Chapter 1. Overview
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 RHEA-2019:3190 introduced RHEL System Roles for SAP to assist with remotely or locally configuring a RHEL system for the installation of SAP HANA or SAP NetWeaver software. RHEL System Roles for SAP development is based on the Linux System Roles upstream project.
RHEL System Roles is a collection of roles executed by Ansible to assist administrators with server configuration right after the servers have been installed. These roles are provided in the RHEL Extras repository. In contrast, RHEL System Roles for SAP is provided in the RHEL for SAP Solutions subscription and can be used by Ansible Engine and Ansible Tower to manage RHEL systems.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription provides support for RHEL System Roles with Ansible Engine, which is available in the Ansible Engine repository (e.g. ansible-2-for-rhel-8-$(uname -m)-rpms). However, if you require full support for the Ansible Engine itself, a separate Red Hat Ansible Automation Subscription is necessary. Additional information is available at Top Support Policies for Red Hat Ansible Automation.
The following RHEL System Roles for SAP are fully supported on control nodes running RHEL 8.2 and later:
- sap-preconfigure
- sap-netweaver-preconfigure
- sap-hana-preconfigure
The RHEL System Roles for SAP, just like the RHEL System Roles, are installed and run from a central node referred to as the control node (which can be Ansible Tower, Red Hat Satellite, or a RHEL 8 or RHEL 7 host). The control node connects to the local host and/or to one or more remote hosts (called managed nodes in the context of Ansible), and performs installation and configuration steps on them. It is recommended that you use the latest major release of RHEL on the control node (RHEL 8) and use the latest version of the roles either from the rhel-system-roles-sap RPM or from Red Hat Automation Hub. The RHEL System Roles for SAP and Ansible packages do not need to be installed on the systems that are being managed/configured.
See the following table for the support status:
| Control Node | Managed Node | Support Status |
|---|---|---|
| RHEL 8.4 or later | RHEL 8.0 or later | fully supported |
| RHEL 8.4 or later | RHEL 7.6 or later | fully supported |
| RHEL 8.4 or later | RHEL 7.5 or earlier | not supported |
| RHEL 8.3 or earlier | RHEL (any release) | not supported† |
† Note: For control nodes running RHEL 7.8, RHEL 7.9, or RHEL 8.1, you can use the previous versions of rhel-system-roles-sap which are in Tech Preview support status. Please find the instructions for these versions here.
For control nodes running RHEL 8.2 or RHEL 8.3, you can use version 2 of rhel-system-roles-sap which is fully supported. Please find the instructions for this version here.
See the table below for the supported hardware/virtualization/cloud platforms of the managed node:
| Hardware platform | Bare Metal/Virtualization/ Cloud platform | Support Status |
|---|---|---|
| x86_64 | bare metal, Red Hat Virtualization/libvirt, VMware ESX, Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers | fully supported |
| ppc64le | PowerVM LPARs | fully supported |
| s390x | zVM guest | fully supported: sap-preconfigure, sap-netweaver-preconfigure |
The roles are designed to be used right after the initial installation of a managed node. Do not run these roles against a SAP or other production system. The role will enforce a certain configuration on the managed node(s), which might not be intended.
Before applying the roles on a managed node, verify that the RHEL release on the managed node is supported by the SAP software version that you are planning to install.