SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance: Create your SAP S/4HANA system in a fraction of the usual setup time

[JoergWolf]

Last updated: December 15th, 2023

Summary

• The SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance is a pre-packaged SAP S/4HANA system for non-production use cases such as sandboxing, proof-of-concept, scoping, or fit-gap analysis.

• The appliance contains both curated ready-to-use demo scenarios (some based on SAP Best Practices, some freely defined) as well as a separate client with the greenfield activation of SAP Best Practices for all available localizations.

• You can create your own personal system with full administrative rights either hosted in the cloud (takes ~ 1-2 hours) or on your own on-premise hardware (takes ~ 2-3 days).

• For the cloud deployment you need a valid account at a supported hosting provider, currently those are AWS, Azure and GCP. The hosting costs will be charged to your account (typically 3-4 USD per system uptime hour)

• Once you have such an account, the easiest way to start is the SAP S/4HANA trial (SAP licenses are waived for 30 days; only the cloud provider hosting fees apply). An extensive demo guide walks you through sample scenarios with pre-defined users and data sets.

Latest news from December 15th, 2023:
The SAP S/4HANA 2023 (SP00) Fully-Activated Appliance is available:
Direct link to appliance template in SAP CAL / Demo Guides

What is an appliance ?

An appliance is a compressed system image that can be rapidly extracted into a regular system instance by preserving everything that has been configured in the appliance during the development phase of it.
This makes it an ideal medium for pre-configured systems e.g. for sandboxing, proof-of-concept or scoping/fit-gap purposes.

In the SAP S/4HANA fully-activated appliances, you will find the SAP S/4HANA software (along with some other components, see further below), activations of SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA (incl. technical configuration e.g. for the Fiori launchpad), and prepared demo scenarios with sample master and transactional data.

The delivery infrastructure for appliances is the SAP Cloud Appliance Library (SAP CAL, https://cal.sap.com), and if you browse this site you will see many more appliances besides the SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated appliances.

[Fig 1]: The concept of the SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance

How to use an appliance

An appliance can be consumed in two ways:

1. Within 1-2 hours in a hosted environment, using a cloud provider infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
2. Within typically ~ 2-3 days on your own on-premise hardware that has a supported Linux release installed (everything else will come with the appliance).

Details for option 1 (hosted):As prerequisite, you need to obtain an account at one of the supported cloud providers, and can afterwards bring up your system using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library (SAP CAL, https://cal.sap.com).The registration in SAP CAL and one of the supported hosting providers takes ~15 minutes. The start-up of your personal trial instance (no shared system !) will take ~1-2 hours.An easy entrance into SAP CAL is the SAP S/4HANA 30-day trial with the following characteristics:

• Built-in 30-day test license for SAP S/4HANA and SAP CAL (i.e. no fees to be paid to SAP)

• Hosting provider fees are charged to your hosting provider account (~ 3-4 $ USD per uptime hour, depending on provider and data center region).

• Support via asking a question in the SAP CAL community

• Possibility to extend the 30-day trial phase by acquiring an SAP CAL subscription license (requires a valid SAP S/4HANA license as well), see here for more details

If you are new to the SAP Cloud Appliance Library, there’s a detailed ‘Quick Start Guide’ on the SAP S/4HANA trial page to get started. This video playlist for SAP CAL will also help to get into the topic.

Details for option 2 (on-premise installation):If you prefer to install the appliance on your own hardware, you can also receive it via download or Blu-Ray disks.The shipment is free of charge, however, corresponding SAP licenses need to be in place (trial licenses are sufficient for delivery). The installation of an appliance differs from a “regular” SAP installation, we therefore recommend to have this done by SAP Consulting or an experienced SAP partner, however, customers can also do it on their own and will receive support from SAP.Ordering by a partner on behalf of a customer and deploying it on the customer hardware afterwards is not allowed.The following SAP note contains more information on the ordering process (it is valid for customers and partners):
Ordering process for on-premise installation of SAP software appliances (2041140)

[Fig 2]: SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance – Consumption Methods SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance

What is the content & scope ?

