Now available: ABAP Platform Trial

[karl_kessler]

Dear SAP customers and partners, dear ABAP developer community,

ABAP  Platform Trial 1909 is available now. ABAP Platform Trial replaces the former Developer Edition 1909. With ABAP Platform Trial 1909 we want to return to you what the ABAP developer community and many SAP customers and partners were missing for a long time: a standalone ABAP trial offering free of charge which you can use for your own educational purposes, for your own configuration and test setups and as a home for your open source projects. Over the last year, we have been in close contact with the SAP Mentors and DSAG (Sebastian Freilinger-Huber and team from AK Development) to better understand their needs and to find a way to offer the trial version again.

Like its predecessor, ABAP Platform Trial is a docker image containing an ABAP application server (ABAP Platform 1909 SP 07) running on top of the SAP HANA 2.0 database and SAP Cloud Connector. You can pull the entire image from docker hub and create a docker container from it, see ABAP Platform Trial on Docker.

ABAP Platform Trial on Docker Hub

ABAP Platform Trial is modeled as an official SAP product and therefore is delivered through a delivery program. A delivery program ensures that the product meets all SAP product and delivery standards. Special thanks to the SAP HANA team who helped us to get started and for their support during the project.

In this fast-paced world with Cloud and AI everywhere version 1909 might sound a bit like an anachronism. However, this version is still in broad use by SAP customers. It was a good starting point for our new delivery approach. We are already working on a subsequent delivery for ABAP Platform Trial 2022 (we leave out version 2020 and 2021). We plan to deliver ABAP Platform Trial for every new ABAP Platform release (version 2023, 2025 and 2027 according to the release strategy for SAP S/4HANA). In addition, we plan to update ABAP Platform Trial subsequently whenever a new SP update for ABAP Platform is released. Please note that the ABAP Platform Trial roadmap like any other SAP roadmap is subject to the usual roadmap disclaimers.

ABAP Platform Trial 1909 is a docker image and very easy to install. You need to get Docker Desktop installed on your Windows laptop or Mac. Then you open a command prompt or Terminal:

docker pull sapse/abap-platform-trial:1909

docker run --stop-timeout 3600 -i --name a4h -h vhcala4hci -p 3200:3200 -p 3300:3300 -p 8443:8443 -p 30213:30213 -p 50000:50000 -p 50001:50001 sapse/abap-platform-trial:1909 -skip-limits-check

Please make sure you have enough main memory on board (>=32 GB). The documentation readme on docker hub provides additional technical details.

Once the docker container is up and running you can log on with ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse, via SAP GUI or via SAP Fiori Launchpad, see screen shots below. Enjoy your ABAP Platform Trial 1909.

The available scope including the preconfigured scenarios are described in Julie Plummer's ABAP Platform Trial rollout blog.

ABAP Platform Trial is a team effort. Many colleagues have contributed in many ways. I would like to say a big THANK YOU to the core team:

• Ralf Henning who owns, develops and maintains (upgrade, patch) the master image,
  drives the content and test efforts


• Stephan Daub who drives the delivery program end to end


• Jakub Filak who develops the docker image and scripts for publication on docker hub


• Natalia Brik, Roman Anisovich, Irina Petrov and Derna Hetherton for their support
  around non-ABAP technical assembly


• Frank Rotter who validates our delivery tasks


• Sandra Thimme who executes the test plan


• Julie Plummer who writes the rollout information and interacts with the community


• Roland Brethauer and Matthis Langhoff for security validation and export classification


• Bettina Knauss for her CAL support

I would like to thank the SAP Mentors for their continuous engagement. Special thanks go to the following SAP Mentors for testing the image and providing their valuable feedback and input: Gregor Wolf, Wouter Lemaire, Martin Fischer and Paul Hardy.

Last but not least I would like to thank you all for your patience regarding this topic. We will keep you in the loop and should something happen unexpectedly we will brief the SAP Mentors and SAP user groups prior to the publication on external media.

Best regards

Karl

ABAP Platform Trial in Docker Desktop

ADT connected to ABAP Platform Trial

SAP Fiori app on ABAP Platform Trial

[cyclingfisch_]

Thanks Karl and team for listening to the community and bringing this back! I think and hope that we having it as an official SAP product will make it easier to keep it up-to-date and also make it something the community can trust on!

Even though it took a while, it was a very good collaboration between the SAP Mentors, DSAG and SAP to get it back. Thanks to all parties envolved!

[larshp]

That's really good news for the ABAP Ecosystem, thank you

[nils-lutz]

Awesome news, thank you for bringing this back!

[pokrakam]

Hooray, big thanks to all who made it possible!

