Well, I’m excited to say that I have a HANA system, granted it empty, no configuration, no code, no data. Sadly, this is what I asked for, so I could experiment with it. For my first go-around, I’ve built an EHP7 machine on HANA. It’s been a learning experience to say the least. So far, in my initial digging, the system really doesn’t look any different from my EHP7 machine. The configuration looks the same, even the tables I deal with look the same. So my first experiment will be to see what happens if I try to import my old transports into the system. I’ve been told by a basis consultant that this won’t work. But many of you know me… I have to see this for myself. Eventually, I’ll build another HANA system that will export configuration, data & code to be migrated into the HANA DB, but initially, I want to see what will happen. The nice thing about a Virtual Machine is that if I screw things up, I just revert back to the last snapshot, and I’ll I’ve lost is a little time 🙂
Now, my issues currently aren’t around HANA itself, but around the infrastructure I will have to start paying. First off, Suse (Linux for SAP), I’ll need to purchase a subscription of this in order to get updates. One of the things I learned is that HANA seems to be directly connected to the operating system. While previous versions really didn’t care what version of windows I was on, or what updates had been applied, apparently HANA updates require OS updates. And Suse requires a subscription for those… It looks like it might be $700/year, or maybe $1500/year… the website is vague, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
The next hurdle is VMWare. I’ve lived and died by VirtualBox for all my previous systems, and it’s worked great (and it’s free). Now, in order to cut out the additional overhead of the OS on the server, I’ve had to switch to VMWare. This will likely run me another $500 – $800 (I’m hoping that’s not yearly). so keeping a HANA system running for a small business is far from cheap. Granted, I’m still guessing this will be cheaper than doing a web server or something similar. Because, i’d likely need to purchase the same licenses to use it anyway.
More to come as I start getting into the system… but I’m getting closer.
Thanks for reading,
Mike