How-to register your SUSE OS in SAP HANA, express edition on GCP

Recently I worked on refreshing a tutorial Use JupyterLab with SAP HANA, express edition. At the beginning of that tutorial, we need to install some OS packages to make further steps possible. And for that, your HANA’s host OS needs to be registered.

There is a video SAP HANA Express Edition: Setup, Register VM from Denys van Kempen on how to register SUSE OS. But in my case, I was running HANA Express on a VM in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). And, accordingly to SUSE support notes I’ve found, GCP is handled here differently than Azure and AWS.

So, on GCP the OS license is included already in a pay-as-you-go model.

You can see attached licenses using gcloud CLI logged into your account:

gcloud compute instances \
describe <<vm-name>> \
--project <<project name>> \
--zone <<vm-zone>> \
--format="flattened(disks[].licenses[])"

like

In the instance’s shell…

…switch user to root and check available repositories with zypper lr.

The OS on this VM is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (aka SLES) and there is a SUSEConnect utility already preinstalled. With SUSEConnect --status-text you can check the status of your system registration.

Let’s re-register the OS…

…using SUSE process for cloud pay-as-you-go system.

1. Clean-up and check

sudo SUSEConnect --cleanup
sudo SUSEConnect --status-text

Remark: I will include sudo in commands to make it easier to use with another user who can have root permissions.

2. Get “the public key and the instance data”…

…as requested if you check the flag --instance-data with sudo SUSEConnect --help command.

And for that you need gcemetadata utility from https://github.com/SUSE/Enceladus/tree/py2-sle11/gcemetadata.

I found /usr/bin/gcemetadata was preinstalled on my instance already. But on other instances, I was able to set it up from Github with:

git clone https://github.com/SUSE/Enceladus.git -b py2-sle11
Enceladus/gcemetadata # python ./setup.py install

Like me, you might be overwhelmed with the output of gcemetadata --help and it took me some time to get it under control.

To get the instance’s identity I had to run:

gcemetadata --query instance --identity http://smt-gce.susecloud.net --identity-format full --xml

where IP address of smt-gce.susecloud.net was already in the instance’s /etc/hosts.

If it is not there, then you need to find the IP address of the SUSE registration server using their other utility pint: https://github.com/SUSE-Enceladus/public-cloud-info-client/tree/master/bin.

3. Register your SUSE OS from a cloud instance

Generate the instance key…

sudo  gcemetadata --query instance \
--identity http://smt-gce.susecloud.net \
--identity-format full \
--xml > myhxeongcp.xml

…and use it in the registration string.

sudo SUSEConnect --url https://smt-gce.susecloud.net \
--instance-data myhxeongcp.xml

Bingo! Let’s check with sudo SUSEConnect --status-text:

…and with zypper lr:

This registration should as well create a config file /etc/SUSEConnect.

4. Register required extensions

Some activities (like the tutorial mentioned at the beginning of this post) may require you to use some of the SUSE extensions. You can:

• see available extensions with sudo SUSEConnect --list-extensions ,
• register required extensions with --product <product identifier> from the list of extensions above, e.g. sudo SUSEConnect --product sle-sdk/12.3/x86_64.

Update and patch your SUSE system…

sudo zypper lp
sudo zypper patch

…and keep digging into SAP HANA, express edition!

PS. Versions of software used:

• SAP HANA, express edition: 2.00.045
• OS: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 12 SP3
• SUSEConnect: 0.3.22
• gcemetadata: 0.3.3

Ok, it’s time to take a break and to enjoy the weekend!
-Vitaliy (aka @Sygyzmundovych)