There is a lot of information on SAP NetWeaver capabilities available at SDN, but once you have decided to implement a new system you may ask yourself how much effort that might be? Surely, installing an SAP system is a single task in its life-cycle and over years of operation the administrative effort of running the system will surely be higher than this one step. Nevertheless, when a system is well known the recurring efforts are a familiar part of your daily work, while the first hurdle might be felt to be the biggest one and you may ask yourself exactly how big it is…

Of course, there are the master guide and installation guides, providing an excellent source of information, which you should read carefully to prepare for the installation. (For details see SAP Service Marketplace > Quick Link “instguides” – SMP login is required.)

SAP's Guide Finder under SAP NetWeaver "instguides" page 

But to get an idea of the most recent installation process, a demo might be even nicer – so here you are…

SAP NetWeaver System Installation - the Demo

As you will have heard without doubt, starting with releases based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0 SAP ships updates of functions with SAP enhancement packages. You might not have heard, however, that these release states can be installed directly. My installation demo shows the installation of SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 including SAP enhancement package 1 for SAP NetWeaver 7.1 – if you have a look into system details you would find it referred to as SAP NetWeaver PI 7.1 EHP 1 or shorter even as “7.11” when it comes to software components.

The demo content:

• The demo starts with opening the installation tool “SAPinst”, preparation of system and installation have been done. All required sources have been copied to a file share.
  (To find the sources for tool and content, please read the installation guide for the specific release you are going to install; usually both CDs/DVDs and SAP Service Marketplace download are available)
• In the first phases of the installation you take some decisions on what to install, where to install it, and what passwords you want initially to apply. I concentrate on a “typical” installation. You can choose to have more customizing than shown here. The phases asking for user input end with a summary of your decisions, which is the last chance to alter your entries. These phases also include a check, if your system fulfills the requirements.
• After you confirmed your settings, all steps apart from one will run automatically: The SAP Solution Manager key needs to be provided during installation. The generation of this key in SAP Solution Manager is demonstrated as well.
• All following steps run without user interaction, but can be monitored in the installation tool, which I did for this demo. Should an error occur you can retry the failed step, notify SAP or stop the installation, get rid of the cause and restart the installation where it stopped.

Click the link to start the demo of SAP NetWeaver PI 7.1 incl. EHP1 installation:

The screenshot shows the SAPinst UI used in the demo - you can choose between several installation options or start other software life-cycle tasks, such as de-installation of a system.

After the Installation – Configuring the System

Installation of the system is one step and, as you have seen, a highly automated one. When it’s finished, both SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP and AS Java of this dual stack installation are up-and-running and can be accessed with administrator users such as DDIC for the ABAP stack and J2EE_ADMIN for the Java stack.

Configuring the system is just as important and will include as many steps. In the next part of this short blog series the configuration of the new SAP NetWeaver PI system is demonstrated using the highly automated processes of the Configuration Wizard of the SAP NetWeaver Administrator.

Related Information

• Configuration of SAP NetWeaver Process Integration 7.1 including EHP 1
• Technical Implementation Knowledge Center
• SAP NetWeaver System Landscape Directory Knowledge Center
• SAP NetWeaver Process Integration Knowledge Center
• Implementation of an SAP NetWeaver enhancement package