Planning and Prerequisites - SAP NetWeaver on Amazon
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Planning and Prerequisites

SAP Landscape Assessment

Before deploying SAP NetWeaver on Amazon, document your existing SAP landscape to inform architecture decisions. This assessment determines landing zone requirements including account and subnet allocation, as well as patterns for infrastructure selection and shared services.

By considering the complete set of requirements, you can optimize resource allocation and plan for deployment automation where applicable. For comprehensive guidance on SAP workload design principles, refer to the SAP Lens of the Amazon Well-Architected Framework.

Review resilience, performance, and connectivity requirements to determine deployment pattern selection (single instance, distributed, or highly available) as well as requirements for web dispatchers and load balancers. Establish non-functional requirements for:

  • Maximum tolerable downtime (RTO - Recovery Time Objective)

  • Maximum acceptable data loss (RPO - Recovery Point Objective)

  • Maintenance window constraints

  • Geographic distribution requirements for disaster recovery

Consider sizing and cost implications for infrastructure selection, including Reserved Instances, operating system selection, and requirements for operational consistency and support.

Shared Resources

Before deploying individual EC2 instances, consider resource dependencies and establish reusable patterns.

Shared resources may include:

  • Amazon accounts

  • Target Amazon Region and Availability Zones

  • VPC ID and subnet configurations

  • Databases (for example, tenant databases hosting multiple NetWeaver stacks)

  • Security groups

  • IAM roles

  • Shared storage (transport directories, EFS file systems)

  • S3 buckets for backups, software distribution, and logging

  • Load balancers

  • Encryption keys and secrets

  • Instance type and Reserved Instance requirements

  • AMI selection (SLES for SAP or RHEL for SAP)

  • Required Amazon service quotas and limits

For each resource type, establish patterns based on organizational boundaries: business unit, environment criticality (production/non-production), specific environments (development, test, sandbox), application type (BW, ECC), host type (ASCS, web dispatcher, application server), SAP System ID (SID), individual hosts, or Amazon service boundaries.

These design standards directly impact naming conventions, shareable resources, tagging strategies, and automation patterns.

Information gathering

As you work through the deployment process, consider how to populate your design and identify patterns for resource sharing. The following information will help you make consistent decisions across your SAP landscape.

Information Description Your Value

Region ID

Region where you want to deploy your Amazon resources

Availability Zone

Availability Zone within your target region where you want to deploy your resources. For High Availability installations, you need two Availability Zones

Amazon VPC ID

Amazon VPC where you want to deploy your Amazon EC2 instance for SAP installation

Subnet ID

Subnet where you want to deploy your Amazon EC2 instance

Key pair

Key pair generated in your target region with access to the private key

Security group ID

Security group that you want to assign to your Amazon EC2 instance

IAM instance profile

IAM instance profile with necessary permissions for SAP operations and Amazon service access

Use this table to document your decisions and establish consistent patterns that can be reused across similar deployments in your SAP landscape.

Prerequisites

Design Scope

This guide provides technical implementation guidance for SAP NetWeaver infrastructure deployment. It is not a replacement for a comprehensive High Level Design (HLD). Work with your SAP Basis experts or Systems Integration partner to complete a full architectural design that addresses your specific business requirements, integration patterns, and operational procedures.

Specialized Knowledge

This guide assumes familiarity with Amazon services including Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, and security groups. SAP NetWeaver architecture knowledge is required, including understanding of ASCS instances, application servers, and database connectivity patterns.

SAP Documentation

SAP Note 1656099 - SAP Applications on Amazon: Supported DB/OS and Amazon EC2 products

SAP Note 1588667 - SAP on Amazon: Overview of related SAP Notes and Web-Links

SAP Note 1588896 - Linux: Support Statement for SLES on Amazon Web Services

SAP Note 1618572 - Linux: Support Statement for RHEL on Amazon Web Services

SAP Note 2369910 - SAP Software on Linux: General information

SAP Note 1827960 - Adjusting operating system limits for SAP instances

Deployment Methods

Amazon Launch Wizard for SAP

Amazon Launch Wizard provides a guided deployment experience for SAP workloads, automatically provisioning and configuring Amazon resources based on SAP best practices. Launch Wizard simplifies the deployment process by:

  • Automatically sizing compute and storage resources based on SAP requirements

  • Configuring networking and security groups according to SAP communication patterns

  • Setting up monitoring and backup solutions

  • Providing cost estimates before deployment

For detailed information about Launch Wizard for SAP, see Amazon Launch Wizard for SAP User Guide.

When designing systems deployed through Launch Wizard, understand the underlying architecture and resource relationships. For comprehensive design considerations, see How Amazon Launch Wizard for SAP works.

Infrastructure as Code

For repeatable deployments and standardization across environments, consider Infrastructure as Code approaches such as Amazon CloudFormation.

Manual Deployment using Amazon Console or Amazon CLI

Install and configure the Amazon CLI with appropriate credentials and target region. Ensure IAM permissions include EC2, EBS, EFS, and Systems Manager access as required for the deployment.