Provisioning a SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database

The easiest way to get to the SAP BTP Cockpit is by using a direct link to the SAP BTP cockpit. Choose one of the following links:

• Direct link to SAP BTP Cockpit for the enterprise account: https://emea.cockpit.btp.cloud.sap
• Direct link to SAP BTP Cockpit for the trial account: https://account.hanatrial.ondemand.com/trial/#/

Use the following path to navigate from the SAP BTP Cockpit to the SAP HANA Cloud area:

• On the SAP BTP Cockpit – Global Account page, select the <your subaccount> → < your Cloud Foundry space>. In the above screenshot, that would be 1234abcdtrail → trial → dev. The breadcrumbs area (1) shows your location in the SAP BTP.
• On the Space: dev - Applications page, in the menu panel, select the SAP HANA Cloud (2) button.

  On the SAP HANA Cloud overview page, you get an overview of the status of all your SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database instances. In a free tier or trial SAP BTP account, you can only create one SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database instance. In an enterprise SAP BTP account, the number of database instances depends on your entitlements in the license agreement with SAP.

• To open the SAP HANA Cloud Central, where you can create a new SAP HANA Database instance, select the Manage SAP HANA Cloud (3) button.

Use SAP HANA Cloud Central to perform database administration tasks on SAP HANA Cloud databases and SAP HANA Cloud data lakes. The following administration tasks can be performed in SAP HANA Cloud Central: 

• Get an overview of the status of all SAP HANA Cloud instances that you can access.
• Review notifications and alerts.
• Check the configured memory, compute, and storage consumption of an instance.
• Check the High Availability configuration of an instance.
• Deploy new SAP HANA Cloud instances.
• Change the configuration of an instance.
• Add a data lake to an existing instance.
• Start, stop, and delete instances.
• Recover or Recreate an instance.
• Open the SAP HANA Cockpit for an instance.
• Open the database explorer for an instance.

The SAP HANA Cloud Central is the place to provision and manage your SAP HANA Cloud instances. In a new SAP BTP account, the SAP HANA Cloud Central is empty. The Create Instance wizard will help you to setup SAP HANA Cloud instances.

To create your first SAP HANA Cloud database instance, follow the guided procedure steps of the Create Instance Wizard. In the SAP HANA Cloud Central, choose the Create Instance (1) button to start the Create Instance wizard, and provision an SAP HANA Cloud instance.

In the first step of the Create Instance Wizard, you must decide which type of instance you want to create. The following options are available:

• SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database provides an in-memory and multi-model database system to store and analyze relational but also document data which allows for real-time data analytics and transactional processing in one combined system. The in-memory database can handle OLAP and OLTP workloads, setup hybrid Extension to on-premise SAP HANA systems and can be associated with a data lake instance.
• SAP HANA Cloud, data lake SAP HANA data lake efficiently and securely stores, manages, and analyzes large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. The data lake instance manages access to files in the data lake through the files component and can be used for high performance analysis on petabyte volumes of relational data with HANA Cloud, data lake relational engine.

Caution

In this learning material, the steps to create an SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database will be explained. The follow-up steps for the other choices will be different.

In this step, you must provide the location, instance name, description, and the administrator password.

• In the (1) Location area, you must fill-in the location space, which is the Cloud Foundry Organization name and the Cloud Foundry Space name. If your company has multiple Organizations and Spaces created for different projects, then select the correct Organization and Space from the dropdown menus.

• In the Basics area, you must specify the database instance name and description of the SAP HANA database instance you want to create. An instance in SAP HANA Cloud is like a tenant for an on-premise SAP HANA database and isn't restricted to three characters.

  Note

  As of QRC 03/2022, the database administrator can also choose which version to install. The selection is two releases in the past plus the current release. This means with release QRC 03/2022, you could also select QRC 02/2022 or QRC 01/2022 for installation.

  You must also specify the password for the database administrator user account DBADMIN that will be created and assigned to your SAP BTP account. The password needs to be at least eight characters long, with one UPPER and two lower case letters and one number.

There's no SYSTEM user available. You must use the DBADMIN user for the initial setup tasks. The DBAMIN is the super user for your SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database instance. This user shouldn't be used on a daily basis. Create new user accounts and roles for all users accessing the database.

Specify the required RAM and disk storage (1) for this SAP HANA Cloud database instance. The number of vCPUs depends on the amount of RAM you specify.

As not all SAP HANA usage is the same, SAP has introduced the following performance classes:

In the free tier and trial SAP BTP account, you can't change the size of the memory and disk storage allocated to the database instance. This is limited to 30 GB RAM and 120 GB disk space.

An SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database instance in an enterprise SAP BTP account on AWS can allocate up to 5,790 GB RAM, 16,000 GB disk space, and 440 vCPUs.