The scope of the appliance centers around the SAP Best Practices content for SAP S/4HANA and is enhanced by further scenarios depending on the exact release version of the appliance.The below walk-through scenarios (taken from the 2021 SP00 release) have been described in detail (see here) but of course you’re free to explore and adapt the system as needed since you have full administrative rights and even access to the Linux operating system.

• Overview Pages

• Sell from stock / outbound delivery processing

• Accounting & Financial Close

• Lease-in accounting

• Investments

• Universal Allocation

• Treasury and bank account management

• Overdue receivables

• Group Reporting

• Plan-to-produce & Demand-driven replenishment

• Predictive Material & Resource Planning

• Advanced Variant Configuration

• Warehouse Inbound From Supplier

• Plant Maintenance / Quality Mgmt.

• Advanced ATP

• Advanced Intercompany Sales

• Service / Maintenance / Inhouse Repair

• Portolio & Project Management

• SAP Master Data Governance

• Human Capital Management

• Application Interface Framework

• Analytics (Smart Business, BI, SAC)

• Predictive Analytics

• Data Migration

• SAP Fiori Rapid Activation

• Fiori Situation Handling

• Key User & Developer Extensibility

• Custom Print Forms

• SAP Screen Personas

[Fig. 3] Pre-configured walkthrough scenarios in the appliance

What is technically contained in the appliance ?

The appliance consists of four virtual machines that are automatically bundled into one solution instance:

1. SAP S/4HANA (the core ABAP backend incl. the SAP HANA database)
2. SAP NW JAVA with Adobe Document Services (for forms and output management)
3. An SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform
4. MS Windows remote desktop for easy access to the solution

The BI platform and the remote desktop are optional components in SAP CAL (you can opt in/out of the deployment in the advanced mode of the SAP CAL instance creation) and are also not shipped to customers for the on-premise installation.

[Fig. 4] Technical components of the SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance

More information & known issues

These blogs (2023 / 2022 / 2021 / 2020) summarize the known issues and provide fixing hints where available. They will be continuously updated.

One important note at the end:
Once you have created an appliance instance (be it hosted or on-premise), it behaves like a regular on-premise system. And this means that SAP cannot access or patch your appliance instance, thus any system tasks (be it basis or functional) need to be done by you.

Best and have fun with the SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance,
Joerg

Appendix: Link collection

Direct links to start an SAP S/4 S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance instance in SAP CAL, requires a cloud provider account:

• 2023 SP00
• cal.sap.com to browse for other releases and solutions (see also the CAL documentation)

Blogs with known issues (2023 / 2022 / 2021 / 2020), continuously updated

Suggested demo walkthroughs

30-day trial: SAP S/4HANA trial landing page (incl. a quick start guide)

Video tutorials (create cloud provider account and launch the appliance in SAP CAL)

SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA (detailed configuration guides, test scripts, …)

On-premise download / Blu-Ray shipment process (SAP Note 2041140)

[PhilMad]

Hi, I checked today. On 22nd of November. Regards

[AlexShipilov]

No, it's not yet there 🙂

[PhilMad]

Sorry, you are right, it's 2021 but not the fully activated appliance...

[JoergWolf]

Hi Alexander,

we plan with December 15-20.

Best,

Joerg

[former_member675015]

Hi Jörg,

I'd like to ask：is it completely free to download SAP s / 4hana 2021 fully activated appliance through xx-ser-swfl-ship component???

Thank you！

[JoergWolf]

Hi Lin,

the shipment is free but will require your own hardware and installation efforts (typically takes a couple of days depending on experience and network/hardware circumstances).

Best,
Joerg

[former_member675015]

Hi Joerg

Thank you for your reply!

[former_member675015]

Hi Joerg

Thank you for your reply!

