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Abstract
This white paper describes technical and business considerations for planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP
landscapes. This paper addresses a variety of key considerations for SAP infrastructure. Specifically, the paper
addresses example deployment options for the major layers of the infrastructure, including the host or compute
layer, the connectivity layer, and the storage or information layer.
December 2009
Table of Contents
Executive summary........................................................................................................................... 4
Introduction........................................................................................................................................ 5
Transforming IT data center and operations for SAP ....................................................................... 6
Data center model........................................................................................................................... 10
IT service and operations management.......................................................................................... 19
Performance and high availability of an SAP virtual infrastructure ................................................. 21
Building a virtual infrastructure for SAP .......................................................................................... 23
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................... 26
References ...................................................................................................................................... 27
Executive summary
Business case
Business
environment
Introduction
Purpose
The purpose of this white paper is to review business and technical considerations
when planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP landscapes. This paper will address a
variety of key considerations for an SAP infrastructure; specifically the major layers
of the infrastructure, including desktop, server, network, and storage domains that
are critical to a virtual infrastructure. The readers will gain further insights from this
paper when considering a virtual infrastructure for SAP IT.
Audience
This white paper is intended for individuals interested in data center alternatives for
SAP IT when considering a virtual infrastructure including applied technologies,
design concepts, and planning considerations. Senior managers, applications and
data center managers, SAP Basis administrators, DBAs, and system and storage
architects will benefit from reading this paper.
Embracing a virtual infrastructure strategy for SAP will impact the business by delivering
the most efficient IT for SAP with reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including
smaller data center facilities and carbon footprints. The transformation ushers in new
data center models, management policies, and operation practices for addressing SAP
performance and capacity issues, managing SAP IT, and ensuring business continuity.
In addition, SAP Basis and application administrators are looking for better ways to
manage the SAP landscapes throughout the application lifecycle implementation,
migrations, consolidations, upgrades, and ongoing maintenance.
A survey sponsored by the SAPs user group revealed the following three most difficult
tasks:
Moving production data to non-production systems,
reorganizing the database, and
monitoring the system performance.
The most time-consuming tasks also include copying data to a non-production system,
managing complex landscapes for performance monitoring, rehearsing disaster
recovery, and managing application changes.
In addition, with the growing of SAP landscapes, performance issues are taking place
more frequently than before.
Benefits
Transforming to a virtual infrastructure for SAP can provide value to applications and
data center teams, including:
Increased operational flexibility and efficiency Rapid SAP software application
and services deployment, and shortened time to productivity.
Minimized risk and enhanced IT service levels Zero-downtime maintenance
capabilities and rapid recovery times for high availability and streamlined disaster
recovery scenarios across the data center.
Optimized SAP IT environments Compliant provisioning, monitoring, and change
management for SAP governed by agreed upon service catalogs between
business and IT management.
Cloud
computing
Considerations
Two computing paradigms are merging to bring business agility with improved time
to value for application development and deployment, along with financial
efficiencies both capital and operational in providing SAP IT as a service.
Enterprise Service Orient Applications (SOA) platforms, such as SAP NetWeaver,
are driving new application IT paradigms for developing and adopting process-driven
applications. The goal is to deploy adaptive business processes based on reusable
application services with secure access to any device from any location.
With a virtual infrastructure, the Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) enables the
data center to provision SAP IT as a service, as against physical assets, for
customers including SAP business users and applications IT.
The following figure illustrates the SOA and data center platforms.
Note: A virtual infrastructure for SAP must align IT service levels to support
federated application landscapes based on the SOA platforms and virtual IT assets.
Efficiency and
responsiveness
through end-toend management
This section covers some of the alternatives for each of the IT domains: SAP
application, OS, network, storage, and desktop. The IT management requirements
for monitoring and managing the cloud data center for SAP will also be addressed.
Foundation
platforms
As part of SAP NetWeaver, the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC) provides
the ability to virtualize the SAP landscape on top of the OS by separating the
application layer form OS dependencies whether they are UNIX or x86 platforms.
SAPs strategy for ACC is to integrate with UNIX, Hypervisor, and storage vendors
for platforms to capitalize on partners domain expertise.
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The Hypervisor Virtualization takes place at the hardware level of the server by
separating the OS and its dependent services from the server platform. VMware
vSphere allows a data center to implement an OS cloud, supporting SAP and nonSAP applications.
Note: SAP ACC and Hypervisors are complementary in SAP deployments. SAP
ACC with VMware vSphere 4 and EMC virtual storage can enhance SAP landscapes
in realizing the capital and operating savings of a virtual infrastructure.
Data center
logical view
A logical view of the data center serves as a guide in reviewing deployment options
for an SAP virtual infrastructure based on the EMC and VMware platforms.
The primary IT domains include the OS cloud for the servers, shared storage for the
datastore, SAP desktops, and a unified network approach. It is important to
implement a virtual infrastructure based on the platforms that will scale out to
provide the performance and availability for growth in SAP.
