Windows Central Instance ABAP+JAVA plus UNIX ABAP dialog instances ?

[Former Member]

Hi everybody,

we are an SAP software partner and provide SAP complementary software on UNIX and Windows platforms.

Part of our software (a gateway) needs to be installed on the SAP application server.

In order to setup a cross-platform test environment for our developers, I was thinking about extending the existing SAP ERP 6.0 Windows-based Central Instance (IDES, Oracle, usage types ABAP+JAVA) by multiple ABAP dialog instances which run on different UNIX flavours (Solaris, AIX, Linux).

I searched the SAP Notes and found nothing which could confirm my plans, as this is quite an unusual setup and heterogenous systems are usually the other way round (CI on UNIX, DI on Windows).

SAP Note 1067221 however mentions that DIs on different OS platforms are only partly supported, but it seems this is only valid for JAVA DIs?

As I need only ABAP DIs, I hope my plans are fine?

Many thanks for your feedback

Markus

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

> I searched the SAP Notes and found nothing which could confirm my plans, as this is quite an unusual setup and heterogenous systems are usually the other way round (CI on UNIX, DI on Windows).

Well - what is "usual" depends on the requirements

It's possible to do that. Technically there's no difference whether an application server is Unix or Windows based.

There are, however, a few things to take care of:

- if your system is non-Unicode, sorting algorithms are different on different platforms. Unicode systems use ICU which is cross-platform

- if you want to automatically distribute your kernel on system start you will need to create a "share" on the Windows machine and make it accessible from the various other platforms. You can, however, ensure "manually", that you use the same kernel patchlevels on all systems, then this is not needed

- Windows is LittleEndian whereas most Unix systems are BigEndian, depending on if you exchange data between those systems (means, binary data, files through NFS) the programs must be aware of the fact, that a file can be either LE or BE.

Markus

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Markus,

thank you very much for the quick reply!

Do you also know why there are restrictions then with JAVA application servers?

As mentioned in Note 1067221, JAVA application servers on different OS are not supported, or only to a very limited extent.

Many thanks

Markus

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

> Do you also know why there are restrictions then with JAVA application servers?

> As mentioned in Note 1067221, JAVA application servers on different OS are not supported, or only to a very limited extent.

This is caused by the fact, that Java makes much more use of filesystem data than the ABAP part and for Java you must have a SMB/CIFS client on the Unix machines to access the global directory.

On top of that you have different JDKs with different parameters which makes the whole system and administrative nightmare...

Markus