And if i request it ,Way of delivery is download, How and where can i download it?

through Software Downloads - SAP ONE Support Launchpad?

[JoergWolf]

HI Lin,

please open an incident as described in SAP Note 2041140 and you will receive a download link.

Best, Joerg

[former_member675015]

Hi Joerg,

Think you for your reply~

Best, Lin

[former_member508210]

Hello colleaguese

we want to test scenario 2JN Production Operations with SAP Manufacturing Execution but it not quite clear where is the ME/MII system in SAP S/4HANA 2021 SP00 Fully-Activated Appliance landscate. I can see S4HANA instance only but no any SAP MII as in mentioned in config guide.

Many thanks

[JoergWolf]

Hi Kirill,

no, ME/MII components are not included in the appliance, and there are also no dedicated demo scenarios for it on the appliance demo page.

Some of the generic tests scripts for SAP Best Practice scope items (as listed on https://rapid.sap.com/bp/BP_OP_ENTPR) might need additional components to be installed, either  on one of the appliance VMs or on extra hardware.

Best, Joerg

[peretz]

Hi Jörg,

Thanks for the clear and detailed information about the CAL solution.

I'm looking to host a number of CAL instances on AWS, and I'd like to control the start-up from AWS (CloudFormation) rather than the CAL UI for various reasons.

Is there a simple way of achieving it without going through the on-prem installation approach?

Many Thanks!

[JoergWolf]

Hi Peretz,

the CAL service is legally available only via the CAL UI.

Best, Joerg

[peretz]

Thanks for the quick response Joerg.

Can you please recommend a different approach (maybe not using CAL?) for using a pre-configured solution for training purposes?

It's important that the image is saved as an AWS AMI, as it will need to have a few more non-sap components, so terminating it after training (without any post training clean-ups) and spinning it up before training is key.

This training platform is already heavily integrated with AWS which is why we can't add another management layer to this solution.

 

Any suggestion or direction will be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[marian_harris]

The other option is as you mentioned “ going through the on-prem installation approach” which Joerg has outlined in the blog where you can download the image and install it on your own resources. As it relates to the ‘Fully Activated S/4H Appliance”, these are the two easiest options.

[steffen_wetzler]

Hi,

 

I am not sure if I got that right.

Is it mandatory to have a new and clean database appliance ready for the installation of the SAP S/4HANA fully-activated appliance?

Or can I use an exisiting appliance with already other HANA DBs installed?

 

We have several HDBs on a sandbox HANA Appliance. I want to put the fully-activated S4HANA also on this HANA Appliance. Is this possible?

 

Thanks.

[hunterworf1]

I think so, with deploying multiple HANA instances on one host. As long as the resources are sufficient, the  instance number and SID do not conflict

[ESM]

Hi Joerg,

Thanks for the informational and helpful blog. We are trying to install the latest S/4HANA appliance (SAP S/4HANA 2021 (SP00) Fully-Activated Appliance) using the "S/4HANA 1909 FPS1 Fully-Activated Appliance standard installation" instructions and are facing an issue starting the database. We created an incident with SAP AGS but I was wondering if issues with these appliances need to be recorded under a specific component instead on HAN-DB. Do you know what team will be able to help with this installation?

Thanks in advance,

Eduardo L. Sanchez

[pmuschick]

Hi,

We have seen update on the note Note 2041140 - Order an SAP S/4HANA fully-activated appliance for on-premise deployment and see CAL template available on cal.sap.com

Universal Parallel Accounting

Can you please update on the Universal Parallel Accounting functionality and if this is activated or not on the system? Will there be / is there a template system with UPA activated? Will there be a whitelist client in the future as UPA is only supported in the whitelist client?

