Setting up a BW/4 Instance in CAL

Being familiar with AWS or any other PaaS or SaaS provider one should think that setting up an instance of a piece of software is a one to ten click thing in modern times. Not so with SAP!

Today I have struggled with the activation of the “SAP BW/4HANA 2.0 SP02 including SAP BW/4HANA Content 2.0 SP01” image in CAL and not only with the image but also with the very poor “Getting Started with SAP BW/4HANA 2.0 SP02 including SAP BW/4HANA Content 2.0 SP01” that acompanies the image.

In order to ease your experience with the image, I have sumarized my experiences:

Above mentioned image is the newest BW/4 HANA image available in the CAL.

After activation the system only offers the intial 000 client (which can’t be used as a BW client) and adiditonal work has to be performed to make the instance fly.

Normaly a new client can be created in transaction SCC4 in SAP GUI. However, a coding error (described in SNOTE 2354516) prevents a user from doing so. Unfortunately the note only adresses SAP BASIS 750 to 751 but the image is based on SAP BASIS 753. (The very poor documentation mentioned above also doesn’t take this into account). Be this as it is, the image will not allow to create a new client in SCC4:

However, if you call SM30 to maintain table T000, you will succeed:

Now you can create an entry according to your preferences:

After you have created the new client (here 001 with name BW4) you have to log on to this client. Unfortunately the very poor documentation provided by SAP doesn’t explain what has to be done, so here is my guidance:

Because the new client doesn’t know any user the system has to be prepared to at least accept a logon with user “SAP*”. Therfore the profile parameter “login/no_automatic_user_sapstar” has to be changed. Call transaction RZ10 and select the DEFAULT profile via the F4 Help. Mark the “Extended maintenance” radio button and press “Change”:

The upcoming screen will display your parameters and in the bar above you will see three!!! “Parameter” entries (who codes such nonsense?). Only by hovering over the parameter buttons you will see that every button has a distinct meaning and what we need is the “Create” button which is the one to the left:

You will receive a warning which doesn’t really convey any meaning because our intention is to add something to this profile

In the next screen type “login*” into the “Parameter Name” box and F4 for “login/no_automatic_user_sapstar”

Set the parameter to “0” which means “deactivated” and with a very intuitive double negation logic this will result in user “SAP*” being available in every client. Revert to the previous scrren by saving the changes:

Do the same from the profile maintenance screen:

Most probably you will receive a warning about faulty parameters. If you have followed these instructions, your parameter is correctly set and you can ignore the warnings because these faulty parameters were provided by SAP!!!

Lastly confirm that you want to activate the new profile:

In order to make the changes take effect, you have to restart your instance now. This can be done in CAL or on Linux level if you are familiar with the procedure.

After the system has restarted you should be able to logon to your new client. Be aware that the only user that can logon is “SAP*” with the predefined password “pass”. (This should ring the bell to remind you that you have to reset the parameter “login/no_automatic_user_sapstar” to”1″ once you have finished your work):

Now, call transaction SCCL to initate the client copy. Unfortunately the documentation is also silent about the profile to use for the cleint copy but SAP_CUST should be the right one. Beacuse the source client is not very big you can “Start immediately” or, if you prefer, run the copy process in the background:

You should receive an intermediate confirmation…

…and finaly adn hopefully something like:

Now, be aware of the final steps required to compete the setup:

◉ create a user in SU01 of the new client and provide it with the necessary authorizations

◉ log-off from the new client

◉ log on to client 000 and reset the parameter “login/no_automatic_user_sapstar” to “1”

◉ if you wish, set parameter “login/system_client” to the newly created client (this will ease the logon process because the BW4 client is then already set in the logon screen

◉ acitivate the new profile as you did before and restart the installation

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You’re more or less done. Unfortunately the documentation again becomes very inacurate in chapter “2.6.3 Setting up BW/4HANA Client”, so you might encounter even more problems when trying to set up the system. I will therefore briefly try to clarify how the setup is:

The image is based on a HANA 2.0 Database with a system DB and a tenant called “A4H”. Unfortunately the documentation is silent about this and talks of a user SAP<SID> that should grant rights to other users because user system could not do so.

Now, first of all, there is no user SAP<SID> in this system (this was HANA 1.0!). There is a user “SAPHANADB” in tenant “A4H” and this user is the owner of the BW tables. If for any reason you want to access the BW tables from HANA-native side with a different user, you must make “SAPHANADB” grant this access to such a user (however you should be aware of the security implications).

The “SAP_BW4*”-Roles mentioned in the document are pure BW/4 PFCG roles and don’t have to do anything with native HANA development. These roles should be assigned to the users working with BW/4 HANA according to their business function.