Stop and Start Rules for HANA on AWS

[Former Member]

I work with a remote team in India and one of the things we have drilled into each others minds is - when you are done working on the HANA - Stop the instance on AWS to avoid unexpected compute charges. In fact, I even downloaded an iPhone app called OPS1 so that I can shut down the AWS instance.

The problem with this rule is- HANA doesn't always want to start up correctly when we Start in instance back up in the EC2 console. Symptoms within SAP HANA Studio include:

• The AWS instance node shows something other than stop
• The Catalog doesn't always expand out
• The Administration console shows only the tabs for Processes and Diagnosis Files

The ah ha step that we missed was - Stop the HANA database instance first and wait for the stop action to be completed. It's as simple as running the Stop command from the database instance node in SAP HANA Studio using the Soft option. Once the node shows the database as stopped, then Stop the instance from the AWS EC2 console. Starting the VM back up from the EC2 console then starts the HANA database instance in a happy state!

All is not lost if anyone on the team forgets to stop the HANA database instance. In juergen.schmerder master blog - http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-28294, he has documented the stop and start procedures that must be run from the Linux SSH client - you can't use SAP HANA Studio to do this as you need to stop the instance and then start it and the Stop command is not enabled in HANA Studio.  Here are the sequence of steps required to recover in the event you stopped the VM without stopping the database:

Launch your SSH client

# su -l hdbadm

# ./HDB stop

# ./HDB start

More information regarding stop and start operations can be found in the Administration Guide at http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-1073

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Bill Ramos, Database Architect at Advaiya Inc.