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This tutorial will provide you an alternative guide on how you get your first experience with our SAP Trials offered via SAP Cloud Appliance Library. The approach described should enable you to get your trial instance up and running on AWS with minimal configuration effort on Amazon Web Service (AWS). Although we describe this approach we still recommend that you follow the more secure setup descriptions in the tutorial with a virtual private cloud and VPN access http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-46629.

Disclaimer

Please keep in mind that this is just a proposal to get you started quickly and only one variant how to realize such a scenario. There are a lot more installation and configuration options which are not shown below. Thus, this might not be the perfect setup for your personal use case. So please consider alternative scenarios explained in the VPC documentation. In addition, we always recommend to set up a billing alert for your AWS account to avoid unpleasant surprises.


Pre-requisites

  1. You have an active AWS account.
  2. Although SAP offers the trial for free your will have costs for running the trial on AWS. Please ensure that you create a “billing alert” for your AWS account as soon as possible.
  3. Familiarize yourself with the AWS console, e.g.
    1. This means switch to AWS Management Console
    2. Click on Service EC2
    3. It is important for the trial that you ensure that you have selected region “US East (N.Virginia)” in right upper corner on AWS screen. The trial offering will only be deployable to AWS region US East.
  4. You have configured your Cloud Provider account within SAP Cloud Appliance Library

Alternative Deployment Options

  1. Public Deployment
    As soon as you fulfill the pre-requisites mentioned above you can directly start creating an instance of the trial within your AWS account.


    This option implies that your instance will be deployed into the AWS public cloud environment. The instance will get a public IP assigned and it will be accessible from the public network. This is the easiest and fastest way to create your own trial instance.

    If you mark the option “Static IP Address” an IP address will be reserved by AWS for the whole time the instance exists and not only for the time the instance is started. This option will produce costs on AWS (see link) since the IP address is reserved for you. Nevertheless this option will ease your client configuration since you will not always have to reconfigure your clients due to a changed IP address after restart

    It is important that you are aware that this deployment option implies that your instance is public and therefore accessible from all over the internet.

    After the deployment time of 40 minutes you are able to start working with the instance.  Just try on your own to directly access the instance via ssh or SAP GUI from your computer. (Ensure that you are not behind a firewall or proxy which blocks the ports required.)

    Important:
    With regards to security please ensure that you also read the last paragraph of this post which mentions the minimum security options which you should consider with a public deployment.

  2. Public VPC Deployment
    Next to the mentioned pre-requisites above this deployment option requires the additional step of creating a VPC within your AWS account.
    (Please Ensure that you are always working in AWS region “US East (N.Virginia)”).

    After you have created the VPC you can directly start creating your trial instance via the SAP Cloud Appliance Library Test Drive Center. You will now have the additional option to deploy the instance into the “corporate network” which means into your newly created VPC.

    The instance will be directly visible within your EC2 console on AWS, and it will be ready to use after the deployment time of 40 minutes, but until now you will not be able to access it since your VPC is a private network on AWS.

    In the first step open the AWS console and navigate to the EC2 service, Elastic IPs. Allocate an Elastic IP for use with VPC:


In the second step select the Elastic IP from the list and click on “Associate Address” and assign it in the upcoming pop-up to your trial instance.



It is important that you notice that you now have exposed the instance to the public internet and that you can access it in the same way as in the first option described above. The differences to the first approach are:

    • The instance is running within your VPC
    • You are responsible to associate or release the Elastic IP via your AWS console

Important:
With regards to security please ensure that you also read the last paragraph of this post which mentions the minimum security options which you should consider with a public deployment.


Security Considerations:

For the above options we recommend the following minimum steps:

  • Stop the instance via the SAP Cloud Appliance Library if you do not use it
  • Restrict the Access Points of the instance on the configuration tab “Virtual Machine” within the instance details on the SAP Cloud Appliance Library, to your IP address. You can get your IP address via internet services like e.g. http://whatismyipaddress.com/.
    If you restrict the IP range of the access points of your instance to “[YOUR-IP]/32” only you will have access to the instance via the access point.
  • For the second option always release the Elastic IP address from the instance if you do not use it.

This post describes the fastest approach to get access to your trial on AWS. We hope that it is good starting point and that you have fun with the trial and feel motivated to get more familiar with alternative AWS setup options.

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