For the past month and a half I have worked as a Cloud Operations Intern at SAP National Security Services (NS2). My time at NS2 has exposed me to a whole new host of technologies and tools. A lot of cutting edge tools are used to solve the complex problems that SAP NS2 is faced with. For example, I’ve used Splunk heavily. In the future, I will transfer my Splunk notes onto here as well. Anyways, one of the platforms that I’ve heard repeatedly about is SAP HANA. HANA stands for high-performance analytic appliance.
HANA is a very powerful SAP product. SAP HANA as a platform is truly unrivaled. It combines a complex and robust database with services that generate innovative applications. One big advantage of SAP HANA is the capability it has in enabling real-time business by converging transactions and analytics on one in-memory platform. According to people who I’ve talked to, it is leaps and bounds ahead of anything Oracle has to offer in terms of its flexibility, scalability, ease of use, etc.
The versatility of SAP HANA is something that stuck out to me. After researching it in depth, I found out that it can be available as a comprehensive infrastructure combined with managed services. These services are consumable through SAP Cloud Platform and the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service. Also available through other third party cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This was actually something I noticed when I was doing one of my Azure modules. The integrated environments create a seamless transition from one platform to another.
In pursuit of getting actual hands on experience with SAP HANA, I thought it’d be a good idea to spin up a VM on my own personal machine. I usually use my Macbook for my other VM’s that I have, such as my Kali Linux and Windows VM on my Macbook. However, after reading and researching I figured a Windows machine would be more suitable especially when I have to install the VMware Workstation Player. The VMware Workstation Player was available for either Linux or Windows, so I used a Windows machine for this learning experience. For the installation there was a number of steps that needed to be taken.
- First step was to install JAVA JRE on my laptop
- After that, downloaded SAP HANA Express Edition for Windows from SAP HANA website.
- Installed VMware Workstation Player
- Finally, I had to import the SAP HANA VM image.
hammad yousuf 