Once the computers, storage, and network platforms are set, an integrated IT
management framework must be in place for IT operations and service management
for the SAP landscape.
The following figure illustrates the logical view of an SAP data center.
Notes:
The virtual infrastructure for SAP must be able to scale out for landscape
growth.
Management abstraction and integration between the IT domains are critical to
reducing operating expenses and delivering IT services for SAP.
Automated discovery and mapping for SAP virtual hosts are critical for
application-aware IT operations and service management in a virtual
infrastructure.
OS cloud
SAP deployments can generate significant server sprawl due to its tiered
architecture and the need to provision separate systems for development, quality
assurance/test, and production environments. As a result, SAP implementations can
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span 50, 100, or more servers, and even smaller implementations can have a
relatively large IT footprint.
Virtualization enjoys fast-growing adoption among SAP customers who are already
reaping significant benefits in optimizing data center resources; easing SAP
upgrades, new implementations, and platform migrations; and better managing SLAs
to provide support services to the business for SAP.
The VMware vSphere cloud operating system leverages the power of virtualization to
transform the data center into cloud computing infrastructures. This is an extension
of the VMware Infrastructure platform that customers adopted in support of server
consolidation strategies for improved server utilization. A VMware vSphere cloud
operating system is comprised of the following two service groups for supporting
the cloud computing infrastructure:
Application services The set of components that provide built-in service level
controls to all applications running on VMware vSphere, regardless of application
type or operating system.
Infrastructure services The set of components that are provided for server,
storage, and network resources and are aggregated and allocated precisely on
demand to applications based on business priority.
Administration of infrastructure and application services, and automation of day-today operational tasks with visibility into every aspect of VMware vSphere
environments are provided by VMware vCenter Server.
The VMware vSphere cloud operating system provides the following benefits:
Enhances SAP upgrades / maintenance by increasing the number of testing cycles
without impacting project plans
Meets SAP SLAs for availability, application performance, and disaster recovery.
Provides data center resources pooling during mergers and acquisitions, driving
application consolidation and retirement of legacy systems.
Optimizes data center resources for SAP landscapes with reduced physical
servers, carbon footprint, and energy requirements, and with increased CPU
utilization.
Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP
Technology Concepts and Business Considerations
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Datastores
SAP landscapes typically generate significant storage footprints driven by the size of
production instances and the number of copies maintained for QAS, DEV, TST,
TRN, and backup. This is compounded as organizations typically have multiple
landscapes including ERP, CRM, and BI which ultimately drive multi-terabyte SAP
storage footprints.
The key for an SAP datastore in a virtual infrastructure is to reduce capital and
operating expenses for SAP storage. EMCs storage platforms deliver this reduction
with scale-out and tiering capabilities within a single frame and management
abstraction by virtualizing storage resources in the array.
Scale-out and storage tiering in a single frame
The figure below depicts the EMC advanced functionality to optimize storage tiering
through a suite of software-based tiering capabilities, including areas such as qualityof-service management and optimization tools that offer the right levels of
performance to meet specific application service levels.
The next figure explores how the tiered storage can lower cost with optimized
service levels. Compared to an all-Fibre Channel configuration, a tiered storage
configuration not only provides a 17 percent cost savings, but delivers 38 percent
more IOPS, and requires 32 percent less power and cooling and 384 fewer drives.
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Integrating OS
cloud with the
datastore
EMC and VMware have invested heavily to achieve benefits related to simplified
management of virtual environments in order to lower cost and enable higher levels
of service.
The following figure highlights the integration of VMware vSphere and EMC virtual
storage. This integration provides management abstraction that enables ease,
speed, and automation for provisioning resources, centralized reporting and control,
and ensures performance and minimized disruption for SAP landscapes.
Integrating the OS cloud with the storage datastore provides the following benefits:
Reduces operating expenses with management abstraction and automation for
SAP landscapes.
Quickly provision resources on demand
Centralized, automated management, reporting, and control
Ensures SAP performance and high availability.
QoS - Policy-based load balancing across physical resources
Non-disruptive mobility of applications and data
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Desktop
Managing traditional desktops has become increasingly more complex. This is due
to the increasing number of users, remote and mobile, and the demand for high
levels of performance and quality while access multiple applications including SAP.
In addition, costs associated with IT administrative activities, including PC
maintenance, repairs, and upgrades, are also rising. This results in the
transformation of desktop management toward virtualization. VMware View
(formerly VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI) lets organizations streamline
desktop management and control, providing SAP users a virtual desktop that
behaves like a normal PC.
The figure below illustrates the centralized SAP desktop management.
The centralized SAP desktop management reduces capital and operating costs for
desktop applications including SAP through:
migrating users and intelligence from standalone machines to centralized data
center, and
unifying data centers to serve SAP business users requirements across different
geographies.
