Overview
In May 2023, we announced the General Availability of Azure Centre for SAP solutions. With Azure Center for SAP solutions (ACSS), one of the key capabilities is a logical representation of the SAP system or what we call a Virtual Instance for SAP solutions resource. With the virtual instance, you can see and interact with the SAP system directly in Azure, even for your existing systems by registering them.
Benefits of registering your SAP systems with ACSS:
Azure Center for SAP solutions enables you to deploy new SAP systems on Azure as well as register existing systems already on Azure. Once you register SAP systems, you unlock various SAP management capabilities such as:
- View and track the SAP system as an Azure resource, called the Virtual Instance for SAP solutions (VIS).
- Get recommendations for SAP infrastructure, Operating System configurations etc. based on quality checks that evaluate best practices for SAP on Azure.
- Get health and status information about the SAP system.
- Start and stop SAP application tier.
- Start and stop individual instances, that is ABAP SAP Central Services (ASCS), App server and HANA Database.
- Monitor the Azure infrastructure metrics for the SAP system resources.
- View Cost Analysis for the SAP system.
How to register your SAP systems with ACSS?
We have heard from our customers how easy it is to register systems with ACSS using the Azure Portal experience. Customers can also use PowerShell, CLI or Restful APIs if they prefer. If you have hundreds of SAP systems running on Azure or looking to automate the registration process, keep reading to find out how you can register all your SAP systems at scale using Azure PowerShell.
The automation using PowerShell described in this blog is an example and you should be able to modify this and build further for the use-cases and scenarios that you have.
At scale registration of existing SAP systems running on Azure
Before getting started with registering systems, make sure to review the pre-requisites and supported systems.
The example script described in this article can be run from any Powershell 5.1 Console (eg. Local machine, Virtual Machine, Azure CloudShell etc.) which can access azure resources.
Steps to register your SAP systems at scale:
- Install the Az.Workloads PowerShell module for your PowerShell environment.
- Prepare a csv file with details about your SAP systems using this template. The attributes which need to be included in the input file are:
- SID name for the SAP systems you are registering.
- ACSS service location based on the region in which your SAP system resources are present. You can look up the corresponding ACSS service location using this documentation.
- Environment type for the SAP system, that is Prod or NonProd.
- SAP product for the SID being registered. Valid values are S/4HANA, ECC and Other.
- ABAP SAP Central Services (ASCS) virtual machine resource identifier.
- User assigned managed identity with the right permissions.
- Optionally, you can provide the names for Managed Resource Group and Managed Storage Account that will be created as part of the registration process. If you do not provide these names, ACSS service deploys them using its default naming convention.
- For the resources which get deployed as part of registration process, you can optionally add any tags that you need. The sample input file shows how multiple tag name-value pairs can be added for each system being registered.
- State field in the input file can be ignored.
- Download the example PowerShell script. Script has the below parameters which need to be input as arguments:
- InputFile - This is a mandatory parameter which represents the path of the csv file which has the data for the SAP systems which are going to be registered. Sample file can be found here.
- OutputFile - This is a mandatory parameter which represents the path of output csv file which will be generated by the script with the status of the registration process. Sample file can be found here.
- MonitoringIntervalInSeconds -- This is an optional parameter which specifies the number of seconds for which script waits to check the status of jobs during execution. Default value is 30 seconds.
- MaxParallelJobs - This is an optional parameter which specifies the limit of parallel jobs that can run at a time. Default value is 10.
- Use Get-Help cmdlet to get information about the script and parameters.
5. Run the script to register SAP systems with ACSS. The script reads data from the input file and triggers parallel jobs for registration of systems.
Sample command for Windows:
C:\ AcssRegistration\RegisterSIDs.ps1 -InputFile "C:\input\RegistrationData.csv" -OutputFile "C:\output\RegistrationDataOutput.csv"
Sample command for Linux:
pwsh -Command "/home/user/acssRegistration/RegisterSIDs.ps1 -InputFile /home/user/acssRegistration /RegistrationData.csv -OutputFile /home/user/acssRegistration /RegistrationDataOutput.csv"
6. See the systems being registered on the Azure Portal Virtual Instance for SAP solutions page.
7. Once the Registration is complete, verify the status of each SID in the output file and from the Azure Portal.
Troubleshooting:
In case of any errors with registration, you can see the error message on the script console as shown below:
For detailed error messages, go to the Azure Portal and navigate to the overview page for the specific Virtual Instance for SAP solutions resource that failed to register and see error information as shown in screenshot below:
You can take the necessary steps to resolve the errors based on recommended actions in the error message. If you need help with resolving any of the issues, you can raise a support ticket from within the ACSS page on the portal.
Conclusion
Once you have registered your systems with Azure Center for SAP solutions, start using the various management capabilities such as Quality Insights, Cost Analysis, Start and stop SAP application and more.
Learn more
Check out the following updated resources to learn more about Azure Center for SAP solutions.
