Running SAP on OpenSolaris

Running SAP on OpenSolaris is not (yet) supported. But you wouldn't be reading this page if that fact gave you nightmares. Technically speaking, there are no reasons SAP (for Solaris) shouldn't run on OpenSolaris. And maybe sometime in the future, the support reasons will be out of the way, too. This article is based on my observations installing SAP's EHP 1 for SAP NetWeaver 7.0 on an x64-system running OpenSolaris 2008.11. Installation was done just like on any other Solaris-system - download media, read install guides (nah!), run sapinst. Since you already know what to do on a Solaris-10-system, I will only cover the "What's different"-topics. All components were installed with media available on the SAP Service Market Place SAP - Central System, ABAP only sapinst runs just fine with the JRE supplied with OpenSolaris. Install package SUNWscp, if you have not already done so. On my system, this was not installed by default. SAP's user profiles heavily rely on progs located in /usr/ucb When installing in a Solaris Container, you may have to create a link /etc/termcap -> ../usr/share/lib/termcap OpenSolaris identifies itself as Kernel 5.11. To avoid getting SICK when logging into a newly started SAP system, check out this Wiki article

Recently Updated by joerg_meiners (29 Jan) Adaptive Oracle Grid (SAPonSun) by j.brosowski (28 Jan) Understanding a SAP SD 2-tier benchmark result (SAPonSun) by vwetter (19 Jan) Open Dodecaeder for SAP on Sun (SAPonSun) by j.brosowski (18 Jan) Open Dodecaeder for SAP on Sun v. 16 (SAPonSun)

Oracle 10.2

• Install package SUNWmfrun (runInstaller depends on a library from this pkg)
• runInstaller does not work at all with the JRE supplied by Oracle (1.4.2), since the JRE depends on a library that is not supplied with OpenSolaris (and installing Solaris-10-packages is not an option in this article...)
  The JRE supplied with OpenSolaris does not work well with runInstaller - I've encountered numerous errors like the one below.
  
  It turned out that in the process of installing Oracle, most of the time regular files were created instead of links, but sometimes the links just were not created. Haven't root-caused this.

The good news is that the JRE 5.0 available from http://java.sun.com works OK with runInstaller. Just make sure to get the „x86"- AND the „x64"-components.
I used the „Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 Update 18" (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index_jdk5.jsp)

• runInstaller does not recognize OpenSolaris as a supported OS. The easiest way to come around this is to tell runInstaller not to check for system prerequisites. Unfortunately, SAP's RUNINSTALLER-wrapper does not pass additional flags to runInstaller. So the alternatives are:

1. Modify RUNINSTALLER to pass additional arguments to runInstaller:

insert one line right at the top (second line) of RUNINSTALLER

	flags=$@

change every occurence of

	exec "${oinst}"

to

	exec "${oinst}" "${flags}"

and then run

	cd /oracle/stage/102_64/database/Disk1/SAP
	 ./RUNINSTALLER -ignoreSysPrereqs -jreLoc /path/to/jre5

The following messages can be safely ignored:

	Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file 
	sh: line 1: showrev: not found 
	sh: line 1: showrev: not found 

2. run the native runInstaller

	cd /oracle/stage/102_64/database/Disk1
	./runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs -jreLoc /path/to/jre5

The drawback here is that you can't use the responseFile provided by SAP because RUNINSTALLER modifies it just before running runInstaller.

• Just in case you're installing in a sparse zone with /opt as an inherit-pkg-dir: don't worry about errors regarding ORCLfmap.

MaxDB

• MaxDB 7.7 does not work due to changes in libc. Until MaxDB 7.8 is available, use MaxDB 7.6 instead. I installed 7.6.03 Build 9 and later upgraded to 7.6.06 Build 4 (because of problems with SAP transaction ST04).
• Although, according to http://help.sap.com, the "$" character is a valid part of a password, the connection as SUPERDBA crashes the installation:

  ...
  
  > Subprocess starts at 20090425015624 
  
   Execute Command : /sapdb/programs/bin/dbmcli -n nw7sapdb -d SOL -u CONTROL,******** load_systab -u SUPERDBA,******** -ud ******** 
   Start subprocess as user with uid: root 
  
  > Subprocess stops at 20090425015628 
  
   ERR 
   -24964,ERR_EXECUTE: error in program execution 
   256,/sapdb/SOL/db/bin/x_python /sapdb/SOL/db/env/lsystab.py -R /sapdb/SOL/db -d SOL -u SUPERDBA,******** 
   ---------Traceback--------------- 
   ---------Error------------------- 
   sql.SQLError: [-4008] (at 1) Unknown user name/password combination 
   Traceback (most recent call last): 
     File "/sapdb/SOL/db/env/lsystab.py", line 202, in ? 
       connectAndInstall (install, install.__doc__) 
     File "/sapdb/SOL/db/env/installib.py", line 393, in connectAndInstall 
       session = connect (options) 
     File "/sapdb/SOL/db/env/installib.py", line 348, in connect 
       alterUserNotExclusive(options) 
     File "/sapdb/SOL/db/env/installib.py", line 336, in alterUserNotExclusive 
       session.release() 
   AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'release'
  

So just don't use "$" as part of SUPERDBA's password.

DB2

• The database software is installed in /opt. When installing in a Solaris Container, make sure /opt is writable (i.e. no inherit-pkg-dir) or otherwise create a link in the global zone, e.g. /opt/IBM -> /optIBM, and then create the referenced directory in the container.
• Install SUNWlang-en-extra to avoid „Locale could not be set properly" errors.

What's missing?

SAP Java instances -> coming soon

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