SAP B1 Implementation Guide - SAP - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Version Control

Version	Revision Date	Types Of Changes	Effective Date
1.0			2018/05/07
1.1	2018/07/31	1.Certified IaaS platforms is updated.	2018/07/31

SAP Business One implementation Guide

This guide provides instructions for implement your own SAP Business One System on Alibaba Cloud.

For more information about planning your implementation, see the SAP Business One planning guide on Alibaba Cloud.

Implementing SAP Business One system

For SAP Business One on Alibaba Cloud, you can choose SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA. This solution uses an ECS instance to sets up SAP Business One on Alibaba Cloud, uses the following software:

SAP HANA 1.0 SP12
SAP Business One 9.0
SLES 11 SP4

Deployment architecture

The implementation of an SAP Business One environment on Alibaba Cloud follows the standard SAP process used with traditional infrastructure. However, Implementing an SAP Business One system on Alibaba Cloud can greatly reduce the effort and time.

SAP Business One ServerOn Alibaba Cloud, to implement the Business One server component, follow the standard SAP installation procedures and tools that you use for any other physical or virtual environment.
SAP Business One ClientOn Alibaba Cloud, when you’re running SAP Business One on a remote hosted ECS instance, the standard best practice is to host the SAP Business One client software by using a virtual desktop solution on another ECS instance. So, install and manage a virtual desktop service like Microsoft Remote Desktop Services on Alibaba Cloud ECS.Business One Database.
SAP Business One, powered by SAP’s in-memory computing platform, can help you supercharge application performance and analyze massive volumes of data in real time – without complicating your IT landscape. SAP Business One and SAP HANA are installed on same ECS instance.

Prerequisites

For SAP administrators who have experience in deploying and running SAP systems on traditional an infrastructure, the following prerequisite knowledge will help to understand some public cloud specific tasks before starting to create an ECS instance for SAP system deployment.

Account setup

Signing up for Alibaba Cloud
Adding a payment method
Real-name registration, it is required only if you have to create an ECS instance in a region inside Chinese mainland

Basic network and security settings

Creating a VPC and vSwitch for creating an ECS instance in a private network you provisioned
Creating a security group that have the rules meeting your business needs for the inbound and outbound access of your ECS instance
Creating an SSH key pair for creating a Linux instance authenticated by using SSH key pair

Connect ECS instance from Internet

VPC is a private network established in Alibaba Cloud. VPCs are logically isolated from other virtual networks in Alibaba Cloud. You can use NAT Gateway or EIP (Elastic IP) to connect ECS instances from Internet.

NAT Gateway is an enterprise-class public network gateway that provides NAT proxy services (SNAT and DNAT), up to 10 Gbps forwarding capacity, and cross-zone disaster recovery. As a public network gateway, NAT Gateway requires configured public IPs and bandwidth. Public IPs for NAT Gateway are grouped into abstract groups called shared bandwidth packages.

An EIP address is a type of NAT IP address. It is located in a public network gateway of Alibaba Cloud, and is mapped to the private network interface card (NIC) of the bound ECS instance in the way of NAT. Therefore, the ECS instance bound with the EIP address can communicate with the Internet without disclosing the EIP address on the NIC.

Create and configure an ECS instance for SAP Business One and SAP HANA

To create an ECS instance for implementing SAP Business One on Alibaba Cloud, follow these steps:

Open ECS Purchase page

Log on to the ECS console.
On the left-side navigation pane, click Instances.
On the Instance List page, click Create Instance.

Choose Pricing Model

You can choose either Subscription or Pay-As-You-Go as the billing method of your instance.

Currently, ECS instances support two billing methods:

Subscription: A type of prepayment whereby instances can be used only after payment is made. Instance usage is billed on a monthly basis, and the billing unit is US$/month. Subscription is applicable to fixed 24/7 services, such as Web service.
Pay-As-You-Go: A type of post payment whereby payment is made after instance usage. Instance usage is billed on a minute basis, and the billing unit is US$/hour. The minimum charge for the lifecycle of an ECS instance (from creation to release) is 0.01 US$. Pay-As-You-Go is applicable to scenarios with sudden traffic spikes, such as temporary scaling, interim testing, and scientific computing.

See Purchase ECS instances in the ECS Purchase Guide for the differences between these two billing methods.

Choose the Datacenter Region and Zone

Usually, All SAP applications (SAP ERP, CRM, SRM, and so on) and systems (SAP DB, SAP Application servers) should be deployed in the same Zone. The region and zone cannot be changed after the instance is created. When choosing a region and zone, consider the following:

Generally, if the region where your instance is located is close proximity to your customers, they will experience shorter network latency and faster download speed when using your service.
Some features, such as the number of zones, instance types, storage types, and network service pricing, vary by region. Select an appropriate region to meet your business needs.
ECS instances in regions outside Mainland China do not support interchange between Linux systems.
If you are creating multiple instances for your SAP system,
- If it requires shorter network latency, we recommend that you create the instances in the same zone.
- If it has higher requirements for disaster recovery, we recommend that you create the instances in different zones of one region.
Instances in different regions cannot communicate with each other over intranet.

