If you are working as an SAP Consultant and Developer like me, but you're not having a instance of a new NetWeaver to test new technologies (UI5/Fiori), I am recommending the Developer Edition. SAP provides us at Developer Trials and Downloads a free NetWeaver installation with ABAP stack.
In their own Blog SAP is recommending a SUSE installation as OS, but it is also working on my Ubuntu powered machine. I am running my own physical server, but if you are not it is no problem to install the NetWeaver in a virtual machine e.g. Oracles VirtualBox.
Requirements
- Linux 64 bit
- 6 GB RAM (in my case 4GB have been sufficient)
- 100 GB of disk space
Installation
Before we are starting with the proper installation, we have to install the C shell and UUID to create unique table keys.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install csh && sudo apt-get install uuid
After installing the necessary components, the script which was included in the download has to be made executable and started.
sudo chmod +x install.sh
sudo ./install.sh
The script will ask you to accept the license agreement and to enter a password for the OS users used by the SAP instance. Now we are able to get a good cup of coffee because the installation takes a while.
To start the instance we have to change to the created user npladm and execute the start script.
sudo su npladm
startsap < hostname >
Should everything have gone without problems the NetWeaver instance is already reachable via SAP GUI. If not, I am recommending to check the log files with SAP Management Console which is accessible through the browser of your choice with < hostname >:50013.
To activate the installation a license key is necessary, which could be ordered for free here. How to activate the system could be read in the readme.html which comes with the download.
useful information
If the start script is running without an error, but the instance is not reachable it could be possible that in /etc/hosts the hostname is assigned to the ip address 127.0.0.1. You have to assign your server a fix ip address and adjust the hosts file /etc/hosts.
I am a person who strictly separates OS and data to different HDDs. To install the NetWeaver I have first tried symlinks but here it comes to problems, so I have decided to adjust the fstab
sudo nano /etc/fstaband add your folders as mount points
#SAP folders
/media/Data/sapinst/sybase /sybase none bind 0 0
/media/Data/sapinst/sapmnt /sapmnt none bind 0 0
After a reboot you should be able to access your folders from root directory.