Running SAP in the Cloud
Intro
There are many ways to implement "SAP in the cloud". I've explained this in more detail on my TechEd 2017 page. For reference:
SAP's own cloud is a hybrid of IaaS and PaaS offerings as they aim to differentiate themselves from the traditional cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
SAP Cloud Platform
Previously called the HANA Cloud Platform, even SAP finally decided that they don't need to put the word HANA in everything. SAP offers a trial account giving access to developer tools to create Java and HTML5 apps, tools for creating HANA databases and the ability to trial various SaaS offerings. They also have a section for SAP ASE (Sybase) but oddly the only option is to create a MaxDB database. I didn't know anyone was still considering this for new installations. It's not a patch on SAP ASE in my opinion. Like most things SAP, the branding and the fact you're thrown from one website to another, often requiring re-authentication, makes the process of installing and activating cloud services more confusing than it needs to be. Having said that, I found it relatively straight forward to create a prototype HANA database which I was then able to easily connect to using a local SAP HANA Studio installation.Azure
Azure is Microsoft's cloud offering. This is the first IaaS provider I tried, mainly as they give a $200 credit, valid for a month, to experiment with. This is plenty for creating a few virtual machines, even quite powerful ones assuming you don't leave them allocated 24x7. I first used their pre-built image to install a HANA Express Edition VM, which installed without issue. Feeling more confident, I then manually created a few VM's (which had to be scattered around the world due to the Free Trial's limitations of a maximum of 4 virtual CPUs per datacentre).On one I manually installed SAP AS ABAP 7.51 running on openSUSE and SAP ASE (Sybase). To be fair, my first attempt using SUSE Enterprise Server didn't go so smoothly, although this was an issue with the SAP software (the kernel version I installed refused to talk to the UUIDD daemon on Linux). On a second Linux VM I installed a demo version of SAP LaMa (Landscape MAnager 3.0) which I provisioned using SAP CAL, the SAP Cloud Appliance Library. Finally, on a third VM I installed Windows Server 2016 in order to run SAPGUI Windows 7.50, SAPGUII Java 7.40, Eclipse Neon and SAP HANA Studio. All went smoothly.
I'm a big fan of the Azure Portal and am tempted to keep some of these VMs once my free trial expires in a month's time. Although this was the first cloud offering I used in depth, just a quick glance at Google's portal helps Azure look good. Their new B-series VMs (B for Burst) are excellent value for money for those who don't need their VM to run with 100% CPU all the time.
... more to come!