We will have a guide on how to do the deployment in the SAP Guide Server. Also, what are the advantages of having this server?
What is Sap Guide Server?
SAP GUI Server is a server that runs the SAP front end and provides access to the SAP system. It is an HTTP server that allows you to use the SAP WebGUI.
The SAP GUI Server is installed on the same machine as the SAP System or on a different machine.
It is not necessary to have this server to run your SAP System. You do not need to install it unless you want to access your SAP System using the SAP GUI. You can also deploy it on a dedicated machine if you want to separate your front-end instances from your backend instances.
The WebGUI is divided into 2 parts:
SAP WebGUI Interface
This is the actual application that runs on top of the web server and provides an interface for users and administrators. The interface can be accessed via desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
To run this part, you will need a web server like Apache2 (or another supported webserver) and some database like MySQL, Oracle, or DB2 that supports PHP5.
SAP Web Server
This part provides the functionality for displaying HTML pages containing data from your SAP System and web services. As well as other functionality required by the web browser when accessing content from an SAP System.
It also contains some software components. So are needed for communication between browsers and other clients, for example, mobile devices. An SAP system such as HTTP Transport Layer Security (HTTPS).
It is part is provided by Apache2 (or another supported webserver) with some Addons. Like mod_ssl and mod_perl or mod_python or similar. You do not need this part to run your SAP System. But it can be installed if you want to access your SAP System via a web server.
If you want to access your SAP system via desktop or mobile device only. Then this part is not needed because all communication with these systems happens via Java EE Application Servers. Also, directly with some middleware systems like IBM MQ, TIBCO, etc.
Now, what are the advantages of deploying this
Advantages of deployment SAP Gui Server
If you want to access the SAP System via a web server. As I explained above, then it is not necessary. Because all communication with these systems happens via Java EE Application Servers. Also, directly with some middleware systems like IBM MQ, TIBCO, etc.
But it can be installed if you want to access your SAP System via a web server. It can be good if you want to have architecture as below:
SAP System >> Web Server >> Web GUI Server >> Database Server
To deploy this server you can follow this guide: Configuring SAP WebGUI Deployment Server in SAP Netweaver 7.0.
The idea is that we can have 2 different environments on this server. One for development and the other one for production. Also, we can have different versions of the same application on this server.
So it can be bad if we update the applications on the servers without knowing what is going on on these servers. So we have to pay attention when we are modifying the configurations. And make changes to avoid incompatibilities between versions.