I've successfully downloaded and installed the sap" target="_blank">www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/downloads?rid=/library/uuid/70b58216-00e7-2c10-f6a9-c59f3a351b63">sap NetWeaver 7.01 SR1 SP3 ABAP Developer Edition on my windows XP Pro Laptop - T2400 cpu, 1.83 Ghz, 2GB, 75GB drive.
The documentation supplied in the downloads, plus what I've read elsewhere, suggested that this release was only available for server editions of Windows. However, after discussion with some of my colleagues over the differences between these and WinXP Pro, we thought it was worth a try.</br>
Additionally, local corporate policies dictate that all important data be retained on servers, so we have relatively small drives in our laptops, meaning I did not have the required 30GB free space. Because of this, I decided to try installing the <strong>/sapdata/..</strong> and <strong>/usr/sap/..</strong> directories on a USB drive.</p><p>
<h3>Notes:</h3>
During the <strong>Prerequisite Check</strong> step of the install, I got two warnings (which I ignored)</br>
Incorrect Operating System, and</br>
Insufficient swap space.</br></p><p>
My WinXP is 32bit, meaning I can have a maximum 4G swap file per drive. I have only 1 permanent drive, and I didn't want to add a page-file to the USB drive, so I made sure my laptop page-file was set to 4GB and hoped for the best :)</br>
During the <strong>Parameter Review</strong> step of the installation, I saw that the location of <strong>/sapdb/NSP/log</strong> was defaulting to my C: drive. I changed it's location to point to the USB drive.</br>
I set the parallelism for the abap import jobs to 1, so as not to overload the USB port.</p><p>
<h3>Licensing:</h3>
<h3>Limitations:</h3>
At the time of writing, the SGEN says it has approximately 16 hours to run. I have found that this forecast can be hopelessly wrong; certainly within the early stages of the generation process.</br>
Even though SGEN is an I/O intensive operation, I'm consistently seeing CPU utilisation between 50% and 80%. This suggests that the T2400 processor may be a bit small.</br>
Total memory usage (according to Task manager), with SGEN running, an SAP Dialog session open, Firefox open on 3 tabs, and Lotus Notes is 3.02GB.</p><p>
<h3>Summary:</h3>
Installing and running the 7.01 SR1 SP3 ABAP Developer Edition is feasible on a relatively small Win XP Pro machine. Given the limitations that I imposed on myself (USB drive, limited paging space &tc), this suggests that performance on an average recent model desktop (running WinXP Pro) would be more than adequate.</br>
I haven't altered the number or mix of Work Processes yet, but I will experiment with adding more Dialog and Batch task, to measure the impact on the Memory usage.</p><p>
I hope this proves helpful to someone.</p>