A quick way to test SAP S/4HANA data extraction scenarios

A quick way to test SAP S/4HANA data extraction scenarios

It’s been a while since I published an SAP-related post: Fast access to SAP ERP demo data sources. Now it is time to look into some cool SAP S/4HANA stuff.

Let’s say you want to test or demonstrate utilizing SAP S/4HANA data with different data integration setups. How to go about it rapidly?

Well unlike with SAP ECC, we do not have an S/4HANA IDES environment like we used in our earlier post, but we can deploy an SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance to our cloud of choice very quickly.

Testing and demonstrating with SAP S/4HANA

The SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance luckily contains data designed to enable testing and demonstrating various analytical and operational scenarios, so it works well for us in e.g. testing data extraction from S/4HANA with SAP or 3rd party tools.

The appliance can be deployed from the SAP Cloud Appliance Library.

We’ll choose ‘Create Appliance’ for the latest appliance.

Next, we will give the details and authorization against our own Azure Subscription to enable CAL to deploy the resources.

We’ll go through the steps in the wizard and can drop components like SAP BO, which we do not need here, to save on costs. After deployment, we will set auto shutdown times for the VMs on Azure to keep costs down and will clean up the resources once not needed as they generate costs even when suspended.

Depending on the current Azure settings, the vCPU quotas may need to be increased to accommodate the robust requirements of the VMs.

After a while, we will see our resources deployed and running in our Azure Subscription and we can go and set things like static IPs and auto shutdown times so that we won’t generate unnecessary costs with the robust VMs S/4HANA requires.

For accessing the environment one can use the optional remote desktop VM or connect directly with things like SAP GUI, Fabric, AecorSoft etc.

Check SAP Community to get started

The SAP Community provides numerous demo scenarios supported with guides available. The CAL page for creating the appliance contains a getting started guide to get us going.

After digging up the access details we can access the environment and confirm via SAP GUI that we can see data.

We can now think of the next steps of possibly extracting SAP data with for example Fabric, AecorSoft or test SAP Datasphere Replication Flow to push data to our cloud storage of choice. This could be a topic for the next SAP post.

Do contact us with any questions about SAP and what are the best ways to extract and integrate S/4HANA data!

Janne Dalin

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