SAP and VMware (Virtualizing SAP)

SAP Minors Program
TEEAM Region
Webex Series
“SAP & VMware“
Cenk Ersoy
Advisory SE
cenk.ersoy@emc.com
© Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. 1

SAP Minors Program
SAP Minors Community Page:
https://community.emc.com/community/connect/
presales/presalesminorsprogram/presales-minors-sap
SAP Minors Training Path and Training Modules
are available here:
https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-31637
Previous sessions of this Webex series for TEEAM
region
https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-33298

Agenda
• Benefits of Virtualization
• Virtualization Options
• SAP Support for VMware
• SAP Performance on VMware
• Recommendations for virtualizing traditional SAP applications
• SAP HANA and VMware
• Recommendations for virtualizing SAP HANA
• Key Findings (Summary)
• Resources

Benefits of Virtualizing SAP
• Increased business agility (deploy faster)
• Better resource utilization (consolidation)
• Improved SLA (using DRS)
• Reduced risk (vMotion, SRM etc)

TCO/ROI Savings with Virtualized SAP
Systems
Source: http://www.vmware.com/sap

Virtualization Options for SAP

Vmware is the most dominant virtualization

SAP is the Fastest Growing Workload on VMware

SAP on VMware
• VMware has been supported by SAP since December 2007
• Every component based on NetWeaver 6.40 or above is supported
on VMware
• The following are some of the most useful SAP Notes relevant to
running SAP on VMware
– 0895807 – Supported SAP Environments on Linux / VMware ESX
– 1056052 – Windows VMware Configuration Guidelines
– 1122387 – Linux : SAP Support in virtualized environments
– 1122388 – Linux: VMware ESX 3.x or vSphere configuration guidelines
– 1173954 – Support of Oracle for VMware
– 1130801 – Virtualization of IBM DB2 on Linux, UNIX, and Windows
– 1409608 – Virtualization on Windows
– 1492000 – General support statement for virtual environments

VMware & Oracle
• There is further information on support for Oracle products
on VMware on the VMware web site:
– http://www.vmware.com/solutions/partners/alliances/oracle-vmware-support.
html
– http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/oracle-support.html

Oracle Support Statement on use of VMware
• Oracle MyOracleSupport (Metalink) 249212.1 defines Oracle’s VMware
support policy most broadly
• Support facts:
• Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the
native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware.
• If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the
appropriate solution on the native OS. If that solution does not work in the
VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for
support.
• When the customer can demonstrate that the Oracle solution does not work
when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support, including logging a
bug with Oracle Development for investigation if required.
• Oracle RAC included for 11.2.0.2 and above (Updated Nov 8,2010)

Vmware’s Support on Virtualized Oracle
https://www.vmware.com/support/policies/oracle-support

Relevant vSphere Maximums
• Deployment Considerations SAP on VMware
VMware vSphere ESX 4.1 5.0 5.1 5.5 6.0 *
Virtual CPUs Per VM 8 32 64 64 128 ?
RAM Per VM 255GB 1TB 1TB 1TB 4TB ?
Logical Cores Per ESX
Host 320 2048 2048 4096 ???
RAM Per ESX Host 1 TB 2TB 2TB 4TB 8/12TB ?
Virtual Disk Size 2TB 2TB 2TB 64TB ???
Virtual Disks Per VM 60 60 60 60 ???
* Speculation based on public statements of Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware

Certified 3-tier SAP Benchmark on vSphere
vSphere 4
Certification number: 2010016 16,000 Users and 87,800 SAPS
vSphere 5
Certification number: 2011044 32.125 Users and 175,320 SAPS
http://global.sap.com/campaigns/benchmark/index.epx

Performance Impact of VMware
Oracle Entry (OLTP) benchmark: very small transactions,
heavy I/O load with random reads and writes
2-7% less
throughput
compared
to native
Server Hardware: Two (2) x 2.93 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 processors, 36GB memory
VMware ESX 4.0 Build #136362, Red Hat Enterprise Linux5.1 64-bit Oracle 11g R1
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_ESX40_Oracle-eval.pdf
VMware virtualization overhead is estimated at 6% as agreed by the
SAP Sizing Council on August/7th/2012.

Other SAP Benchmarks on vSphere
Source: “SAP Solutions on VMware – Best Practices Guide”, VMware 2011

SAP & VMware
Install & manage SAP as you normally would in a physical environment

SAP & VMware

SAP & VMware
• Deploy virtualization in stages (DEV and QA first).
• Sizing for VM is identical to sizing for physical. vSphere server sizing
is most critical. You must have enough resources (CPU, RAM, disk IO
and HBAs) while considering vMotion and HA !!!
• It is recommended that the SAP systems have their own dedicated
virtual server and not share with other non SAP Applications.
• CPU over commitment is allowed but not recommended
• Memory over commitment is NOT allowed
• See VMware website for “virtualization best practices” whitepaper

SAP & VMware
• VM wide and vSphere server wide settings are very critical for performance
(multipathing, virtual switches, SCSI adaptors, NUMA, disk layout etc). Follow
best practice guideline documents from VMware and SAP)
• http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-27384 for SAP on VMWare
• http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-42091 VM Based cloning using LVM
• For performance monitoring, ESX/ESXi performance counters are available in
SAP transaction OS07N (see SAP Note 1409604 for Windows and Note
1102124 for Linux).
• See “SAP Solutions on VMware – Best Practices Guide” from Vmware for VM
sizing
• SAP only supports Windows 64-bit as guest operating system in a virtualized
environment for AMD and Intel processors.