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Network
Unified networks
Typical SAP performance and availability require the data center to have two
separate but interdependent physical networks the Ethernet LAN and the Fibre
Channel SAN. Each network has its own terminology, protocols, management tools,
and physical components. This requires unique equipment and creates a
tremendous amount of redundancy, especially when it comes to administration. IT
administrators with different skill sets are needed to manage and support the two
networks.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet enables consolidation of server cables and adapters by
allowing LAN and SAN traffic to travel on a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet link. It also
seamlessly integrates with existing Fibre Channel networks, management
processes, and workflows, offering a smooth migration path for existing Fibre
Channel customers.
Virtual switches
Until recently, data center networks were designed under the safe assumption that
each end node was connected to the access port of an end-of-row switch in the
network and corresponded to one server running a single image that is, a single
instance of an OS and a single instance of a given application. Another safe
assumption was that the application and its associated OS would be persistently
bound to that specific physical server and would rarely, if ever, move onto another
physical server.
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18
IT operations
IT service
management
process
Governance,
risk, and
compliance
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an efficient and accurate process for managing data center configurations for SAP
IT, and
the consolidated view and control of physical and virtual infrastructure.
EMC Ionix
EMC Ionix provides an IT management framework and tools for end-to-end SAPaware operations and service desk management.
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Quality of service (QoS) provides the ability to guarantee the SAP landscapes
priority in a shared virtual infrastructure environment, ensuring a defined level of
performance for SAP users. It is critical to provide QoS at every level of the IT
infrastructure:
Server - guarantee sufficient server-side resources (CPU, memory) to specific
virtual machines, establishing priority control and time sharing of resources.
Network - guarantee sufficient network resources (queuing, scheduling, traffic
shaping)
Storage - guarantee sufficient storage-side resources (response time, bandwidth,
throughput) to specific LUNs, establishing priority control and performance
(minimum/maximum) on a LUN-by-LUN basis
Organizations need to effectively guarantee the performance across the IT stack for
SAP transactions responding to potential problems diagnosed as soon as they start
occurring with a self-adjusting, self-optimizing services.
Archiving
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Backup and
recovery
Disaster
recovery
The most visible and, in some ways, most critical part of business continuity planning
is taking care of mission-critical applications such as SAP. The SAP Business Suite
manages business processes, such as order processing, shipping, and supply chain
management, that trigger updates to several applications in the landscape prior to
completion of the business event. Application services and data from multiple
sources or federated groups must be managed and protected for businessconsistent recovery.
Since an average company incurs over $1 million of revenue loss per hour of
downtime, data is required to be protected across the entire infrastructure -- the
network, server, and application layers. The continuity across local production
environment and remote environment should be established for planned and
unplanned downtime, including disaster recovery.
EMC products integrated with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
provide the ability to reduce risk and cost for SAP landscapes with automated
failover testing with no impact to the production.
System refresh
SAP Basis administrators and DBAs are challenged with the time and risk
associated with managing upgrades, new modules, maintenance, QA refreshes, and
migrations. Cloning SAP data is important to the lifecycle management of SAP
applications.
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Planning the
move to virtual
infrastructure
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protect and ensure landscape availability for SAP users. The services include
backup and recovery, data replications for SAP system refresh, business continuity,
and automated IT resource management.
Policy-based automation for provisioning SAP IT In order to realize the value of
a virtual infrastructure for SAP, data center management needs to be able to
provision IT infrastructure as a service. Components for policy-based automation
include Service Catalogs for SAP; business workflow for reviewing, ordering and
chargeback of services; and automated IT best practices such as ITIL, for service
management, problem resolution, root cause analysis, configuration and change
management.
The figure below illustrates the process or phases that an organization will move
through on the journey to realizing the vision of the virtual infrastructure for SAP.
Note that the phases may overlap.
Building a
virtual
infrastructure
for SAP
As stated earlier, building a virtual infrastructure for SAP begins with a strategy that
considers the SAP application lifecycle and data center directions impacting the SAP
landscapes providing value to the business. Focus on the value to the business
creates consensus for project requirements, resources, and management support.
Second, a documented blueprint of the SAP and non-SAP landscapes, including
dependency mapping for IT components, will be critical for planning projects and
facilitating implementation.
Third, a project roadmap that supports business and data center management
objectives for the SAP landscape should be developed. The key in developing a
project-based roadmap is the prioritization based on the projects business impact,
including ROI and the complexity to implement.
Employing a project-based taxonomy, EMC works with customers to bring together
senior management, SAP teams, and IT to drive discovery and business impact
workshops to identify and prioritize projects enabling management to plan and
commit based on value and return to the business.
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The following figure provides a framework for project-based discovery and business
impact assessment for SAP IT transformation.
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Conclusion
Summary
SAP project teams are looking for better ways to manage their SAP landscapes
throughout the application lifecycle implementation, migrations, consolidations,
upgrades and ongoing maintenance. In addition, the teams need to continually
ensure optimal performance and high availability for SAP.
For IT, with growing SAP landscapes, infrastructure challenges are compounded
by constraints for power, cooling, and floor space within data centers and the
continual corporate acquisitions that introduce heterogeneous platforms into the
corporate architecture.
Recommendations
26
References
Related
documentation
Next steps
27