The introduction of SAP, in the ordinary world, is considered not the easiest task. Different kinds of analysts inspect, shovel the entire enterprise, change business processes, consult many times and many times, and even IT infrastructure is calculated by specially trained super-specialists. However, to help us, there is a service for the automated deployment of German products in the mode: clicked, waited, tested (or even work).
This service is called the SAP CAL (Cloud Appliance Library).
If you want to see the functionality of something "Saperovsky", then you need to have only resources in one of the big clouds (Azure, AWS, Google). Further, inside this library there are already pre-configured templates for a fairly large number of products.
The other day, I just had such a problem, to prepare one of the previously unknown products for me, but because I'm friends with Azure, then of course it was there that I looked.
Then everything is completely simple.
We select the product, in my case it is the SAP Solution Manager and we get all the available options for deployment:
Choose the option that is interesting and enter it:
We download various docks on the links and, without particularly bothering with painstaking reading, we immediately begin to deploy.
You first need to link your SAP CAL account with your account in your existing Azure subscription (we remember that you have one). In the corresponding account management dialog (at the top left in SAP Cal there is an Accounts menu) we specify the name and password for Azure and the subscription ID. Azure subscription settings are easily extracted, for example, by logging into the portal.azure.com portal in the subscriptions section.
Next, you will be offered a choice of two options: basic and advanced.
The basic version is needed if you want to do everything as quickly as possible. In the extended, it is allowed to select the address space, the size of virtual machines, the size of the connected drives.
In both cases, it should be during the dialogue, set up a schedule at which the machines will automatically turn off (and if you need to turn on), which will save quite well.
Selecting the option, proceed to save the private key, which may be required for the administration of future servers. The key can be saved locally or in the built-in SAP CAL repository (select according to the level of the built-in paranoia).
After warning (for the free trial version) that the installation is being deployed for a "demo" and should not be taken to measure performance, etc. begins automated product deployment.
In fact, that's all. It only remains to wait for quite some time. For simple deployments, such as the single-machine demo version of SAP S4 / HANA - about 40 minutes. For larger options, for example, for five machine implementation of Solution Manager + SAP S4 / HANA, the deployment time was about 4.5 hours.
We get a summary of the deployed resources:
After deployment, in addition to the productive servers, a jump node is automatically created, which can be accessed via the public IP address via RDP, and further, the productive servers (that are not visible from the outside) are administered through it.
Or you can start looking at the product itself here, in our case Solution Manager:
What did not like.
Although the service and reports on the planned cost of resource costs, I still would like to understand exactly what we get in the end. The target ARM template before deployment can not be pulled out, and the descriptive document that is present does not reveal the essence of the implementation in a particular cloud. Inconvenient. Could and immediately share the template. Not so to pull the ARM template after deployment.
At the same time, there are also products left overboard that, although they are in the library, are designed to be deployed without a trial period, immediately for cash. In this case, to see what the infrastructure will be deployed, the more will not work.
But in general, for most of the products presented in the library, you can deploy, not plunging into the intricacies of the infrastructure and immediately begin functional testing.
What actually was required.