[Sweekar]

karl.kessler

Hi kessler,

could you please do help me with configuration step by step with this please

my pc  12 gb ram

1 tb hdd

i5 configuration

[gregorw]

Hi Karl,

please forward a big thank you to everyone involved! Great to have the ABAP Developer edition back. I think the positive side was the better understanding that SAP gained about the use cases that go beyond just ABAP Development.

Best Regards
Gregor

[jakub_filak]

Yes, of course, first go to favorite hardware shop and buy more powerful machine. Then we can continue.

[wridgeu]

I can just underline what awesome news this is. Big thanks to everyone involved and their continuous effort in bringing this (back)!

[joltdx]

I still have the old version up and running, so I might sit this one out. Nevertheless, I need to say this is great news! Thank you for bringing this back and for the intention to deliver future releases. 👍 It's really valuable for the community!

[huseyindereli]

Great news, thanks!

[marcfbe]

Thank you, SAP! I will just leave this here.

Unfortunately, some issues with the previous Dev Edition have not been addressed in this new release (like missing ports).

What is the preferred feedback channel for this product?

 

[ryfleisch]

Fantastic news! Thank you for the hard work and dedication of the team to make this happen

[ralf_henning]

Hi Marc

Please have a look at section primary contacts at the end of the oververview page.

https://hub.docker.com/r/sapse/abap-platform-trial

Your feeedback is very welcome here.

Kind regards Ralf

[szebenyib]

That's really good news! Thanks for your work.

[albanleong]

Yay! Best news of the year!

[DirkO]

Oh, wow. Do we have already x-mas?

Many thanks for this great present & thanks to all who were involved in making it possible!

Just one question.

Will "docker pull sapse/abap-platform-trial:1909" relplace / overwrite an existing container?

[jakub_filak]

No, it won't. Even more, it will not remove the image you already have downloaded, so you better have lot of disk space.

[AI-BTP]

Great News Karl!

Thanks for bringing it back & already excited for ABAP Platform Trial 2022.

Thanks!

[DirkO]

Hi Jakub,

thank you very much for your clarification.

Br.,

Dirk

[marcfbe]

Funny, but not really. First, his machine isn't far off and might fit some more memory. And second, not everyone can afford the hardware for running SAP software. A simple "no" with a link to the docs would have done.

[freilinger]

Thanks a lot for this.

Thank you Karl & everyone who was involved from SAP side plus a big thanks to the involved SAP Mentors.

This is a great example how a trustworthy relationship to SAP can work based on honest discussions, where every participants puts his statements to the table in a constructive, target-oriented manner.

Extremly looking forward to the 2022 edition 🙂

[jakub_filak]

Marc has made a good point - my comment is too vague. So to be more precise, you do not need more powerful machine, you just need more RAM as 12GB is not enough (the official value is 32GB - I have no link to share and I am not a fan of screenshots, but it is the only bold text just below the pull and run command).

[Jörg_Brandeis]

Great! Many thanks to SAP and to everyone who repeatedly asked. To the 278 votes on influence.sap.com and to everyone else who didn't let up.

It's great that the community is being heard by SAP.

[jakub_filak]

Networking depends on Operating System, but as far as I know, there is no need to change anything in the image to give you access to any port you need.

For example, my primary OS is Fedora Linux and I can access all ports of my containers regardles of the run command I issue. I just have to use IP address of the container and iptables route my packages at the desired place.

Windows and Mac are different because containers are build on the top of Linux kernel Namespaces. Therefore, to make Docker running, the real docker process must run in a virtual machine with Linux. I am not sure but I bet setting up ip router on Mac/Windows is probably not a trivial task (well, iptables configuraion on GNU/Linux is certainly not trivial either ...) and thus one has to use the parameter --publish(-p) on the run command to make the required ports available directly on the host. (Since I have no Windows nor Mac machine available my understand of these OSes is limitted and I might have been mistaken. Please, correct me if I am wrong).

[bztoy]

This is really great new and exited for the in coming 2022 edition (and more). Thank you SAP for helping us especially the independent developer who doesn't have the right to access newer version of SAP environment.

I do believe that with the comeback of ABAP Platform Trial will make good impact to the ABAP community.

[wesson]

I see something similar, it is SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP Developer Edition.

What are the differences between them?

For ABAP, I am new guy.

[DiegoDora]

HI karl.kessler ,

I wanted to thank you and the team for having so many open discussions with the SAP Mentors. Taking the time to get with us and listen our concerns to later on materialize those into viable and tangiable solution motivates us even more to bring our opinions foreward and collaborate with all of you.

Thank you ALL again and we look forward to continue working together !

[martinc_mb]

Nice one! The ABAP communities thank you.

