SAP S/4HANA 1809 Fully Activated Appliance – Known Issues

Your system runs out of disc space

Out of disc space on Linux backends (relevant for 1809 SP00 only)

We observed some cases where the disc of the appliance ran out of space due to a wrong log file behavior (the file /var/log/sap on the LInux backend gets huge i.e. multiple GB or even larger).

This may affect all solutions in SAP CAL (not just SAP S/4HANA) and all Linux-based virtual machines deployed in an instance, especially if the instance is often suspended and re-activated.
For the SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance, it can happen on the ABAP/HANA, the JAVA, or the BusinessObjects virtual machine.

The error messages that users will see won’t always point directly to a “no disc space” root cause, so think of it if your appliance behaves strangely in general e.g. it doesn’t come up again after a suspend (that’s what we saw for JAVA), you see “strange” errors in the ABAP system log, can not import transports anymore, etc.

To check and resolve it, you will need PuTTY (or another SSH client) and the private key file (.pem) that was generated when you created the instance. Unless you chose to save it on your own computer, the .pem file can be downloaded from the instance details page. For details how to log on with PuTTY, see this page > How to connect to a running instance via the secure shell protocol (SSH).

Follow these steps (valid for both the ABAP/HANA and the JAVA virtual machine) :

1. Log on to the Linux backend system as root.
2. Run command df -h to check the available disk space. If /dev/hda1 is at 100% usage, proceed as outlined in the following steps. If not, your root cause is something else.
3. Navigate to directory /var/log and check the size of the file sap. Its size will be multiple gigabytes which is the root cause of your issues.
4. Remove the file /var/log/sap (this will free up disc space already)
5. Navigate to directory /sbin
6. Edit the file sapstart (using vi as editor)
7. In the file /sbin/sapstart , find this text line (use vi search function)

   cat $LOG | grep "First service start marker"​

8. Replace the line above by

   startmarker=$(cat $LOG | grep -c "First service start marker")​

9. Save the /sbin/sapstart file and exit vi.
10. Exit Linux. Now the file /var/log/sap shouldn’t grow beyond disc space in the future.
11. If your system wasn’t started properly due to the full disc, you might need to restart it either manually on Linux level or more conveniently via the CAL console (Reboot or Suspend/Activate)

Note:
Instead of checking the disk usage on the Linux backend, you can do this also from SAP GUI (the correction itself needs to be done on Linux, though): 
Enter transaction SE38 > Execute report RSBDCOS0 > Type df -h in the simulated shell UI and check the disk usage of /dev/hda1

Note:
If you want to solve it in all clients of the appliance, you need to create a workbench request in tCode SE10 first, and afterwards use this request in the scope=CONF mode of the Fiori designer (adapt the “scope” parameter in the URL accordingly; for details please see the Fiori Designer documentation).

Fiori app “Cost Centers – Plan/Actual” shows empty Plan Amount column
(1809 SP00 only)

This is caused by an issue in the underlying HANA DB revision (2.00.32) that was used in the 1809 SP00 appliance release.

Resolution:

Please update your HANA DB manually to the latest available revision (at least 2.00.36).
As an alternative, you can also create a new instance using the SAP S/4HANA 1809 FPS01 Fully-Activated appliance (there the issue has been fixed as well).