SAPonAWS: Create a Amazon Web Services EC2 instance for SAP

This is part of blogs series for creating your own SAP lab on Amazon Web Services cloud.

In this blog I am attempting to help create a AWS EC2 instance ONLY. Installation of SAP HANA and ABAP will be covered in other blogs.

Short Introduction to AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a suite of on-demand IT services provided over the Internet by Amazon.com.  The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is an IT infrastructure platform that provides on-demand access to a virtual Linux/UNIX and Windows servers, storage and networking.With AWS you only pay for the services you use when you are using them.

Perquisites –  Sign up for an AWS account and activate your account for AWS EC2

Using your AWS account and password log into the AWS Management Console

Once you login in aws you will find a lot of aws services, find the Compute Section on the upper left Conner.

Open the EC2 Dashboard

EC2 dashboard has loads of info about your EC2 instances. But there will 0 Running Instances with a new account.

Please note the AWS Region as shown in the Right top Conner.

You can select any of the available region, EC2 instance will be created in the selected region only.

To create a EC2 instance Select “Launch Instance” and follow the wizard steps 1-7 .

Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

An AMI is a template that contains the software configuration (operating system, application server, and applications) required to launch your instance.

select option – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP1 (HVM), SSD Volume Type – ami-b7b4fedd

Step 2: Choose an Instance Type

Instances are virtual servers that can run applications. They have varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity,

Select a instance of the size as per your needs

– For ABAP instance select check SAP note # 1656099 for the latest SAPS ratings of the different Amazon EC2 instance types.

– General purpose m4.xlarge with 4 vCPU and  16 GB RAM (For HANA express edition)

Step 3: Configure Instance Details

Leave these setting to default but dont leave them blank if they are empty. 

Settings for VPC and IAM role are critical allowing  connection in and out from your EC2 instance.

Step 4: Add Storage

A default root volume will already be there with 10 GB space.

Beginners can use this root volume for installation by increasing the size as per your needs. For HANA express edition another make this size to 30 GB.

If you chose to add another disk,then as a separate step you will have to format the disk and mount it from within the EC2 instance.

Step 5: Tag Instance

A tag consists of a case-sensitive key-value pair used to organize EC2 instances. This setting can be ignored for beginners.

Step6: Configure Security Group

A security group is a set of firewall rules that control the traffic for your instance. On this page, you can add rules to allow specific traffic to reach your instance.

Select below option Create a new security group

Type – All traffic

Protocol – All

Port Range – 0 – 65535

Source – Anywhere 0.0.0.0/0

Step 7: Review Instance Launch

Please review your instance launch details. You can go back to edit changes for each section.

Click Launch to see the below popup.

Select – Create a new Key Pair and give any name.

Click “Download Key Pair “. The .pem Key is saved on your desktop.

Click “Launch Instances” and your first EC2 instances is ready to be used.

Your EC2 instance should be ready to use in few mins. Check your “EC2 dashboard” it will show “1 Running Instances” .

Click on that to see the list of instances.  Note down the “Public DNS” of your instancce show above. This host name used to ssh into your instances

Login to the EC2 instance from PuTTY

Convert the downloaded .pem key to .ppk file with puTTYgen

In PuTTY prove the “Public DNS” as <host name> and use the converted .ppk for authentication.

PuTYY will prompt login user, give “ec2-user”

Configure network to set permanent host name.

By default when Amazon EC2 Linux instances are stopped/started a new hostname is generated. This behavior is not appropriate for an SAP system and can be disabled by following the steps below:

1) Start yast

2) Navigate to Network Devices -> Network Settings (press enter)

3) Select Hostname/DNS in the menu

4) Change the values of the Hostname and Domain Name fields as required

5) Uncheck “Change Hostname via DHCP”

6) F10 (to save)

7) F9 (to exit)

Now you have a running Linux EC2 instance on which SAP ABAP, JAVA or HANA instance can be installed. I will cover these installation as separate blogs individually.

I can give a brief understand of aws concepts if needed. Please let me know in comments if this has been helpful for you to begin using aws.