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JoergWolf
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Update Decembrer 12th, 2018:
The SAP S/4HANA 1809 Fully-Activated Appliance is available: blog / direct link

If you are a short-fused reader or have no time


The SAP S/4HANA 1709 fully-activated appliance in a few bullets and 60 seconds:

  • The appliance is a pre-packaged software bundle that contains an SAP S/4HANA 1709 system with pre-configured SAP Best Practices and demo scenarios. It is the successor of the SAP S/4HANA 1610 fully-activated appliance, however, it has been set up as a new installation.

  • It can be rapidly brought up as your personal instance with administrative rights either hosted (takes ~ 2 hours) or on your own on-premise hardware (takes ~ 2 days). Typical use cases are sandboxing, proof-of-concept, and scoping/fit-gap analysis.

  • You can create your personal instance using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library > Create Instance. This requires an account for SAP CAL (free sign-up) and a valid account at a supported hosting provider (video tutorials can be found here).
    The homepage of the SAP S/HANA 30-day trial also points  to the SAPS/4HANA 1709 fully-activated appliance, including a demo guide with proposed sample scenarios.

  • New since May 15th, 2018: SAP S/4HANA 1709 FPS01 is released as separate solution in SAP CAL (link to solution). New features include SAP S/4HANA for Customer Management 1.0, Production Planning / Detailed Scheduling, SAP Best Practices activated for 23 additional countries in the reference client 300, and various minor additions&fixes.


More details needed ? Read on…

 

Note: This blog (text, screenshots) mostly references the SAP S/4HANA 1709 (SP00) version of the fully-activated appliance. In the appendix, you will find links with information for the FPS01 version.

What is an appliance ?


A (software) appliance is a compressed system (think of it as a large .tar or .zip file) that can be rapidly extracted into a regular system instance by preserving everything that has been configured in the appliance during the build phase of it,
This makes it an ideal medium for pre-configured systems e.g. for sandboxing, proof-of-concept or scoping/fit-gap purposes.

In the SAP S/4HANA 1709 fully-activated appliance, you will find the SAP S/4HANA software (along with some other components, see further below), the fully-activated SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA 1709 (incl. technical configuration e.g. for the Fiori launchpad), and prepared demo scenarios with sample master and transactional data.



[Fig 1]: SAP S/4HANA 1709 Fully-Activated Appliance – Concept

 

How can the appliance be consumed ?


The appliance can be consumed in two ways

  1. In a hosted environment (using cloud provider infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with the SAP Cloud Appliance Library (SAP CAL) as bridge into the hosting providers.
    Setup time is ~ 2 hours, and the easiest way is to use the SAP S/4HANA 30-day trial.

  2. On dedicated on-premise hardware that has a supported Linux release installed (everything else will come with the appliance). Pure setup time is ~ 2 days.


Details for option 1 (hosted):
If you are already experienced with the SAP S/4HANA 1610 appliance/trial, you will find it easy to use the new appliance release since the ‘mechanics’ are the same as before:

  • Built-in 30-day test license for SAP S/4HANA and SAP CAL (free of charge for the supported trial scenarios during that time)

  • Hosting provider fees are charged to your hosting provider account (~ 3-4 $ USD per uptime hour, depending on provider and data center region).

  • Support via asking the SAP CAL community

  • Possibility to extend the 30-day trial phase by acquiring an SAP CAL subscription license  (requires a valid SAP S/4HANA license as well)


If you are new to trials in SAP Cloud Appliance Library, there’s a detailed ‘Quick Start Guide’ on the SAP S/4HANA trial page to get started. Registration in SAP CAL and one of the supported hosting providers (AWS, MS Azure, (GCP) takes ~15 minutes, start-up of your personal trial instance will take ~2 hours.

This video playlist for SAP CAL will also help to get into the topic.



[Fig 2]: SAP S/4HANA 17090 – 30-day trial summary

 

Details for option 2 (on-premise installation):

You can receive the trial appliance for installation on your own on-premise hardware either via download or via shipment of 3 Blu-Ray discs (the appliance size is ~ 100 GB).

The shipment is free of charge, however, corresponding SAP licenses need to be in place. The installation of an appliance differs from a “regular” SAP installation, we therefore recommend to have this done by SAP Consulting or an experienced SAP partner, however, customers can also do it on their own and will receive support from SAP.

Ordering of the discs/download by a partner and deploying it on customer-site afterwards is not allowed.

The following SAP note contain more information on the ordering process (it is valid for customers and partners).





[Fig 3]: SAP S/4HANA 1709 Appliance – Consumption Methods

 

The following chart summarizes the deployment options and the needed license / cost drivers for each option.



[Fig 4]: SAP S/4HANA 1709 Appliance – License & Cost Drivers

 

What is the content & scope ?


The scope of the appliance centers on the SAP Best Practices content and has been extended compared to the 1610 release.
It covers the below ‘walkthrough’ scenarios that are explained in detail in an extensive demo script on the SAP S/4HANA trial homepage.(the demo script will be available shortly there).

  • Order-to-cash

  • Revenue recognition

  • Financial closing

  • Plan-to-product (incl. EWM)

  • Migration Cockpit (for data migration into SAP S/4HANA)

  • Fiori Custom Fields

  • Custom Forms

  • BI platform reports

  • SAP Screen Personas

  • NEW with the FPS01 appliance: Customer Management ("CRM add-on"), Detailed Scheduling, Demand-driven replenishment


But of course, you’re free to explore and adapt the system as needed (and covered by the terms&conditions of the trial) since you have full administrative rights and even access to the Linux operating system.



 



[Fig 5 a&b]: SAP S/4HANA 1709 suggested demo walk-throughs

 

What is technically contained in the appliance ?


Technically, the trial consists of four virtual machines that are automatically bundled into one solution instance:

  1. SAP S/4HANA (the core ABAP backend incl. the SAP HANA database)

  2. SAP NW JAVA with Adobe Document Services (for forms and output management)

  3. An SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform for display of pre-configured BI reports

  4. MS Windows remote desktop for easy access of the trial system


The BI platform and the remote desktop are optional components in SAP CAL (you can opt out of the deployment in the advanced mode of the SAP CAL instance creation) and are also not shipped to customers for the on-premise installation.




[Fig. 6]: Software components of the appliance and virtual machines (note: FPS01 in addition contains the add-on for "SAP S/4HANA for Customer Management 1.0")

More information & known issues


More information can be found in the link collection in the appendix below.

This blog summarizes the known issues and provides fixing hints where available. It will be continuously updated.

One important note at the end:
Once you have created an appliance instance (be it hosted or on-premise), it behaves like a regular on-premise system. And this means that SAP cannot access or patch your appliance instance, thus system tasks need to be done by the person who created the instance.

Best and enjoy the SAP S/4HANA 1709 appliance,

Joerg

 

Appendix: Link collection


 

Software appliance in general:

 

On-premise download / Blu-Ray shipment:

 

SAP CAL information

 
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