SAP & VMware
• Some SAP batch processes are intensive workloads. Examples of such jobs
include: MRP runs; Demand Forecasting/Planning Run in SCM. These app
servers can be configured in multiple virtual machines that scale out
horizontally.
• VMware virtualization overhead is estimated at 6% as agreed by the SAP
Sizing Council on August/7th/2012.
• Hyper-threading increases SAPS performance usually by about 30%.

Monitoring Virtualized SAP

SAP HANA & VMware

Source: SAP AG

SAP HANA Delivery Options by EMC
Large (Over 2TB)
Virtual TDI on VCE VBlock
• Most flexible HANA deployment option
• Scalable SAP HANA platform; up to 1TB / VM
• High-availability architecture (leveraging VMware HA,
vMotion, DRS, SRM)
• EMC VNX or VMAX included
• Optional Data Domain for Backup and/or cold DR
• Available: Now
TDI with VMAX
• Scalable SAP HANA platform; up to 96 HANA nodes
• Deployed on customer’s existing VMAX platform
• Disaster Tolerance: YES with SRDF/A/S/Star + Timefinder
• Can be shared with non HANA workloads: YES
• Available: Now
TDI with VNX
• Can be shared with non HANA workloads: YES
• Available: Now
Starter TDI with VMAX
• As of 16 disks for 1TB of HANA
• Leverage existing VMAX storage capacity
• Available: Now
Starter TDI with VNX
• Available: Now
Virtualized SAP HANA
• Up to 1 TB of RAM
• Functions: vMotion, VMwareHA, DRS, SRM
• Available: Now
Small (Under 2TB)
Converged Infrastructure
Flexible Custom Integration
Physical TDI on VCE VBlock
• Best of an appliance in a shared infrastructure
• Scalable SAP HANA platform; up to 16 nodes
• High availability architecture
• EMC VNX or VMAX storage included
• Optional storage replication via EMC SRDF
• Optional Data Domain for Backup and/or cold DR
• Available: Now

Virtualized SAP HANA Performance

Virtualized SAP HANA in Production (Cont.)
Private Cloud
Ÿ SAP and Vmware announced support to run HANA in production on
virtualized platform at EMCworld 2014
– Same sizing as physical SAP HANA
– Only Scale-up is supported (Scale-out planned)
– Only one SAP HANA prod instance on a single physical ESX server
– CPU and storage on the ESX server must SAP HANA certified
– DRS, Vmware HA, vMotion are all supported
– Sizing Limitations: 1TB vRAM, 64 vCPU (vSphere 6.0 -> 4TB vRAM
and 128 vCPU)
– SAP PAM HW or equivalent certified HANA engineer installation,
passwd SAP’s HW check tool
See SAP Notes 1788665 and 1995460

Virtualized SAP HANA in Production
Hosted by VMware vCloud Hybrid Services
Ÿ Announced by VMware & SAP as part of the launch of the
vCHS (vCloud Hybrid Services) in May 2013
Ÿ Designed specifically to compete against Amazon HANA
Cloud offering, so it’s limited to 64GB in Production
Ÿ All restrictions on vMotion & DRS have been removed, so
HANA virtual machines can be moved one data center to
another
Ÿ Available only as a Cloud Services offering from VMware

Key Findings - Summary
Ÿ VMware virtualization does not introduce any changes to
the installation and technical configuration of SAP software
Ÿ Size your vSphere cluster carefully (think failover of VMs,
set affinity rules, watch for resources after failover)
Ÿ No memory over commitment
Ÿ Check for most up-to-date best practices and tuning
parameters
Ÿ Understand the limitations for virtualizing SAP HANA (vCPU
limit, scale-up vs scale-out support)

Resources
Ÿ http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-27384 (SAP on VMware)
Ÿ http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-4192 (SAP HANA on
Vmware)
Ÿ SAP Notes ( http://service.sap.com/notes )
Ÿ http://blogs.vmware.com/apps/sap
Ÿ http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/sap/SAP-Solutions-on-
VMware-Best-Practices-Guide.pdf
Ÿ http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/sap/
SAP_TCOROI_Customers_Final.pdf (ROI and TCO benefits for
virtualizing SAP)

Resources
Ÿ http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/
SAP_HANA_on_vmware_vSphere_best_practices_guide.pdf
Ÿ http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/
2014/05/27/sap-hana-virtualization-deployment-scenarios

Resources

THANK YOU

SAP and VMware (Virtualizing SAP)

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