[ipravir]

Run Successfully 🙂

[joachimrees1]

Awesome, thanks a lot!

[abo]

Still have to check this edition but the previous A4H could run on a Linux machine with 32GB, at the same time as the older NPL VM. Long story short, those values have some margin built into them.

It's also gonna be interesting to see if the minimum kernel version has been upgraded: I'm still using a 5.16 (or something) instead of the current 6.4 series, otherwise the container would not start.

[Sadullah]

Hey Wesson,

ABAP trial works in Docker container, Netweaver Dev Edition works on Virtual Machine like Oracle Virtual Box.

Dev Edition version 7.52 (You can't do a "select query" for internal table, you can't create CDS View Entity etc.). Docker needs more memory to run the image as mentioned above, 32 GB. You can run Netweaver Dev Edition with a 8 GB RAM (I did it).

To brevity, if you need a local SAP environment, choose one of them, of course, it depends on your PC hardware limitations.

[Nigel_James]

This is really great news.

Thanks to the mentors and others for pressing SAP with the case that this is needed.

 

In the 20th year of the community it is great to have this back. I remember back in 2003 downloading my first ABAP trial in the beta community.

 

 

 

[Marian_Zeis]

Thanks to the whole team for making this possible!
I am especially looking forward to future releases.

Have you tested it or made it work on an Apple Silicon?
I'm stuck on "HDB: starting" at startup.
There is enough RAM available for Docker.
Anything I can debug or check?

 

docker run --sysctl kernel.shmmax=21474836480 --sysctl kernel.shmmni=32768 --sysctl kernel.shmall=5242880 --sysctl kernel.msgmni=1024 --sysctl kernel.sem="1250 256000 100 8192" --ulimit nofile=1048576:1048576  --stop-timeout 3600 -i --name a4h -h vhcala4hci -p 3200:3200 -p 3300:3300 -p 8443:8443 -p 30213:30213 -p 50000:50000 -p 50001:50001 sapse/abap-platform-trial:1909 -agree-to-sap-license -skip-limits-check

WARNING: The requested image's platform (linux/amd64) does not match the detected host platform (linux/arm64/v8) and no specific platform was requested



You have accepted the SAP Developer Center Software Developer License Agreement

by passing the parameter -agree-to-sap-license.

You can read the license text in the file /SAP_COMMUNITY_DEVELOPER_License

in the image.

Hint: docker exec -it a4h less /SAP_COMMUNITY_DEVELOPER_License



WARNING: the following system limits are below recommended values:

  (sysctl vm.max_map_count = 262144) < 2147483647

  (sysctl fs.file-max = 524288) < 20000000

  (sysctl fs.aio-max-nr = 1048576) < 18446744073709551615

Hint: if you are on Linux, consider running the following system commands:

  sudo sysctl vm.max_map_count=2147483647

  sudo sysctl fs.file-max=20000000

  sudo sysctl fs.aio-max-nr=18446744073709551615

sapinit: starting

start hostcontrol using profile /usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/host_profile

Impromptu CCC initialization by 'rscpCInit'.

  See SAP note 1266393.

Impromptu CCC initialization by 'rscpCInit'.

  See SAP note 1266393.

sapinit: started, pid=14



HDB: starting

[Sweekar]

Hi Filak ,

 

can u help how can i get sap abap trial like can u help configuration for aws or azure or gcp we can get that right

[rcaziraghi]

Big thanks to the team for releasing the ABAP Platform Trial 1909 - it's what we've all been waiting for! It's really cool that you've been working with the SAP Mentors and DSAG to shape it. Looking forward to the next releases!

[jakub_filak]

Sure. First order a Linux machine with 32GB RAM and 200GB disk space. If you can choose distribution, use some RHEL alternative, or Fedora, or OpenSUSE, or Ubuntu. Once you have the machine and working ssh conneciton, we can continue. I have never ever order a machine on Azure nor GCP, so I cannot help you with this task.

Also, I am not sure this is the right forum for such guidance. You can find the right contact on the overview page:

https://hub.docker.com/r/sapse/abap-platform-trial

[ralf_henning]

Hi Marian

we tested it on an Apple with Intel CPU

Fact is, creation of the container could take some time.

Log stops at HDB: starting and continues several minutes later.

Our test settings:

[jakub_filak]

Start shell in the container and check HDB logs.

I start shell in the container this way:

docker exec -it a4h bash

Then I would explore the logs at:

• /usr/sap/HDB/HDB02/vhcala4hci/trace/DB_HDB


• /usr/sap/HDB/HDB02/vhcala4hci/trace/

 

I have no idea what to look for as the root cause can be anything and also I am not strong in SAP HANA. Therefore analyzing the logs is up to you.

