Update October 2018

For the latest information about the playlists, see

• SAP HANA Installation and Update – by the SAP HANA Academy

Introduction

In the upcoming weeks, we will be posting new tutorial videos to the SAP HANA Academy to help you get started with SAP HANA cockpit 2.0. Topics covered are how to install and update cockpit, how to setup cockpit with cockpit manager, how to secure cockpit and how to use the cockpit to configure, manage, monitor, and optimize the SAP HANA databases.

You will find all these topics covered on a dedicated playlist on our SAP HANA Academy YouTube channel

• Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit

 

SAP HANA Academy – Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit (playlist)

 

Additionally, we will post a number of blogs to provide a bit of context, add some SQL script snippets, links to documentation, etc., to make getting started with SAP HANA cockpit as easy as possible.

• SAP HANA Cockpit 2.0 Installation and Update (this blog)
• What’s New with SAP HANA cockpit 2.0

This blog is also part of a series about installation:

• SAP HANA 2.0 installation and update
• SAP HANA 2.0 platform lifecycle management
• SAP HANA Installation Automation
• SAP HANA 2.0 Server Installation
• SAP HANA 2.0 XS Advanced Installation
• SAP HANA 2.0 Client Installation and Update
• SAP HANA 2.0 Studio Installation and Update
• SAP HANA Cockpit 2.0 Installation and Update (this blog)
• Installing SAP HANA SHINE

Preparation

Software Download

You can download cockpit from the same central location where you can download any SAP software: the SAP Software Download Center. This requires an S-user ID and download authorization (contact a user administrator in your company).

The download is almost 3 GB, so using the SAP Download Manager is recommended. This is a Java application which you can download from the same location.

Supported hardware platforms are

• Intel x86-64 (LINUX ON X86_64 64BIT)
• IBM Power Systems (LINUX ON POWER 64BIT)

 

Software Download Center – SAP HANA Cockpit 2.0 (Support Packages and Patches)

 

Supported operating systems are the same as for any SAP HANA system

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for SAP HANA / for SAP Solutions
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications

Latest supported versions at the time of writing are SLES 12 SP2 and RHEL 7.3. Currently, on IBM Power Systems, only SLES is supported.

For the latest information (at the time of reading), see

• SAP Note 2235581 – SAP HANA: Supported Operating Systems
• SAP Note 2380291 – SAP HANA 2.0 Cockpit Central Release Note

You can also always check the Product Availability Matrix (PAM) for SAP HANA 2.0

• SAP HANA PLATFORM EDITION 2.0

Note that for cockpit no entry is listed in the PAM as SAP HANA cockpit is considered to be a HANA component (like the client), not a product or add-on.

When you search for ‘hana cockpit‘, all currently available support packs (SP00 – SP04) are returned on the latest patch level.

Typically, for SAP HANA cockpit, you would download and install the latest version.

In the tutorial video below, you can see this in action:

Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit – Software Download 

 

Software Upload

Unless you have added a graphical environment to the Linux system (X-Windows) on which you intend to install SAP HANA cockpit, installed Java and the SAP Download Manager to download cockpit directly to the server, you probably will need to upload the download some way or the other.

As this probably covers 99.9% of the cases, I will address this topic here as well.

In the Software Download video, I used the YaST system administration tool to start vsftpd on SLES (vsftpd is included with both SLES and RHEL) and then used an FTP client on my computer to upload the file.

vsftpd uses SSH FTP with an SSH private key. SSH FTP uses the same default port as SSH (22) which typically is already open in case there is a firewall between your client computer and the Linux system.

SFTP configuration

 

For more information about vsftpd, see

• vsftpd – Secure, fast FTP server for UNIX-like systems

 

There are many different ways how you can transfer files between systems, be it on-premise, in the cloud, or hybrid, so it is not really feasible to describe them all.

Below an illustration of another example using secure copy (scp) integrated with the Google Cloud Platform gcloud command line tool (for those running cockpit on GCP).

gcloud compute scp

 

For the tutorial video, see

• SAP HANA Academy – Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit: Sysprep HXE on CAL

For the GCP documentation, see

• Transferring Files to Instances – Compute Engine Documentation – Google Cloud Platform

 

Deployment Options

In production environments, the SAP HANA cockpit should be installed on dedicated hardware. In the SAP HANA Cockpit Installation and Update Guide, an image is included to illustrate this.

SAP HANA cockpit deployment options

 

Unlike the previous release, SAP HANA cockpit 1.0, cockpit 2.0 comes as a separate SAP HANA system. In fact, SAP HANA cockpit runs on a special version of SAP HANA, express edition with an XS advanced runtime environment included.

You cannot deploy cockpit as an XS Advanced application on an existing SAP HANA instance nor can you deploy (add) XSA applications to HANA cockpit. Technically, this may be possible but it is certainly not supported.

In the documentation, a minimum of 16GB of RAM is mentioned. Personally, I would expect this to be a bit optimistic as for SAP HANA, express edition with XSA included (server + applications) recommended memory requirements are around 30 GB (depending slightly whether one opts for cloud deployment, VM or local installation).

Finally, there are a number of SAP notes that document the prerequisites for each operating system.

