After being sidelined on sick leave for the first half of the year it is time to dig deep into some neat tech stuff once again.
SAP ERPs being so prevalent in the large enterprise sector in Finland I thought we could investigate how to deploy, provision and kick up an SAP ERP system with ready demo data. We will use this demo data as a data source in the following parts of this series of blog posts.
And why would we want to do that, you may ask? 🤔
Well, once we have our ERP set up in the cloud of our choice, we can use it as a data source to for example test the AecorSoft Turbo loading speeds or proof the SAP CDC (Change Data Capture) capabilities for Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse which just made it into General Availability.
High level steps:
- Cloud Appliance selection
- Provision to chosen Azure Region
Do check the full set of news from Microsoft Ignite 2022 by the way: https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2022-book-of-news/
1. Cloud Appliance selection
Let us introduce you to the SAP Cloud Appliance Library in case it is new to you.
You can access it at cal.sap.com and the intro text there says it all:
“SAP Cloud Appliance Library offers a quick and effortless way to create SAP workloads in your cloud infrastructure. With a few clicks, you can set up a fully configured demo environment or deploy a standardized system layout for an SAP product based on default or custom SAP software installation stacks.”
Create your account, log in and dive into the Appliance Templates available. You can get going on a trial basis to test various systems.
Systems range from state-of-the-art S/4HANA ERPs to BW/HANA and older incarnations of these.
We will not be kicking up an S/4 with its memory-intensive requirements since that will be outside the budgetary range of this blog series 😊
Instead, we will filter the list with IDES to find SAP IDES (Internet Demonstration and Evaluation System) versions with ready data in them to use in our next steps down the line.
When you choose your appliance and hit Create Appliance you can choose your cloud provider from Azure, AWS, or GCP. In this case, we will use our Azure partner subscription and authorize SAP CAL against that for it to be able to provide? the resources there.
2. Provision to chosen Azure Region
When using the trial, we are unfortunately limited to only using Azure West Europe region.
It would have been nice to use the announced Azure Kirkkonummi Data Center in my backyard, but that will still take some digging and building. https://news.microsoft.com/fi-fi/2022/03/17/microsoft-rakentaa-suomeen-datakeskusalueen/ I cannot wait to get my own data center and sustainable heating as well! 😊
The next best option would have been Azure Sweden Central with its lower latency:
https://www.azurespeed.com/Azure/Latency
Unfortunately, some of the other services we would like to utilize in our future scenarios are not yet available in that region, so we are not heading there yet.
In any case, once you go through the straightforward wizard-like process in SAP CAL, you will end up with your SAP demo system alive and kicking.
Depending on your setup, you might have to request a vCPU quota increase like I had to.
The post is getting long already, so let us dig into accessing and prepping our SAP ERP for further use in the next part of the series…
Janne Dalin