[szebenyib]

Do we need an AS ABAP license if we intend to use the container multiple times and for a few months? If so how to obtain one? (I know about License Key in sap for me, but I doubt that for such an instance this would be the way or is it?)

It seems to be valid to 10.31. So by design it can be used till the new release is not available?

[cyclingfisch_]

Hi Balint,

it comes with a free developer license. No need to obtain a license in SAP for me.

I didn't get your last question, maybe you can rephrase it.

Cheers,

Martin

[szebenyib]

Thanks, it is okay then, just the docker install guide mislead me a bit with this. It starts just fine this way out of the box.

The last question referred to the license being valid till 2023.10.19 and above in the intro you have written that you plan to release a 2022 version of this ABAP Platform trial. I just suspected from this that this validity end date is intentional and makes the image usable till the new version of ABAP Platform trial appears.

[ralf_henning]

Get a fresh license here:

https://go.support.sap.com/minisap/#/minisap

Call transaction slicense to replace existing one.

The  license the system comes up with is a temporary one. You need to replace it before you can start to develop.

Transaction slicense supports you with the hardwarekey. 

SAP trial license can be renewed several times. It's valid for 3 month.

License the container comes up with

License after applying a SAP trial license

The SAP Hana license expires end of next year. No need to replace the next time 😉

[vladislavkustov]

Appreciation to all who made it possible!

[nomssi]

your efforts to simplify and streamline the installation process paid off. For me it was the smoothest installation for a trial sofar.

Thanks to your whole team and every helper for the hard work! I look forward to seeing you keep this level on with future releases.

Best regards,

JNN

[Former Member]

Kudos from my side as well !

[TMNielsen]

Hi Jakub

You make it sound like it must run on Linux, but as I understand sapse/abap-platform-trial - Docker Image | Docker Hub it can run on Linux, Windows and macOS just as well.

Or am I wrong?

I agree that this is not the right forum but does the right forum exist?

I hope SAP creates a dedicated tag for "ABAP Platform Trial" instead of just using the more generic "ABAP Development". After all, the installation of ABAP Platform Trial has not much to do with the decipline of writing ABAP code.

Regards

Thomas Madsen Nielsen

[jakub_filak]

You are not wrong. Docker runs in Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux and you can run the image from your Windows, macOS or GNU/Linux workstation.

Reasons why I asked MACHIREDDYPALLY to order Linux.

Techincall backgroug:

As I wrote somewhere else, Docker containers are built on top of Linux Kernel Namespaces (and some other Linux features like cgroups): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_namespaces

So people running Docker on Windows or macOS, do run a transparent Virtual machine with Operating System built around Linux kernel, which runs the real docker container engine.

Pople running docker on GNU/Linux do run the docker container engine on their GNU/Linux directly without any additional hypervisior.

1. Reason efficiency:

Running docker on GNU/Linux is simply more efficient as you do not need the intermediate VM with GNU/Linux. Ordergin macOS or Windows would mean that you order a VM only to run a hidden VM which runs the docker container engine.

2. Reason skills:

I would not be able to help anybody with deploying Docker on Windows or macOS as I have no practical experience with those Operating Systems (I have stopped using windows 12years ago - I have a Windows XP Professional Administrator certificate though; I have seen macOS three times and touched a keyboard connect to a terminal on macOS only once).

I hope my answer clarifies the topic.

Disclaimer: I had no intention to start an OS flame war - use whatever OS you like. I did not realize I could offer an OS (actually I could not offer it because of my skills).

[RolandKramer]

Hello marcbernardtools, jakub.filak and karl.kessler

As Marc already said: nice try and also HANA needs at a minimum a 32 (better 48) GB node to run at a minimum, and the RAM for the SAP Instance is not added.

We already made this experience with our internal implementation of SAP Data Intelligence - SAP Data Intelligence 3.0 – implement with slcb tool (more about DI can be found here)

For internal purposes, the "Developer Edition" aka IDES never disappeared and can still be accessed, but hurry several parties want to dismantle the servers soon ... 😞

Running "SAP as mini" like a proper system will be a dream, as SAP (on-premise) can only big(ger) ... 😉

[abo]

Pleased to report that the new image runs on kernel 6.4 on the current Debian/testing: this alone is reason enough for me to move my repos from the old to the new one, so thanks!

A few random remarks:

• the name of the abapGit complete report should be ZABAPGIT_STANDALONE, not ZABAPGITFULL (can be fixed in the next version, really minor issue)


• the SFLIGHT scenario is pointing to a branch that has been renamed


• the SSL certs for GitHub are expired

Nothing terrible, you just have to know it.