By Dr. Berg
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the components of BI 4.0 and what is really required to make it work from a compatibility standpoint. This is despite an excellent job from SAP to publish lots of details in a Product Availability Matrix (PAM) document on marketplace.
The Components
Yes there are many components and other software that needs to work together to realize the benefits of BI 4.0. The items may be illustrated as in the figure below:
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(image source: Dr. Berg, 2011)
Starting for the bottom, there are requirements for BW to use the BICS connectors for Analysis (i.e. BW 7.0 SP 23; 7.0 Ehpk 1, SP 5 or 7.3 with any SP).
You should install the BI 4.0 system on separate hardware, unless the hardware is virtualized. Without this, it is not recommended to install BI 4.0 on the same BW hardware, or to share the java installs. The disk requirements are between 11GB and 16 GB depending on how many languages you install, but I reccomend having at least 40-100GB available for future use.
You can use all major Operating systems on the server (64-bit is required), and the number of CPUs should be at least four (or equivalent). It is important to note that SAP recently published sizing guidelines that make BI 4.0 sizing in SAPS instead of CPUs and memory (unlike sizing for XI 3.1). You may also want to take note of the fact that the Mobile Server is currently only supported on Windows operating systems
The install will also install a database for the CMS and audit repository, as well as an application server. It is worth mentioning that BI 4.0 comes with SQL Server Express 2008 as a bundled offering, so you don't need to buy another database. However, Oracle, DB2, Sybase and regular SQL server is also supported, if yur organization have other standards.
When installing, you also should have it connected to a web portal. WebSphere, Weblogic and SAP enterprise portal 7 is supported and for most, the SAP portal will probably be the simplest alternative, unless you already have another portal already installed.
For the PCs you should plan for at least 1Gb memory. Preferably a bit more (I would go for 2GB+). Also, you need to check that you have the right software versions of Office, Flash, Browsers and Adobe reader before you roll the system out or start developing. The versions depend on the operating system you are using and unfortunately, Mac OS/X is currently not supported for other than the Crystal report viewer. You may also want to warn the users that the install will take between 3.5 and 7.5 GB of their disk space (again depending on the number of languages supported). But, that should not be a 'show-stopper'.
There are a lot more details to cover, but this should get you thinking.
If you want to see all details and also ask questions, I will be covering this, and much more, at the Xcelsius Bootcamps this fall in September 19-21 (Chicago); October 3-5 (Philadelphia); November 2-4 (Las Vegas) and December 7- 9 (Copenhagen).
Hope to see you at any of these locations..
Dr. Berg