SAP S/4HANA 1709 Installation – Issues & Resolution

With S/4HANA 1709 few weeks old, there is very little out there in terms of troubleshooting issues during installations. We setup the Initial Shipment release for one of our clients in Canada and came across two issues.

I’d like to share these for anyone out there facing similar problems:

1. Issue with SWPM 1.0 SP21 Patch 2 (latest at the time)

This one was peculiar as you can see below:

Find anything out of order?

Issue starts with steps/screens asking for folder locations for S/4HANA 1709 Export.

While Export 1 is accepted without issues, SWPM is actually expecting Export 11 on the screen below:

Well, once you are past giving Export 1 and Export 11, you face this:

Based on multiple trials and lot of patience, I got the following order work for me:

This combination allows us to move on successfully.

2. Issue with Stack XML from Maintenance Planner transaction

Typically, we use the option ‘Plan for SAP S/4HANA’ in Maintenance Planner to start with. This allows us to select target stack for Fiori Front End Server as well. As a best practice, we chose hub deployment which meant a single stack XML was generated for two <SID>s, one for S/4HANA 1709 and one for Fiori FES based on AS ABAP 7.52 for S/4HANA

When we used this stack XML with latest SWPM (SWPM 1.0 SP21 Patch 2), while installing S/4HANA 1709, we faced an error where SWPM expected media for Fiori FES. Since this was not an embedded deployment, I realised something is amiss.

Error#

When we look at the stack XML, it clearly shows the product ppms number for Fiori platform:

We opened a message with SAP Support but despite prompt responses, together we could not find a solution.

So, I tried creating an XML only for S/4HANA 1709 without Front end server at all:

Resulting XML does not contain Fiori components of course and it did allow our installation to complete smoothly.

For Fiori FES, I generated a separate stack XML.

Update: Oct 07, 2017

We received a response from SAP acknowledging the issue. There is no solution in place as of now, only this workaround. A new SAP note has been released informing customers:

I would add another entry here, but only if there are more funny surprises in store for me during post installation activities!

Cheers,

Shantanu Bansal