Setup procedure - new from scratch or "updated"

Was the CAL 2022 system template set up from scratch or "just" updated with the delta as in previous release versions? (issue is that the merged client in past releases of the CAL template was not set up from scratch using 000 as per admin guide. Actually it was an activation of previous releases and basically updated with a delta package in content - which produced issues in activation of further functionality e.g. in IS Retail where a clean 000 copy was required - We know this is not supported officially, just that the docm. doesnt mention this relevant aspect)

Thanks a lot for your feedback as always!

Best regards

Peter Muschick

[amauryvanespen]

Hello,

is there a simple way to deploy Appliance on top of OpenStack or via Docker ?

https://www.slideshare.net/snoopy1710/strategic-choices-in-sap-s4-hana-deployment (for example, slide 18 of this slide deck, based on SUSE architecture).

I'm still struggling with setting up a local sandbox based on SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance for a limited time.

Any help/support | feedbacks would be great 😃

Thank you

Amaury

[JoergWolf]

Hello Amaury,

this is not possible (at least not "out of the box").

The options are CAL (using a VM on a hyperscaler) or the deployment on your own infrastructure.

If you have problems with deploying an instance on CAL, please ask a question in the CAL forum and share some more information there.

Best, Joerg

[JoergWolf]

Hello Peter,

UPA is not activated in the 2022 appliance, see some of the general background eg. in this blog (greenfield, transition, ...). As far as i know, there is no CAL template with UPA available right now, might be something to look into for the future.

The S/4HANA 2022 Fully-Activated Appliance was upgraded (same as in past releases). Only in that way we can preserve what has been done in client 100 on top of the standard SAP Best Practices (there's a lot more configured).

If you want to conduct further activations that don't work in client 100, you can copy your own clients, or check if the two existing Best Practice clients (200 & 400) can be used, see the Getting Started guide.

Best, Joerg

 

[pmuschick]

Hi Joerg,

thanks a lot for the quick update. This was already helpful.

UPA has huge impact and yes, I believe a CAL template would be of interest for lots of users to understand the impact.

Regarding missing data / upgrade procedure: Clients 200 and 400 were not helpful for past projects because they were also not set up as per official admin guide. In 2021 CAL version 400 was the client we were using as a reference, copied using SAP_ALL and then were missing some (really only few/some) data in tables relevant for our case - but the data was present in 000.

Best regards

Peter

[PAscalMartin]

Hi Joerg,

I plan to order a fully activated appliance in order to test the following scope items, all related to recipe management :

1QA, 1QC, 1QG and 22R

My question : are these scope items included in the fully activated appliance ?

Otherwise what shall I order to get them in the appliance ?

Many thanks for support

PAscal

[JoergWolf]

Hi Pascal,

see https://answers.sap.com/questions/13787798/recipe-management-in-a-cal-system.html

Best,

Joerg

[manikmdu]

When I host it on my personal cloud, can I stop the EC2 instances when I do not use and start again when I use it again, without impacting the S/4 Hana setup? I just want to avoid spending money on the infra when I am not using it within the 30 days trial.

[marian_harris]

Hi Manikandan, if you deploy the appliance via SAP CAL, you can suspend and reactivate the system as you like, or you can put it on a predictable schedule of being activated/suspended. If you do this, I would suggest deploying the instance using the ‘advanced mode’ and in Step 2. Appliance Details, choose the option to use a public static IP address so that the IP address doesn’t change every time you suspend and reactivate the instance. You may want to think before selecting this option, some people feel it is less secure, but is very convenient for some thing like a sandbox.  Additionally, some of the cloud hosting partners have limitations on how many public static IP addresses you can use, so you may have to increase your quota for that attribute.

[Mi2]

Hello,

I am testing the Application Interface Framework (AIF) in SAP S/4HANA 2022 (FPS01) Fully-Activated Appliance scenario Create a Simple IDoc Interface see: https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/aif-idoc-monitoring-interface-create.html#1f4c45e3-1b0c-4bb1-a5....

