Installing Trial SAP NetWeaver Gateway 2.0 SP04 with ABAP 7.02 on AWS – Part 1

$0.10 – $0.19 per GB-month of provisioned storage (depending upon selected Region)

+ charges per 1 million I/O requests (unlikely to be an issue for a Trial ABAP)

6.  Select the Instance Type as ‘Large (m1.large, 7.5GB)’.  For the ‘Launch Instances’ section select an Availability Zone (any choice should suffice – but note down which you choose). 

Leave all other options as defaulted. 

** Note that during the installation we will use a large instance to expedite the process, however after the installation we can downgrade to a medium instance, hence keeping ongoing charges low **

Press ‘Continue’.

7.  In the ‘Advanced Instance Options’ window

Select the ‘Termination Protection’ flag.  This prevents you from accidentally terminating (destroying) your instance.  You can still terminate it (when you have finished working with the Trial), but you will be forced to uncheck this flag first.  I learned the hard way that this should always be selected to prevent accidental deletions of instances.

Leave all other options as per their default values.

Press ‘Continue’.

8.  For the tags section, simply add the value ‘SAP ABAP7.02 + Gateway 2.0 SP04’ for the tag ‘Name’.  This simply gives your instance a visible name – you can change this later if you wish.

Press ‘Continue’

9.  At the ‘Create Key Pair’ step, enter any name for your key pair (eg. mykeypair) and press the ‘Create & Download Your Key Pair’ link.  This will download a file which you will need later to connect to your AWS system via your local machine.

Press ‘Continue’

10.  At the ‘Configure Firewall’ step, you can accept the suggested new Security Group name of ‘quick-start-1’, or alternatively change it to whatever name you wish.  What is important is to add the TCP ports 3200 and 8000 by typing them in and pressing the ‘Add Rule’ button in turn.  Opening port 3200 enables communication via a SAPGUI on your local machine, and opening port 8000 enables web communication with the SAP Internet Communication Manager (ICM) to invoke Gateway services from outside your instance.  If you leave the Source as 0.0.0.0/0 it means ANY external IP address can access this system via those ports.

Also ensure that TCP port 3389 is included as you need that open to connect later via Remote Desktop.

Press ‘Continue’

IMPORTANT NOTE: The setup here results in quite an open system which will allow you to later connect devices such as smartphones to your Trial instance.  However, from a security perspective you would presumably apply more stringent controls for a Productive system.

11.  At the ‘Review’ step, press the ‘Launch’ button.

You will see a window with the text ‘Your instances are now launching’. 

Select the option ‘View your instances on the Instances page’

12.  You should see your instance in the Instances page.  Within 30 seconds the instance should appear as ‘Running’.

13.  Next we need to allocate additional disk storage to this instance to accommodate the ABAP system. 

Select the option ‘Volumes’ under ELASTIC BLOCK STORE

14.  Here we create a volume (D drive) for our instance.

First, press the ‘Create Volume’ button at the top of the ‘EBS Volumes’ canvas.  For the window that appears, select the size as 60GB, and the availability zone which you selected in step 6.

Press the ‘Yes, Create’ button.

15.  You will now see two rows in the EBS Volumes area.  One which is 30GB was originally provisioned as part of your new instance – this is effectively the ‘C:’ drive.  The other which is 60GB appears with state ‘available’ – we want this to become the ‘D:’ drive for our instance. 

Right click on the available 60GB volume and select ‘Attach Volume’.

16.  In the popup window ‘Attach Volume’, select the instance you created.  Leave other fields defaulted.

Press the ‘Yes, Attach’ button.

17.  At this stage it may take a few minutes for the new volume to register as attached to the new instance. 

To see that the volume is attached, navigate back to the Instances page, click on the instance you created and you should see two entries (sda1 and xvdf) in the details pane against the field ‘Block Devices’.

NOTE: I have on occasions found that I needed to stop and start my instance to get the new volume to ‘attach’.  Be patient and cross your fingers.

18.  Next we need to retrieve the initial Windows password for the new system.  It takes a while (sometimes as long as 15 – 30 minutes) for this to be generated for you.

Right click on your instance in the instance page, and select the option ‘Get Windows Password’.  If you receive a popup saying that it is ‘not available yet’, wait a while longer and try again.

19.  You will see a popup window ‘Retrieve Default Windows Administrator Password’

Using a text editor (eg. Notepad), open the key pair file you downloaded in step 9.  Copy the ENTIRE contents of this file, and paste it into the ‘Private Key’ field as shown in the image shown here. 

Press the ‘Decrypt Password’ button. 

20.  You will be presented with the initial Windows password for your new instance.  Note down both the computer address, and the password.

21.  Launch a windows remote desktop client from your local machine.  Windows machines should have it available in the Accessories folder of your start menu.  If you have a Mac (as I do), you can download a free Windows remote desktop client here.

Insert the computer name you retrieved from step 20, then for user Administrator enter the password from step 20.   Enter ‘OK’ in the remote desktop client to login.

22.  If you have made it to this step, you should now be logged into your newly provisioned Windows Server.

At this stage, you SHOULD change your password.  From the Windows start menu, select

Start -> Windows Security.

Then select the option Change Password, and enter an appropriate new password.

24.  If at this stage you wish to take a break, you can stop your instance by right-clicking your instance in the AWS instance page and selecting the ‘Stop’ option.  This will ensure you will not incur any unnecessary charges for the running instance (note however that you will incur ongoing charges for the disk storage which you have provisioned).  You will be automatically disconnected from your Remote Desktop session when you stop the instance.

Note that when subsequently starting your instance at a later stage (right-clicking on the instance and selecting the ‘Start’ option, you will need to look in the details pane for the instance and copy the generated computer address to use in your remote desktop session.  This address may differ from the one you had used earlier (you can avoid this problem by subsequently assigning an elastic IP address – Part 4 of this blog series, by fellow SAP Mentor Sascha Wenninger outlines how to accomplish this).