Note

The required number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) can't be changed manually, but is automatically assigned based on the requested RAM. The amount of disk space depends on the assigned RAM, but the requested disk space can setup bigger.

See the following video for Create Instance Wizard – Step 4.

You can setup a maximum of two replicas for SAP HANA Cloud. One synchronous replica in the same availability zone, and one asynchronous replica in a different availability zone.

Caution

Adding additional replicas to your instance incurs additional costs based on the size (CPU, memory, disk) of the replica database. You can use the SAP HANA Cloud Capacity Unit Estimator to estimate the number of capacity units per month required for your particular use case. Link to the SAP HANA Cloud Capacity Unit Estimator

In the SAP HANA Database Advanced Settings step, you can setup some additional features. In the (1) Allowed Connections area, you can choose which IP addresses are allowed to connect to your SAP HANA Cloud database instance.

The Cloud Connector: You must also decide whether you want your SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database to connect to your on-premise remote data sources through the cloud connector.

The Cloud Connector serves as a link between SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) applications and your on-premise systems. It allows you to use your existing on-premise assets without exposing the entire internal landscape to the outside world. It combines an easy setup with a clear configuration of the systems that are exposed to the SAP BTP.

The Cloud Connector runs as on-premise agent in a secured network and acts as a reverse invoke proxy between the on-premise network and SAP BTP. It provides fine-grained control over your on-premise systems and resources that can be accessed by cloud applications. It also allows you control over which cloud applications can use the Cloud Connector.

Note

In the SAP HANA Cloud Central, you can use the Edit option in the Actions menu to activate the cloud connector after the SAP HANA Cloud database instance was deployed.

The Cloud Connector provides the following features for business-critical enterprise scenarios:

• Automatic recovery of broken connections.
• Audit logging of inbound traffic and configuration changes.
• High-availability setup.

In the enterprise SAP BTP account, you can also add an SAP HANA Script server and a SAP HANA Document Store as additional features to the SAP HANA database instance. When adding these features to an SAP HANA database instance, you may require more vCPUs (compute), which will increase your licensing cost.

In the sixth and final step of the Create Instance Wizard, you can decide to add an integrated data lake instance to your SAP HANA database instance. This integrated data lake allows you to ingest, store, and analyze high volumes of data, economically and securely. You can access and manage the integrated data lake from your SAP HANA database.

Integrated SAP HANA Data Lake: The Integrated SAP HANA Data Lake gives you the option to store the older and rarely used, but still important, cold data in a data lake controlled by the SAP HANA database instance. This database instance already stores your hot data in memory and the warm data in the SAP HANA native storage extension (NSE). With the addition of a data lake to the SAP HANA Cloud database instance, you have access to all your data from one single framework.

The SAP HANA Cloud database instance is being created. Refresh the screen every few minutes to see an updated status.

What is set up during the creation process of SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database:

• A SAP HANA database instance is created with data at rest encryption enabled.
• The SAP HANA database instance is connected to SAP HANA cockpit.
• The SAP HANA database instance is connected to SAP HANA database explorer.
• The database user DBADMIN is created for administration purposes.
• The SAP HANA database is connected to backup infrastructure via the Backint interface.
• A backup cycle of 14 backup generations is setup, and the initial backup is created.

As soon as all these tasks are performed the SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database instance is available for you to explore.

It's also possible to create an SAP HANA Cloud database instance using the Cloud Foundry CLI. Before you can create a database instance, you must install the Cloud Foundry CLI, and log on to the SAP BTP as previously explained.

To create an SAP HANA Cloud database using the Cloud Foundry CLI, execute the following steps:

1. Open a Linux Terminal or Windows PowerShell.
2. Log in to the SAP BTP using the command cf login -o <organisation> -s <space> -a <API endpoint>, and enter your credentials.
   • -o : The organization to connect to.
   • -s : The space to connect to.
   • -a : The API endpoint to use.
3. To create a new database service, execute the command:
   Code snippet

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   cf create-service <service offering> <service plan> <service name> -c 
   '{"data":
       {
         "memory": <xx>, 
         "systempassword":"<password>"
       }
    }'

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   Example:

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   cf create-service hana-cloud hana HC200-Database -c '{ "data": {"memory": 64, "systempassword": "Welcome1"}}'

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   The above command will create a database service named HC200-Database with 64GB memory, and the DBADMIN user will get the password Welcome1.

   Note

   In a free tier or trial account, the maximum amount of memory you are allowed to specify is restricted to 30 GB database instance.

Have a look at the Create an SAP HANA Database Instance Using the CLI page to have a complete list of parameters that can be used to create a database instance.