Tag: VMWare

This is the third part of my (quite large) post on how to install an SAP HANA 2.0 database into a SUSE Linux for SAP 12 SP3 virtual machine.

See Part #1 of the post here.
See Part #2 of the post here.

We continue from where we left off in part 2, just after we created a new 50GB disk volume for our new HANA install.
Check the new partition:

# df -h /hana
Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/volHANA-lvHANA1   50G  33M   50G   1% /hana

Unmount the CDROM and install VMWare tools (I need it for access to my VMWare shared folder):

# umount /mnt/dvd

Select the option to re-install VMWare tools:


Mount the CD and extract the TAR file:

# mount /dev/sr0 -t iso9660 /mnt/dvd

# cd /tmp

# tar -xvf /mnt/dvd/VMwareTools-10.1.15-6627299.tar.gz

# cd vmware-tools-distrib

# ./vmware-install.pl

Choose YES to ALL prompts (especially to the ones to replace existing files).
Disable some SUSE Linux services that are more than likely not needed (in this specific case) and just consume precious memory:
Disable VMware thin printing:

# chkconfig vmware-tools-thinprint off

Disable Linux printing:

# chkconfig cups off

Disable Linux auditing:

# chkconfig auditd off

Disable Linux eMail SMTP daemon:

# chkconfig postfix off

Disable sound:

# chkconfig alsasound off

Disable NFS ( you might need it…):

# chkconfig nfs off

Disable the Machine Check Events Logging capture:

# chkconfig mcelog off

Double check the IP address of your VM:

# ifconfig | grep inet

Your IP address should be listed (you can see mine is 192.168.174.129).
If you don’t have one, then your VM is not quite setup correctly in the VMWare properties or your networking configuration is not correct, or you don’t have a DHCP server on your local network, or your network security is preventing your VM from registering it’s MAC address.  It’s complex.
Assuming that you have an IP address, check that you can connect to the SSH server in your VM using PUTTY :

Enter the IP address of your VM server:

Log into the server as root:

Now we’ve got access to the VM and disk space to create our HANA database and put the software.
To perform the HANA install, I’ve extracted my HANA patch/install media into a VMWare Shared Folders folder and simply extract the SAR file to my PC using SAPCAR.exe, sharing the directory location through VMware to the guest O/S.
Since I’ve used VMWare shared folders, I need to mount my folder (it’s shared via the VMWare Tools(:

# cd /mnt/hgfs/Downloads      [my VMware share name is “Downloads”]

# cd SAP_HANA_DATABASE      [this is my extracted SAR file]

# ./hdbinst –ignore=check_diskspace,check_min_mem

You will be prompted for certain pieces of information.  Below is what was entered:
Local Host Name: hana01
Installation Path:   /hana/shared
System ID:             H10
Instance Number: 10
Worker Group: default
System Usage: 3 – development
System Administrator Password:  hanahana
System Administrator Home Dir:  /usr/sap/H10/home
System Administrator User ID:  10001
System Administrator Login Shell:  /bin/sh
ID of User Group (sapsys): [I selected any]
Location of Data Volumes:  /hana/shared/H10/global/hdb/data
Location of Log Volumes:   /hana/shared/H10/global/hdb/log
Restrict maximum memory allocation? N
Database SYSTEM user password:   Hanahana1
Restart instance after reboot:  N

Summary before execution:
   Installation Path: /hana/shared
   SAP HANA System ID: H10
   Instance Number: 10
   Database Isolation: low
   System Usage: development
   System Administrator Home Directory: /usr/sap/H10/home
   System Administrator Login Shell: /bin/sh
   System Administrator User ID: 1001
   ID of User Group (sapsys): 79
   Location of Data Volumes: /hana/shared/H10/global/hdb/data
   Location of Log Volumes: /hana/shared/H10/global/hdb/log
   Local Host Name: hana01
   Worker Group: default

Installation will begin:



Installation & instance startup time was around 45 minutes due to the memory swapping.

That’s it for now.
We have a basic SYSTEM database (SYSTEMDB).