In step 5. Open the IDoc Structure Generator (transaction /n/AIF/IDOC_GEN) I am unable to create the structure - the system requires a Workbench Request, when I select my WB request the error changes to:

System configuration requires the usage of a Customizing request
Message No. /AIF/API_CUST002

 

 

Can you please advise me?

Thank you very much!
Miroslav

[alex_bundschuh]

Hi Miroslav,

I guess you refer to step 6 of the tutorial and not step 5, in step 5 you create the package, in step 6 you run the structure generator, actually the screenshot in the tutorial is not complete, in the interface definition section, the second last entry field is empty in the screenshot, however here you need to enter the customizing request before executing the report, you can simply select here the customizing request that you have created when you created your package or otherwise create a new one, I just went through the report again, and for me it worked fine

Alex

[Mi2]

Hi Alex,

Hey, Alex,

thank you for your quick reply!
You're right, I described the step number wrong, instead of the 5th step it's really the 6th step. I'm sorry.

I'm trying to enter the TR I created into the /n/AIF/IDOC_GEN generator transaction, but unfortunately it doesn't work. I am attaching detailed images, below is the error message.

- System configuration requires the usage of a Customizing request
Message No. /AIF/API_CUST002 - if I enter a WB request
- Workbench request S4HK902302 does not exist
Message No. /AIF/GENERATORS028 - if I enter a Customizing Request

Have I described it better now?

I think AIF is a very powerful tool, we would love to use it, we just have to learn how to use it properly :-)!!

Thanks again for the support!

Miroslav

 

 

 

[alex_bundschuh]

in the second screenshot you entered your customizing request into the field for the workbench request, in the first screenshot the workbench request is correct but the customizing request is missing, you actually need both requests, below you need to enter your customizing request

Alex

[Mi2]

Hi Alex,

thanks again for the quick reply! You're right, I actually overlooked typing Customizing Request in the next field. I added the correct entry, but The IDoc Structure Generator could not create the required DDIC objects. I am getting the message:
"Potentially unlicensed use of AIF; you cannot create interface DEMO_1/FCUSTOMER/1"

I based on the information in the document "SAP S/4HANA 2022 (FPS01 & SP00) Fully-Activated Appliance:
Message Monitoring with SAP Application Interface Framework
Demo Guide"

"The demo scenarios have been setup in an SAP delivered AIF namespace, and hence you do not need an AIF license to run those scenarios."

Again, I don't know if I missed something and understand the description correctly, so thanks for the support and help!

Miroslav

[JoergWolf]

Hello Miroslav,

for the future, please raise specific system questions in a separate thread and not as comment to a blog post  (since such questions/answers tend to get lengthy and are difficult for reading other comments on a blog 😉 ).

For AIF questions in CAL try https://community.sap.com/topics/application-interface-framework and/or https://community.sap.com/topics/cloud-appliance-library (you can also double-tag both communities when asking the question).

Thanks and best,

Joerg

 

 

[Mi2]

Hello Joerg,
thank you for the recommendation and the links you sent. I think I found there a solution about AIF licenses in the blog:

New trial capability for SAP Application Interface Framework
From <https://blogs.sap.com/2021/10/29/new-trial-capability-for-sap-application-interface-framework/>

I will try it.
If my question is not appropriately placed here please delete it.
Next time I will follow the recommendation and look for answers in SAP product communities first.

Have a nice day and thanks for the advice!

Miroslav

[martin_hauschild]

Hi joerg.wolf ,

it is possible to install the ABAP / Backend Part (SAP AS) on a Windows Server 2022 (VM) ? Distributed Installation.

And the HDB on an existing SLES 15 Server.

For a normal S4 2022 installation, it is possible, see in PAM.

Regards Martin

[JoergWolf]

Hi Martin,

the appliance requires Linux on x86_64 infrastructure.

From a sizing perspective, I would give it a try to install the SAP application server on yourHANA  box as well (if there are no other constraints).

If you use the appliance in SAP CAL, both components are also running on the same virtual machine.

