SAP Solution Manager 4.0 SR1 Installation on Linux

This description of the SAP Solution Manager is taken form the SAP Solution Manager documentation page on the SAP Service Marketplace.

Managing your entire SAP solution landscape is a challenging task, but SAP has the answer: the SAP Solution Manager.

• The SAP Solution Manager is a platform that provides the integrated content, tools, and methodologies that you need to implement, support, operate and monitor your enterprise’s solutions from SAP.
• With SAP Solution Manager, companies can minimize risk and increase the reliability of their IT solutions.
• SAP Solution Manager helps reduce TCO throughout the solution life cycle.
• SAP Solution Manager helps companies manage their core business processes and link business processes to the underlying IT infrastructure.
• SAP Solution Manager supports both SAP and non-SAP software and helps companies get more from their existing IT investments.

As of April 2nd 2007, direct downloads via the SAP Service Marketplace will not work any longer. They will be available via SAP Solution Manager‘s Maintenance Optimizer instead. More details can be found here: https://websmp104.sap-ag.de/solman-mopz

Getting started

Now that we heard what the Solution Manager can do, I gonna install a Solution Manager 4.0 SR1 with MaxDB on one of my x86_64 Linux boxes. The box is an IBM slim server with two 2Ghz AMD Opteron CPU’s and 2GB of main memory. There are two SCSI hard drives installed, each having 73GB, configured as RAID1 ensuring fall back if one drive fails. The 73GB space are partitioned to 2GB for SWAP, 100MB for /boot, 16GB for / and 50GB for the database.

The most important piece of software for the installation is the Java SDK which is used. On normal 32-bit (i386) and Itanium2 (ia64) platforms the Sun 1.4.2 JDK is needed, on x86_64 (namely AMD64 or EM64T) the IBM JDK 1.4.2 is needed! The Java which I used is:

# java -fullversion
java full version “J2RE 1.4.2 IBM build j9xa64142-20060824 (SR6)”
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The Sun SDK can be downloaded here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html

The IBM JDK can be downloaded here: https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?source=javasap

But now, that’s it! That was easy, I did not expect the installation goes through that smooth (except the memory shortage). Oh, I forgot to mention, that this whole installation was performed inside a Xen virtual machine. I was quite impressed that it worked no almost no problems 🙂