How To Fix 3 Issues With Your First SAP BW on HANA Trial

SAP has been refreshingly open in recent years with free online training courses (https://open.sap.com).

To further your understanding of the concepts, SAP has provided trial versions of their software (https://cal.sap.com). They have also streamlined the installation process by using Amazon Web Services. It’s almost as simple as downloading an app from the iTunes or Google App Store.

Almost.

In my first experience with the SAP Marketplace and AWS, I ran into 3 undocumented issues that had me stumped for days. I’ve outlined the issues and resolutions below in hopes that this will save you the headache.

Invalid Account Credentials (AWS User-ID and Group Issue)
Pending Verification Issue
Region and Subnet (Remote Desktop Issue)

I’ll briefly go over the three issues & resolutions in the paragraphs below. If you need additional clarification, then check out the video at the end of this article where I go into further detail.

Invalid Account Credentials
(AWS User-ID and Group Issue)

In order to install the trial, you need a AWS user-id with access to the credentials as per http://aws.amazon.com/developers/access-keys/

AmazonEC2FullAccess
AmazonVPCFullAccess
ReadOnlyAccess
AWSAccountUsageReportAccess

Just remember to assign your user-id to the new groups.

Pending Verification Issue

If you happen to see the a “pending verification” status during the installation of your SAW BW on HANA Trial, then you need to take three additional steps.

Contact Amazon (or they will give you a call) to confirm your account and activity.
Delete the current instance of the appliance in SAP CAL.
Install the appliance in SAP CAL again.

Having received this message in a prior attempt, I waited 20 hours only to find that the installation was stuck. Just delete the instance after you contact Amazon and install it again.

Region and Subnet (Remote Desktop Issue)

If you’ve gotten this far, then you should see a green square next to your instance in SAP CAL, indicating your appliance has been installed, active, and ready for use. Congratulations!

However, you cannot tunnel into your server using Remote Desktop.

To resolve this issue, delete your instance and recreate it (again) with the following setting

Region: ap-northeast-1
Subnet: VPC subnet in ap-northeast-1c

There seems to be region specific issues with the SAP Trial packages. I tried a few combinations during the installation and the above setting worked.

Bonus

As an added bonus, there is an Wonderful Guide that provides plenty of exercises (and step-by-step instructions) for the new functionality in SAP BW 7.4 on HANA and SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 on HANA. I highly recommend going through the exercises to become more familiar with the new concepts.