HANA Express and Me

The other day I published my first in a series of beginning to work with SAP HANA, express edition. So today I decided since I have vacation I would post my second in the series, basically picking up where I left off in the first one with having my Server only image downloaded to my Nuc – however before I get into that I wanted to explain what I did to my Nuc in order to get to that point.

In the first post I explained how to pick the right Nuc for my development needs. Mine I decided for a Swift Canyon version with 16GB of Ram and an i5 processor with 120GB drive.

Then I went out and got a Windows 10 license on a bootable USB and hooked up my monitor, keyboard and mouse – also the LAST time I hooked all those things up!

Plugged it in, turned it all on and within a short while I had Windows installed, updated and ready to go. Next I got a version of WM Player and installed that.

With that installed as well, I then jumped back to the instructions in my first post, and downloaded my Server only VM image.

Then I opened up the VM player and chose to “open virtual image” and selected the hxe.ova file I just downloaded.

That took just a minute to import and I was ready to go.  But you know, I’m kind of lazy and was getting annoyed with sitting there on a now crowded desk with everything plugged in so I decided why not make live a little easier. I decided to install the Chrome browser and the Chrome Remote Desktop (CRD).

It’s a great tool you can find in the Chrome Web Store and it runs as a service so with my Windows already set to automatically login and now Chrome Remote Desktop installed I can reboot the Nuc and connect remotely from my laptop or even desktop via the CRD tool.

Now I shutdown my Nuc, unplugged everything and put my office back together. Then turned on the Nuc, went grabbed a coffee and a nice comfy spot on my sofa, it is vacation after all. I opened my Chrome browser and connected to the Nuc.

Opened the VM Player and started my instance. I just needed to open the following tutorial in order to get started with the VM and then press play on my new image.

Following the tutorial I changed my password.

Made sure the processing were running, then activated my statistics server. I also do a few more configuration settings which I submitted to the HXE team for addition to the tutorial (have your own suggestions let us know!!)

Then I made sure my XS engine was running and I could connect to my new SAP HANA server from my laptop.

Then it was a matter of connecting the SAP HANA Studio and requesting my permanent license.

This whole process I think took me less than 45 mins! How have you got along?