Choose the instance type

The availability of instance types varies by region. See Instance generations and type families in Product Instruction for scenarios of each instance type.

Note

Note:If you chose pricing model as ‘Pay-As-You-Go’, you cannot purchase all ECS instances from instance types. If the instance you need is not in the list, you can submit a ticket for purchasing to Alibaba Cloud support.

Alibaba Cloud ECS instance offers a number of instance types (virtual machine sizes) for deploying SAP solutions. You can only run your SAP applications on ECS instances that had been certified by SAP. For a list of SAP-certified instance types approved for production use, see following,

Instance Type	vCPU	Memory (GiB)
ecs.se1.14xlarge	56	480
ecs.re4.20xlarge	80	960
ecs.re4.40xlarge	160	1920

Choose Network Type

Network Type: For your SAP Business One system, please choose Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as the network type. You can select your own VPC and vSwitch. If you do not have one, use the default VPC and vSwitch.
Security Group: A security group functions similarly to virtual firewalls, and is used to set network access controls for one or more ECS instances. When creating instances, you must select a security group. Please add security group rules to control outbound and inbound network access for all SAP system ECS instances in the security group.
Network Billing Type: Billing by Data Transfer. With this billing method, charges are determined by the amount of the data transferred to an instance every hour (usually calculated by GB). The traffic price varies by region. Check the Internet traffic fee on the bottom of the page.
Network Bandwidth Peak: To help prevent high charges from sudden traffic spikes, you can specify a peak bandwidth for the Instance.

Network type	Internet access?	Network bandwidth peak
VPC	Yes	If no Elastic IP (EIP) address is used, set the peak bandwidth to a non-zero value and an Internet IP address will be bound to your instance. The address cannot be changed or unbound.
VPC	No	Set the peak bandwidth to 0 Mbps.

Choose the base operating system

Public Image: It contains the image of an operating system officially provided by Alibaba Cloud. On top of this, you will need to install the related software and configure the application environment based on your specific requirements. Alibaba Cloud currently supports the following operating systems for running SAP NetWeaver systems:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)

Provision and configure storage

You have to select cloud disks for the system disk and data disks. Alibaba Cloud provides you with flexible, cost-effective, and easy-to-use data storage options for your ECS instances.

System Disk is required. It is for installing the operating system.
- Local, temporary, instance based storages.
- Data stored on instance storage volumes will be persistent until ECS instance is released.
- For system disk, we recommend using Ultra Cloud Disks; you can choose SSD Cloud Disk to get better performance.
Data Disk that you add here will be released with the instance and cannot be detached from the instance. You can create a cloud disk independently.
- Persistent block-level storage volumes for use with ECS instances.
- For data disk, we recommend using Ultra Cloud Disks in your SAP non-production environments, using SSD Cloud Disks in production environments.
Each user account can own up to 250 cloud disks simultaneously, with a maximum capacity of 32768 GB per data disk.
You can add up to 16 data disks, blank or from a snapshot, based on business needs.

Cloud disk types vary by region. See Disk parameters and performance test for differences of cloud disk features. Three different volume types, each option has a unique combination of performance and durability.

SSD cloud disks
Ideal for I/O intensive applications, and provide stable and high random IOPS performance.
Ultra cloud disks
Ideal for application scenarios with medium I/O load and provide a storage performance of up to 3000 random IOPS for ECS instances.
Basic cloud disks
Ideal for application scenarios with low I/O load and provide an I/O performance of several hundred IOPS for ECS instances.

For your SAP Business One and SAP HANA environments, recommended storage options as below. For more information about HANA storage configuration, please refer to SAP HANA Deployment Guide on Alibaba Cloud.

Directory	Disk type
SAP Business One and HANA software	Ultra cloud disks
HANA data files	SSD cloud disks
HANA log files	SSD cloud disks
HANA shared	SSD cloud disks
Intermediate backup storage	Ultra cloud disks

Security Setting

You can set the authentication method based on the operating system.

Operating system	Authentication method
Linux	SSH key pairs or password

You have two choices: Set authentication method now or later.
If you want to set the authentication method later, after the instance is created, reset the password or bind an SSH key pair in the ECS console.

Purchase Plan

Subscription Type: If you are creating an ECS instance of the Subscription billing method, you have to set Subscription Type to either 1 Month or 1 Year. If you do not want to manually renew your instance after it expires, select Auto-renew to activate automatic renewal. For more information, see Auto-renewal in Purchase Guide.
Instance Name: We recommend that you specify a name for the instance for efficient management.
Number of Instances: You can create up to 10 instance of the Pay-As-You-Go billing method at the same time, but no quota for instances of the Subscription billing method.