Some things to note at this point:
– SYSTEM database data and log files reside in /usr/sap/H10/SYS/global/data and /usr/sap/H10/SYS/global/log directories (linked to /hana/shared/H10/global).
– Initial usage of disk is around 4GB for data and 1 GB for logs.
– Used memory is around 6GB.
– The HANA Cockpit URL would be (if it was installed) https://192.168.80.2:4310/sap/hana/admin/cockpit   or port 8010 for non SSL.
– The above two URLs are served from the xsengine via the webdispatcher.
– You cannot permanently stop the webdispatcher or xsengine (but I can…).
– SAP note 2517761 tells you how to connect via HANA Studio to the system DB.
– You will need to add the h10adm username and password into HANA Studio to allow you to stop/start the system.
– You may need to add the hana01 and it’s FQDN to your PC’s hosts file to be able to successfully stop/start the system from HANA Studio.
******  OPTIONAL ********

We can slightly reduce the memory requirements of the statisticsserver (now embedded into the indexserver process) by following SAP note 2147247 to disable the inifile_checker service in the global.ini:
Switch to h10adm Linux user:

# su – h10adm

> hdbsql -i 10 -u SYSTEM -p Hanahana1 -d SYSTEMDB

hdbsql SYSTEMDB=> ALTER SYSTEM ALTER CONFIGURATION (‘global.ini’, ‘system’) SET (‘inifile_checker’, ‘enable’)=’false’  WITH RECONFIGURE;

hdbsql SYSTEMDB=> quit

******  OPTIONAL ********
We also reduce slightly the system global allocation limit to 12GB, so that we can consequently reduce the VM memory from 24Gb to 18GB:
NOTE: When you do this, you will not be able to run a Tenant Database because the Tenant DB indexserver process will need at least 8GB of memory to start.

> hdbsql -i 10 -u SYSTEM -p Hanahana1 -d SYSTEMDB

hdbsql SYSTEMDB=> ALTER SYSTEM ALTER CONFIGURATION (‘global.ini’, ‘system’) SET (‘memorymanager’, ‘global_allocationlimit’) = ‘12288’ WITH RECONFIGURE;

hdbsql SYSTEMDB=> quit

Restart the HANA system:

> sapcontrol -nr 10 -function Stop

Wait for it to be stopped:

> watch sapcontrol -nr 10 -function GetProcessList

Press CTRL+C once everything is shutdown (apart from the HDB Daemon).
Exit back to root:

> exit

Shutdown the server:

# shutdown -h now

Adjust the VM memory to be 18GB:

Power on the VM:

Log in as h10adm and start the HANA system:

> sapcontrol -nr 10 -function Start

******  OPTIONAL ********
We can create a new tenant database as follows (we would need at least 24GB of memory for SUSE in order to create and run the SYSTEM DB and the Tenant DB):

# su – h10adm

> hdbsql -i 10 -u SYSTEM -p Hanahana1 -d SYSTEMDB

hdbsql SYSTEMDB=> CREATE DATABASE HT1 SYSTEM USER PASSWORD Hanahana1;

hdbsql SYSTEMDB=> quit

If you wish to stop the Tenant database from starting, you can use SQL as per the help.sap.com, or if your SYSTEM DB will not start also, then you can use the temporary method (probably not recommended by SAP) of exporting the topology using hdbnsutil, adjusting the export file to set the Tenant DB “status” to “no” and then re-import the file using hdbnsutil.
Should you need to quickly (and nastily) kill off the SYSTEM DB and Tenant DB processes, you can use the hdbdaemon command: “hdbdaemon -quit”.

This is the second part of a three part post on how to install an SAP HANA 2.0 database into a SUSE Linux for SAP 12 SP3 virtual machine.
See Part #1 here.

During the VM start-up you may be prompted by VMWare to download the VMWare Tools, you should do this (it’s about 1 minute):

The SUSE installation can be started:

Customise the locale settings and accept the terms:

We skipped registration (we don’t need to update SUSE):

Select “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications” and since we will use SSH, de-select “Enable RDP”:

Click “Network Configuration” in the top right hand corner:

I adjusted my install to use a static IP address, I also setup the hostname and fully qualified domain name at this point (you can change this later using “yast lan” if you want):
IP: 192.168.80.2  (relevant to my VMWare host-only setup)
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Hostname: hana01.fqdn.corp

On the next page I added the same hostname and FQDN, then set the DNS resolver policy to “Only Manually” which will allow me to not use DNS at all:

We don’t need any addons:

Check the root partition size on /dev/sda1 and click “Edit Proposal Settings”:

We need to adjust the root partition format to be XFS:
NOTE: XFS is the only supported filesystem for the HANA data and log areas, so why not use it for everything.


Set the timezone:

Set the root password:

On the summary screen disable the firewall and ensure that SSH is enabled:

To minimise memory usage, we set the default start-up mode to “Text Mode” (to change click “Default systemd target”):

After all the screen prompts were answered the install time was approx 10 minutes (at least 1 coffee).
NOTE: There were a couple of instances where a package failed to install.  Clicking “Retry” completed the package installation.
We now need to apply the required O/S changes as per SAP note 2205917.  We can use the saptune command to do this:

# saptune solution apply HANA

Enable SAPTUNE to auto-start:

# saptune daemon start

Shutdown the server.

# shutdown –h now

Edit the VM to add a second hard disk for the HANA database: