SAP HANA Express Edition on Windows 10 PC

Hi everyone. Guess which news I read this morning?

Awesome. But what exactly does WSL2 mean? Well, it means this: "Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 introduces a significant architectural change as it is a full Linux kernel built by Microsoft, allowing Linux containers to run natively without emulation. With Docker Desktop running on WSL 2, users can leverage Linux workspaces and avoid having to maintain both Linux and Windows build scripts. In addition, WSL 2 provides improvements to file system sharing, boot time, and allows access to some cool new features for Docker Desktop users."

What this means is that now Docker Desktop is able to run Linux containers on Windows natively without Hyper-V virtualisation (essentially, before Docker would spin up VM as the host for Linux containers). We could run HXE on Windows machine in a Docker container for some time now (via Hyper-V) but now we can run HXE on Windows machine without any bells and whistles (bells and whistles described in this post - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/sap-hana-express-edition-docker-end-example-vadim-zaripov/) and also much leaner and faster from Docker Desktop perspective.

Check here how to activate WSL 2 on your Windows 10 machine: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Tick the relevant box in Docker Desktop and let's jump right in!

I decided to try it out quickly on my home machine and, well, in 10 minutes I had a fully functional and running HXE, which is pretty cool.

Firstly I downloaded the newest Docker Desktop version from the Stable Channel here - https://hub.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-desktop-windows

Save, run, install.

Check that it's running fine via running hello-world container:

docker run hello-world

You would see the resource allocation parameters only if you aren't using the full WSL2 integration. Those parameters are for the DD Linux virtual machine. You still can go ahead and adjust params here as required for HXE, but that would mean you aren't using the WSL2 (HXE would still work though).

Next step is to visit https://store.docker.com/images/sap-hana-express-edition and copy the link to the latest version of the SAP HANA Express Edition image. Which happens to be 2.00.045.00.20200121.1 as of today.

Nex step - create an empty folder anywhere you like and place settings.json file there with the password for SYSTEMDB user:

Adjust hosts file to point to your local IP address:

Now run the following command in Console (make sure to adjust the folder name, location and the name of the container - HXE_DOCKER in my case):

docker run -p 39013:39013 -p 39017:39017 -p 39041-39045:39041-39045 -p 1128-1129:1128-1129 -p 59013-59014:59013-59014 -d -v E:\VMs\HANA_On_Windows:/hana/mounts --ulimit nofile=1048576:1048576 --sysctl kernel.shmmax=1073741824 --sysctl net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range='40000 60999' --sysctl kernel.shmmni=524288 --sysctl kernel.shmall=8388608 --name HXE_DOCKER store/saplabs/hanaexpress:2.00.045.00.20200121.1 --passwords-url file:///hana/mounts/settings.json --agree-to-sap-license

Now after the command has been issued you can open Docker Desktop and check up the logs waiting for the process to end:

You may (and will) get the following notifications, so just go ahead and confirm them:

After some time the process should successfully end:

Use "CLI" button to log into the container and issue commands directly:

That's pretty much it, log into the system the same way as it described in my original blog post:

P.S. Check out the Linux kernel used by Docker without WSL2:

And with WSL2 support:

Check the comments section below for SAP HXE XSA problems.