Launch instances

Overview and cost. Check the overview and cost information to make sure that the selected configuration details are correct.
Click either Add to Cart (if you decide to continue shopping) or Buy Now (if you want to confirm the purchase).
On the Confirm Order page, confirm the order information, and then,
For an instance of the Subscription billing method, click Place Order, make payment, and then activate the instance.
For an instance of the Pay-As-You-Go billing method, click Activate, and then activate the instance.

When the instance is activated, you can go to the ECS console to check the instance details, such as the instance name, Internet IP address, and private IP address for VPC network.

Instance post-configuration

Add a DNAT entry

Adding a DNAT entry, you can use the DNAT function to map a public IP to a private IP. Then, the ECS instance with the specified public IP can provide public services or access over the Internet.

Add an SNAT entry

Adding an SNAT entry, when an ECS instance in the specified vSwitch initiates an Internet access request, the NAT gateway will provide it with the Internet proxy service and then the ECS instance can use the specified public IP to access the Internet.The SNAT function provides the Internet proxy service for VPC ECS instances that do not have a public IP.

Connect to SAP ECS instances

Generally, don’t use an external IP for SAP Business One ECS instances, you can only connect to the SAP system instances through the bastion instance using SSH.

To connect to SAP system ECS instances through the bastion instance, connect to the bastion host and then to the SAP system ECS instances by using an SSH client of your choice.
To install or maintain SAP Business One system via Business One Tools from your Business One Client, you should install this Client ECS with Windows Operating System. It easy to run GUI or browser.
To connect to the SAP HANA database through SAP HANA Studio, use a remote desktop client to connect to the Windows Server instance. After connection, manually install SAP HANA Studio and start accessing your SAP HANA database.

Harden OS security

After you create an instance, for security of your instance, we recommend that you perform security compliance inspection and configuration on:

Linux instances: See Harden operating system security for Linux in Security Advisories.

Change hostname

The default naming of ECS instance is Instance ID, the naming of hosts running SAP software has to be done according to general standards and some SAP specific restrictions, for example, the maximum length of the hostname is up to 13 characters for SAP rel. 4.6 or higher. Please refer to SAP note 611361 - Hostnames of SAP servers for more details.

For your SAP system on SUSE Linux Server:

# vi /etc/HOSTNAME

# echo 'newhostname' > /etc/HOSTNAME

This will change hostname permanently.

Reboot the server and verify before your SAP installation.

Prepare SAP Business One installation media

Download the SAP Business One product package (installation package or upgrade package) from the SAP Support Portal, as follows:

Go to the SAP Business One Software Download Center on the SAP Support Portal at https://support.sap.com/b1software.
Do one of the following:
- To download an installation package, click Installation.
- To download an upgrade package, click Updates.

There are two main options for copying SAP Business One installation media to ECS instance on Alibaba Cloud:

Download from SAP Service Marketplace to ECS instance on Alibaba Cloud
From your Alibaba Cloud ECS instance, connect to the SAP Service Marketplace and download the required installation media. This option will most likely be the fastest method for getting SAP installation media to Alibaba Cloud, because Alibaba Cloud instances have very fast connections to the Internet. You can create a dedicated Alibaba Cloud OSS volume to store installation media, and then attach the volume to different instances as needed. You can also create a snapshot of the Alibaba Cloud volume and create multiple volumes that you can attach to multiple instances in parallel.
Copy from your network to ECS instance on Alibaba Cloud
If you already have the required SAP installation media downloaded to a location on your network, you can copy the media from your network directly to an Alibaba Cloud ECS instance.

Check the operating system

After launching ECS, consult the relevant SAP notes on installation and ensure that your system includes the software components specified:

Install the SAP Business One solution

Once you have provisioned and configured the required ECS instance on Alibaba Cloud, you are ready to begin the installation of the SAP Business One solution. Before that, please refer to the SAP official installation guides.

Both SAP Business One and the HANA database are installed in a single ECS instance. You should size the ECS instance to support running both SAP Business One and the database instance together. For SAP HANA requires more memory resources than other databases, so you would need to size the system to support at least the minimum requirements for SAP HANA.

The primary steps are to implement SAP Business One as follows:

For SAP HANA installation, you can refer to SAP HANA Deployment Guide on Alibaba Cloud.
For SAP Business One installation, you need to install the following components on the server:
- Server tools, including the following:
  - SLD, license manager, extension manager
  - Data interface server
  - Job service
  - Workflow service
- Repository
  It includes the shared folder B1_SHR, the common database SBOCOMMON, and online help files in all supportedlanguages
- Microsoft Outlook integration server
- Remote support platform
- Integration framework
- Add-ons
  By installing the SAP add-ons as part of the server installation process, you register them to all companies on the server. If you do not install them now, you will have to register the add-ons manually later in the SAP Business One client.

Support

Alibaba Cloud support: Customers can request assistance with SAP Business One provisioning and configuration questions on ECS instances.
SAP Support: Customers can also contact SAP Support for SAP-related issues. SAP does the initial evaluation of the support ticket and transfers the ticket to the Alibaba Cloud queue if SAP considers it an infrastructure issue about ECS instances.