This entry marks the start of a new VMware blog that will focus on the ins and outs of virtualization for SAP landscapes. The VMware SAP alliance team will share blogging duties here, so a brief introduction is in order. I am Christoph Reisbeck, director of the global alliance team. The others who will contribute include Matthias Czwikla, senior business development manger for the SAP team in EMEA, Joachim Rahmfeld, senior business development manager for the Americas, Wee Meng Thoo, senior technology alliance manager in APAC, Michael Hesse, staff systems engineer, and Vas Mitra, solutions engineer.

If you’re an administrator or manager of an SAP environment, a developer who works with SAP Netweaver, an architect, consultant, or systems integrator working on SAP deployments, put this blog on your list of favorites and check back often. We expect to cover a wide variety of topics drawing from product news, developments in the relationship between VMware and SAP, reports of interesting customer experiences or responses to customer comments and questions, short how-to guides, tuning recommendations, and whatever else that we have to report of timely interest.

As I write this, we’re just reviewing our experiences at the SAP TechEd events this fall, in Las Vegas, Munich, Shanghai, and Bangalore. We were very pleased by the large number of attendees who crowded our booths at the events, even though we weren’t giving away any prizes. We are also happy to note that at TechEd Munich, Klaus Kreplin, SAP Corporate Officer and Member of the Executive Council, mentioned VMware during the NetWeaver Composite Environment demo on a USB stick. Some customers referred to this keynote when they visited our booth. We were also mentioned in six other SAP presentations, including two that were live demos – so all in all, we saw a lot of interest in VMware and a larger awareness of the benefits of virtualization for SAP environments.

We got a lot of positive comments about the benefits of virtualization for SAP software, and we answered a lot of questions. One thing we discussed in particular is how much easier upgrades can be within a virtualized environment, on top of the consolidation and flexibility benefits that users are already aware of. SAP administrators tell us they are worried about potential delays and budget over-runs. By putting everything into a virtual infrastructure, you can be sure your developers and consultants will have the environments they need to get the upgrade done, because you can provision a new virtual server for them in an hour or even less without the need to have extra hardware allocated. Very useful is also the ability to take snapshots of your virtualized SAP systems in between upgrade steps. This allows you to quickly return to an earlier point in time when a modification has not worked out as well as planned. Check here for the story of one SAP customer who used VMware Infrastructure to do a migration from a proprietary Unix environment to Linux and do an SAP upgrade at the same time. As a result of using virtualization, the project came in on time and on budget.

That’s all for now, but check back soon for the latest news and information on how virtualization can make your SAP landscape more flexible and productive.

- Christoph Reisbeck