Best, Joerg

[brahms86]

Hello joerg.wolf,

because it is not explicitly mentioned in the usage scenarios:

Can we use a fully activated appliance on a hyperscaler as a target system for a first trial ERP6.0 to S/4 system conversion (brown field)?

Source system is a locally hosted.

 

Kind regards,

 

Steffen

[JoergWolf]

Hi Steffen,

conversion testing is not a real use case for the appliance.

I'd recommend to check openSAP (eg. https://open.sap.com/courses/s4h25-1) or search for "conversion" in the CAL library (https://cal.sap.com/catalog#/applianceTemplates).

Best,

Joerg

[bettina_knauss]

Hi Steffen,

We can offer several options here:

Jörg already mentioned the conversion appliance templates that we offer to go through a conversion scenario. The templates capture the conversion status in several stages. Very soon we will have new Appliance Templates here, starting from an ERP on windows source system. If you are interested in these let me know.

 

We also support real conversion scenarios, find more info here:  Converting a system

At the moment the supported end to end scenario works for migrating ERP to S/4H in Azure. It uses the Data Migration Option  and requires a good network connection between source and target system. The deployment of the target shell system is part of the overall procedure. The related item in our CAL Roadmap is this. Another option (system move, requiring less bandwith) will be out soon, see here.

 

If you use a different conversion method than one of these recommended ones you can deploy an S/4H system in Azure as a target system. We offer default installation stacks and a deployment wizard for this. For more details see here.

 

Let us know if you have more questions. If your requests are too specific for this forum you can reach out to me directly as well.

 

Best regards, Bettina

[bettina_knauss]

Hi Steffen,

see my comment below,

best regards,

Bettina

[DP]

Hello SAP,

is it possible to have a trial version of the latest S/4 HANA 2023 release (as private cloud or on-premise) where we can test to import our own company namespace (including EWM related developments). Goal is to validate if the cloud-readiness of our code is given or not. As we understand right, we have to import via SAP BTP (embedded steampunk) what we need a trial as well.

Thanks for an answer.

Best regards,

Dominik

[JoergWolf]

Hello Dominik,

the pre-configured S/4 trial version (the S/4 Fully-Activated Appliance) is planned for end of Q4 (usual delivery channels i.e. https://cal.sap.com or on-premise).

For the CAL channel, an unconfigured S/4 system is planned earlier in Q4 but I can't tell you the exact dates.

Best, Joerg

[DP]

Hello Joerg,

thank you very much for the answer and the info about the delivery dates. That's good to know!

Do you know if I can handle my cloud-readyness checks of the our namespace developments with that versions? Or are there any restrictions concering the import of own coding?

Thanks again!

Best regards,

Dominik

[JoergWolf]

Hi Dominik,

you should be able to import coding but I you might need to do additional steps to get a readiness check working (BTP account & connectivity, etc.).

Might be worth raising a question in the readiness check communities (https://community.sap.com/topics/readiness-check) what comes to mind there (and questions is usually more suited than comments for longer discussions).

Best, Joerg

[damovand]

Is there a support team for this appliance?  I activated my appliance but I cannot logon to the s4HANA either through SAPGUI or Fiori tiles.

I get the error "Password logon no longer possible - too many failed attempts"

Is there anyway to reset the account?

 

Best Regards,

Leila

[JoergWolf]

Hi Leila,

additional users are mentioned in the Getting Started guide.

Since you are SAP staff, please check with the colleague who started the appliance.

Best,

Joerg

[goobyhill]

Hi Jörg,

Do you know where can I find the information, what is the planned release date for S/4HANA 2023 Fully-Activated Appliance?

Thanks

regards

Csaba

[JoergWolf]

Hi Csaba,

it's planned for the end of Q4 (probably the week before x-mas).

Best, Joerg

[Leduckduck]

Oohhh long blog - I do not seem to be able to find the released SAP HCM S/4 solution in the CAL library. It was released in October November last year - does it come in a pre-activated solution.