SAP connectivity and beacon requirement

[jasonlu]

Hi all,

for connecting to SAP, is there particular best practice or recommendations regarding a beacon?

I seem to remember in a support case being told to keep SAP connections on a separate beacon, with no other inventory connections or rules running on that one. The often long processing times to grab SAP info was given as a reason for this.

I haven't been able to find any recommendation regarding this in the SAP Applications Installations Guide,  SAP Applications User Guide, FNM-SAP Sizing Guidelines, Adapaters and Connectors Reference Guide, or the FNMS System Reference guide.

Is there any official guidance on this?

j

[winvarma]

Hi @jasonlu ,

please refer to the SAP practice guide https://learn.flexera.com/sap-practice-guide which might help.

Regards,

[jasonlu]

I had a look there too, but there's nothing (six instances of the word beacon, and nothing relevant)

j

[Diggesh]

Hi @jasonlu 

On the beacon, if you click help, you will be able to see most of the information about beacon.  You may use following link and replace it with hostname of your beacon.

http://<<hostnameofyourbeacon>/Suite/Help/webhelp/index.html#concepts/InventoryBeacon.html

Sizing beacon is available https://docs.flexera.com/FlexNetManagerSuite2020R2/EN/WebHelp/PDF%20Documents/On-Prem/FNM-SAP%20Sizing%20Guidelines%202020R2.pdf

HTH,

Diggesh

[jasonlu]

@Diggesh, @winvarma , thank you for the replies. It's great collecting all the info in one place.

However, I'm still not seeing anything specific about my particular question.

The closest most relevant info is at http://<FNMSSERVER>/Suite/Help/webhelp/index.html#concepts/SAP-IBConcept.html

Note: It is recommended to import SAP inventory (user and consumption data) once every month. In addition, the task for collecting SAP inventory should be scheduled to occur on different dates for different SAP Admin module and independent SAP systems.

From this we could infer that you necessarily need a separate beacon for the SAP connections as long as all the connections do not run at the same time, but that's still not a concrete statement.

I'll continue looking.

thanks,

j

[bferring · Accepted solution]

I have been implementing the FlexNet Manager for SAP solution for the past 7 years for Flexera Professional Services and can offer the best practice that we use when setting beacons up.  It used to be that we would recommend but not require customers to have their own beacon for SAP connections prior to FNMS 2016 R1 due to the load of performing RFC calls to multiple SAP systems on the beacon. 

The SAP solution changed at version 2016 R1 introducing the Admin Module that would do the "heavy lifting" of inventory collection and store the inventory in a staging database on an SAP system to be later collected by the beacon.  As such, we now do not bother separating SAP inventory to a separate beacon and will use an existing beacon to connect to the SAP Admin Module (has the same overhead of reading SCCM inventory for example).  The main "trick" to using the SAP inventory on a shared beacon is to make sure you use IIS for the beacon and manually enabling Basic Authentication for the SAPService site in the following order:

1. Install/enable IIS using the following guide for the Roles: 

https://docs.flexera.com/fnms/EN/WebHelp/index.html#topics/PrerequisitesForInvBeacons.html

2. Launch the Beacon UI and switch the "Local web server" to "IIS web server" (use HTTPS if needed but DO NOT choose Use Basic Authentication) and Save (clicking OK to configure IIS)
3. Launch IIS Manager and navigate to Sites --> Default Web Site --> SAP Service, double-click on Authentication, right-click on Basic Authentication and choose Enabled

           

4. Either open a Command Prompt as Administrator and run an "iisreset" or restart the IIS web server in IIS Manager

After this, you must also make sure to ALWAYS hit Cancel when it prompts for "The beacon will configure IIS" to not override the Basic Authentication you set manually within IIS Manager.

Also, you do not want to use a beacon that is collocated with an on-premises FNMS application server since the the "SAP systems" is hidden when the beacon is installed on an application server.  As a side note, Flexera Professional Services no longer attempts to deploy a beacon at all on an application servers as a best practice. 

[jasonlu]

This is all excellent information. Thanks for sharing.

regards,

j