Happy New Year 2010 to all readers of our blog I am very excited to make a great announcement just as we start into business in 2010.

In the past months, I have spoken to many SAP customers that told me about ONE issue they face, when virtualizing SAP: Oracle would not support SAP production landscapes on VMware. While many customers continued virtualizing SAP on Oracle despite these restrictions, some did not and had to delay their project. We have worked with SAP and Oracle to improve the support situation and in Q4 09 the stack was already under evaluation.

Now, I am happy to announce that Oracle modified their policy to support SAP/VMware users as follows (see SAP Note 1173954 for details):

1. Since Jan 13, 2010, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1

Interestingly, there is also a new note (SAP Note 1426182) created about “Support of Oracle Databases for XEN", which clearly highlights that “XEN virtualized environments on the Linux platform impact critical runtime related areas for the Oracle Database such as process scheduling, network and disk IO access. Therefore Oracle does not support to run production databases in XEN virtualized environments.” Also there is still no support from Oracle for Hyper-V.

To make this real simple:
All databases Oracle, IBM DB2, SAP Max DB, and MS SQL Server now support SAP production environments on VMware.
On x86 platforms:
• VMware was the first virtualization solution that supported SAP on Windows
• VMware is the only virtualization solution that supports SAP on Windows and Linux
• VMware is the only virtualization solution that is supported by all database vendors

If you haven’t done so already, now, it’s time to think about virtualizing SAP on VMware. There will be nothing that stops you.

Today, VMware announced in a press release that SAP Managed Services, SAP AG's internal IT infrastructure provider, has deployed the VMware platform pervasively across its IT environment as the main virtualization platform for agile and adaptable implementations of SAP solutions.

This announcement follows a keynote that Dr. Krips (Sr. VP at SAP Managed Services) previously delivered at VMworld Cannes, and various presentations on this topic by Markus Winter (Head of Strategic Projects, SAP Managed Services) at VMworld conferences. SAP Managed Services developed a very comprehensive framework utilizing more than 8000 virtual machines with VMware software as its primary platform with the purpose of providing virtualized infrastructure solutions to internal SAP teams and customers.

Read the press release in full!

Computacenter will start their SAP roadshow on Nov. 25 in Ratingen, Germany. HP, Intel, and VMware will be present. If you are interested to hear first hand about

• SAP Virtualization
• How to identify the right platform for SAP on VMware
• Results about the SAP Virtualization project at regio IT Aachen
• See Live Demos

If you want to hear real-time news about "SAP on VMware", please follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SAPonVMware .

We are excited to be part of SAP TechEd Phoenix next week. If you're attending the conference this year, come by the VMware booth, no. 705, to meet the VMware SAP team and learn how the advanced features in products from SAP and VMware combine synergistically to create a powerful and sustainable business process automation system. With the introduction of powerful new features in the VMware vSphere product suite earlier this year, there has never been a better time or a better platform for virtualizing SAP solutions. Many SAP customers are already using VMware solutions to achieve cost-effective high availability, true fault tolerance, efficient, simplified disaster recovery, and lower energy consumption.

At TechEd, we've got experts with deep SAP technical expertise ready to explain how you can take virtualized SAP environments to the next level, or simply how to best get started if you are in the process of considering a virtualized SAP architecture. We will also share with you explicit customer cases documenting TCO savings of 50%-80% over three years by migrating to a virtualized SAP landscape!

But to the logistics:

• Booth location: no. 705

• Booth demos: Zero Downtime of SAP Central Services using VMware Fault Tolerance & Efficient, Automated SAP Disaster Recovery with VMware Site Recovery Manager

• Speaking Sessions with VMware speakers, contributions, or content:
  • "Virtualizing SAP in a Real-World Environment, an End User Case Study with Intel and VMware Session", Tue, Oct 13th, 11:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
  • "Implementing SAP Landscapes in a Dynamic Virtual Data Center Using EMC Storage Technology", Wednesday, Oct 14th, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m
  • "SAP Scaling with VMware vSphere and IBM System x", Wednesday, Oct 14th, 10:30 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
  • "Virtualizing the SAP ecosystem - Using fundamentally better solutions from HP, Novell, SAP and VMware", Thursday, Oct 15th, 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m.

• Joachim

In this upcoming webinar (Thursday, September 17, 2009 - 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET), Jim Whalen (EMC) and I will discuss how the combination of the strengths of EMC and VMware help to achieve the highest service levels, dramatically lower costs, and unprecedented flexibility for your SAP landscapes. Discover how to transform your SAP operations, increase efficiency and responsiveness through end-to-end management, and maximize the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and service-oriented infrastructure (SOI).

You can register for the event here.

• Joachim

SAP has released two SD Benchmarks based on VMware vSphere 4. The benchmark tests were performed by VMware partner Fujitsu using Intel processors and the latest SD Benchmark setup, which contains unicode, sub 1 sec. response time, and EHP 4.

Here are the results:

• * The setup of one virtual machine with four vCPUs (out of 16 native threads) was able to handle 1,144 SD users with a response time of 0.97 sec., which is equivalent to 6,250 SAPS (Certification Number :2009028).

• * The setup of one virtual with eight vCPUs (out of 16 native threads ) was able to handle 2,056 SD users with a response time of 0.98 sec., which is equivalent to 11,230 SAPS (Certification Number :2009029).