For example, for SLES 12 SP2 we need to

• Update to required kernel, systemd, and glibc version
• Configure tuned to use profile sap-hana
• Turn off autoNUMA balancing
• Disable transparent hugepages
• Configure C-States
• Set the cpufreq governor to “performance” (sounds like the magic parameter run_faster=true)
• Set EPB in the BIOS to “Maximum performance” (id)
• etc.

Unless you configure Linux systems on a regular basis, this might sound a bit complex. For production systems, I would certainly recommend leaving the preparation of the Linux system to a certified engineer (or at least the validation).

Additionally, we find a separate guide attached to SAP Note which also documents a sample installation, how to create partitions, file systems, etc.

For more information, see

• SAP Note 1944799 – SAP HANA Guidelines for SLES Operating System Installation (PDF attached)
• SAP Note 2205917 – SAP HANA DB: Recommended OS settings for SLES 12 / SLES for SAP Applications 12
• SAP Note 2235581 – SAP HANA: Supported Operating Systems (covers both SLES and RHEL)

 

SLES Configuration Guide for SAP HANA

 

Obviously, the topic is also extensively documented on the hardware partner side.

SUSE Documentation – SLES for SAP Applications

 

In the tutorial video below, the system preparation topic is covered in some detail:

Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit – System Preparation

 

The next video, we explore some of the cloud-based alternatives for dedicated hardware (non-production) on

• Amazon Web Services Marketplace
• Microsoft Azure Marketplace
• Google Cloud Platform Cloud Launcher
• SAP Cloud Appliance Libary

 

Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit – System Preparation Cloud-based options

 

Then, for training purposes, I show you how you can prepare an instance of the SAP HANA, express edition (server + applications) Cloud Launcher solution on the Google Cloud Platform for an installation of SAP HANA cockpit.

Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit – System Preparation HXE on GCP (training)

 

In the last video about preparation, I show you how to use SAPCAR to extract the downloaded SAR file.

SAPCAR -manifest SIGNATURE.SMF -xvf SAPHANACOCKPIT<version number>.SAR

Without the -manifest flag, the following message will be returned by the installer.

Further, we explain why cockpit is installed with a script file (hdblcm.sh) and not with the SAP HANA lifecycle management (hdblcm) tool directly.

Additionally, we demonstrate an installation using the graphical version of the installer.

 

Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit – SAPCAR / hdblcmgui

 

Installation

SAP HANA Lifecycle Management

With the system properly set up, installing SAP HANA cockpit is very easy. We need to answer 7 simple questions, with default values provided:

• Do you want to install or exit?
• Where do you want to install cockpit?   [/hana/shared]
• What is the computer name?    [<computer name>]
• What is the system identifier?   [H4C]
• What is the instance number?  [96]
• What is the master password?
• Do you want to continue? [y/n]

Installing SAP HANA, express edition and creating the H4C instance takes about a minute.

Installing the XS Advanced runtime, and in particular, deploying the different XSA applications (cockpit, monitoring, SAPUI5), takes a bit longer (about 9 minutes).

 

In the SAP HANA cockpit installation tutorial video, we perform an installation using the command line version of the SAP HANA Lifecycle Management (hdblcm) tool with some explanation provided for the different installation questions.

Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit – Installation

 

Update

Updating SAP HANA cockpit is very similar to installation. Below a video tutorial where we demonstrate an update from the SP 04 release to SP 05.

SAP HANA platform installation and update – Update SAP HANA cockpit

 

Documentation

SAP HANA Cockpit

As of SAP HANA cockpit SP 04, the latest cockpit documentation is available on SAP Help Portal. This includes the release notes, the Installation and Update Guide, the Administration guide, and education resources, including openSAP and the SAP HANA Academy.

 

Getting Started with SAP HANA cockpit – Documentation and training 

 

SAP Help Portal – SAP HANA Cockpit

 

Documentation

For more information, see:

SAP Community Blogs

• What’s New with SAP HANA cockpit 2.0

SAP Help Portal

• SAP HANA Cockpit
• SAP HANA Cockpit Installation and Update Guide

SAP Notes

• 2380291 – SAP HANA 2.0 Cockpit Central Release Note
• 2235581 – SAP HANA: Supported Operating Systems
• 944799 – SAP HANA Guidelines for SLES Operating System Installation
• 2205917 – SAP HANA DB: Recommended OS settings for SLES 12 / SLES for SAP Applications 12

Other

• SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems
• SAP HANA on SUSE
• Red Hat and SAP
• vsftpd – Secure, fast FTP server for UNIX-like systems
• Transferring Files to Instances – Compute Engine Documentation – Google Cloud Platform
• Amazon Web Services Marketplace
• Microsoft Azure Marketplace
• Google Cloud Platform Cloud Launcher
• SAP Cloud Appliance Libary

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Over the years, for the SAP HANA Academy, SAP’s Partner Innovation Lab, and à titre personnel, I have written a little over 300 posts here for the SAP Community. Some articles only reached a few readers. Others attracted quite a few more.For your reading pleasure and convenience, here is a curated list of posts which somehow managed to pass the 10k-view mile stone and, as sign of current interest, still tickle the counters each month. Good Reads (my two cents)