safe to create the image without rebooting the instance.

You can use Amazon Backup to centrally configure backup policies and monitor backup activity for these snapshots.

Once you have completed the SAP installation and post installation steps, you should create an image of the instance. Amazon provides a very simple and quick way to copy an SAP system. You can use the Amazon Web Services Management Console or the Amazon CLI to create a new AMI of an existing SAP system. The new AMI contains a complete copy of the operating system and its configuration, software configurations, and all EBS volumes that are attached to the instance. From the new AMI you can launch exact copies of the original system. For more information, see Creating an Amazon EBS Backed Windows AMI.

Syntax:

aws ec2 create-image --instance-id i-1234567890abcdef0 --name "My server" --description "An AMI for my server" 

File Backup to S3

You can perform traditional file-based backups to Amazon S3 from your EBS volumes. One way to do this is by using the Amazon CLI and trigger this using Amazon Systems Manager Run Command so that you can centrally manage these.

Third-Party Options

There are many third-party backup products for Amazon services, including a number that have been certified by SAP. For more information, see Amazon SAP Partner Solutions.

Amazon FSx Backup

With Amazon FSx, backups are file-system-consistent, highly durable, and incremental. To ensure file system consistency, Amazon FSx uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) in Microsoft Windows. To ensure high durability, Amazon FSx stores backups in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon FSx backups are incremental, which means that only the changes after your most recent backup are saved.

Amazon FSx automatically takes backups of your file systems once a day. These daily backups are taken during the daily backup window that was established when you created the file system.

If you want to set up a custom backup schedule, you can deploy our reference solution.

Backing up SAP BOBI Platform

Backup of SAP BOBI should protect the following components. The backup of CMS database and FileStore should be taken at the same time to maintain consistency.

You can choose from following options for backup.

Recovering the SAP BOBI Platform

The backups that you choose for the restore of CMS database and FileStore should have been created at the same time to maintain consistency. You can recover a database to a point-in-time using log files, but Amazon EFS (used for FileStore) does not have similar capabilities. In this case, recovering a database to most recent state but FileStore to an older state may cause inconsistencies between the two.

Based on the backup strategy, the following are options for restore.

Compute

EBS volumes are exposed as NVMe block devices on Nitro-based instances. When changing EC2 instance types from a previous generation to a Nitro generation, if using a Windows Server 2008 R2 or later Windows AMI, the Amazon NVMe driver is already included as per the Amazon EBS and NVMe documentation. If you are not using the latest Amazon Windows AMIs provided by Amazon, see Installing or Upgrading Amazon NVMe Drivers.

Aside from operating system maintenance, there is also maintenance you can consider for EC2 instances themselves. This can be driven via Amazon Systems Manager Automation documents. Some examples of this are:

Finally, use the Amazon Instance Scheduler Solution to easily configure custom start and stop schedules for their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances.

Cost Optimization

Just as with right sizing, we recommend customers make cost optimization an ongoing process. This is an extensive topic with many Amazon services that help with budgeting, cost control and proactive cost optimization recommendations.

For more details, see the Cost Optimization Pillar of the Amazon Well-Architected Framework and the SAP on Amazon Pricing and Optimization Guide.

Automation

Automation using Infrastructure as Code with Amazon CloudFormation

We recommend following the principle of Infrastructure as code (IaC) in automating and maintaining your workloads on Amazon. Amazon CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment in a repeatable and automated manner, and thus follow the principle of IaC.

Automation using Documents

Amazon Systems Manager Automation simplifies common maintenance and deployment tasks of Amazon EC2 instances and other Amazon resources. Automation enables you to do the following:

There are many Amazon-provided documents specific to Windows already available.

Integration with Amazon Big Data Services

The SAP BOBI Platform product can use multiple Amazon Big Data services as data sources for reporting purposes. When using SAP BOBI version 4.2, you can connect to the following Amazon data sources:

See the SAP Product Availability Matrix (PAM) for the complete list of SAP BOBI Platform supported data sources specific to your version.