Technical Articles
HANA Deployments in a disconnected world
Recently, we had a requirement to deploy HANA and an XSA Application as part of a Proof of Concept for a client that wanted this set of infrastructure – disconnected from the internet.
Usually our showcases are easy, but getting the infrastructure to build and support this, lead to some challenges – the end requirement of the client was to have us provide a VMWare Vsphere environment to plug and play our technology and then use the environment within their disconnected network.
Searching on internal infrastructure, I couldn’t locate a virtual Machine (VM) capability to create a 256Gb HANA instance (or on any of our small laptops).
So looking at the cloud offerings in this space, we usually use a Amazon subset at SAP (cal.sap.com) for our standard deployments. But this isn’t exportable to a client environment.
Digging deeper, and obtaining an SAP Amazon account, then provided me with the best of both capabilities. The following is the steps I went through to get get it all working. There was some hurdles along the way, so hopefully the steps below help others in the same situation.
To be able to export the Amazon images as VMs – the image needs to be imported originally from a VM image!
Once, you are aware of this, it’s relatively straight forward. I used VMWare in the example below.
1. Create a VM image. I used vmware player to create a VM from an “SAP SUSE 12SP3 iso” file. Any size (CPU / Memory / Disk) will do, although I also loaded all the media required to install HANA and the other technologies for the client
2. Save the VM as an OVA:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\OVFTool>ovftool -tt=ova “c:\Users\Documents\Virtual Machines\SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 64-bit\SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 64-bit.vmx” “c:\Users\Documents\Virtual Machines\SUSE12SP2.ova”
3. Setup the AWS connection to upload the file
Using the AWS command line tools, once initially configured, are easy to move and interact with Amazon infrastructure.
aws configure
Provide your access code, key and region.
Create the role:
trust-policy.json:
Add the role policy:

