SAP Demos in Amazon EC2 Cloud

[Former Member]

Hi All,

I have recently started using Amazon EC2 to run a series of SAP Demo servers. The benefit of this is that I can shut down my instances when they are not in use and restart them when necessary, thereby saving ongoing running costs.

The bad news is, when I restart a server instance it starts up with a different SAP Hardware Key. This of course makes my SAP license invalid and makes the idea of running my SAP Demos in EC2 pointless if I need to request a new SAP license key every time I reactivate an instance.

Is anyone aware of this and have found a way to retain the hardware key?

Thanks for any help at all.

Regards,

Julie

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Julie,

I am not sure if you can retain the same hardware key as in case you are using Ondemand instances.

I will suggest you to check with Amazon for the Reserved instances.

Nikhil

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Nikhil, I will look into reserved instances. I'll leave this as unanswered for a few more days just in case someone has a different suggestion.

Thanks for your reply.

Julie

[kenichi_mori · Accepted solution]

Hi Julie,

What is OS platform of EC2 that you use?

It has not encountered the problem with a different hardware key so far though I am using Windows 2008 R2 x86_64.

I am using all the volumes with EBS. But reserved Instance is not used.

Kenichi

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Julie,

In the case of Windows on EC2 this should not be a problem and I donu2019t think it should be a problem with Linux (I will test this and confirm). On Windows the hardware key is generated from the computername and Windows SID. By default EC2 generates a new computername every time an instance is started. This may be your problem. You can change this behavior by using the EC2ConfigService tool installed on Windows instances. Go to Start > All Programs > EC2ConfigService Settings u2013 on the General tab deselect u201CSet the computername of the instanceu2026u201D. On Linux the hardware key is generated from the MAC address of the first NIC. I donu2019t think this changes on an EC2 instance after restart so if you are on Linux the problem might also be that the hostname is changing.

Regards,

Bill

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Julie,

I did test the behavior with a SUSE Linux instance and the MAC address of the NIC did change after an instance stop/start (but not after an OS restart). This makes sense because you are basically running your instance on a new server after a stop/start. By default on Linux the hardware key is generated based on the MAC address so having the MAC address change after a start/stop is not a good thing as far as the license goes. Per note 1178686 you can change the hardware key generation on Linux which may resolve your issue if you are running on Linux.

Regards,

Bill

[Former Member]

Hi Julie,

From you experience, do you think it would be possible to manage the license directly in the AWS image so that each instance based on this image can leverage the original license ? Currently I have to update the license manually on each of the instance I've created which is not ideal.  

Regards. Remi

[Former Member]

Thanks all for your helpful comments. I have been using Windows 2008 instances, and will be using Linux in future (Thanks especially to Bill for the SAP Note for Linux).

I think my problem must have been with the hostname. In hindsight, perhaps I had applied the license prior to setting the Permanent Hostname. In any case, I just restarted the server after a three week break, and the hardware key was the same as three weeks ago.

Thanks and best regards,

Julie

[Former Member]

Hi Julie,

Finally I found what I'm looking for.

I have been using EC2 from couple of months for other web applications using AWS RDS services.

Now I have a new requirement, to implement SAP BO demo servers on Amazon EC2. I would like to know that how you implemented this. Will the Amazon provides such pre-configured images? Or do SAP provides any such facilitation on EC2?

Will be looking for your support!!

Regards,

UB