Blog Posts

The SAP Windows support announcement is now one week old, and what a busy week it has been. Many existing and prospective customers have called to express how important the SAP support announcement is for them, new partners have reached out to us, and the news was also very positively discussed in the press and the blogs (see for example “VMware goes to Germany” at the Motley Fool). More than 300 customers also dialed into our webinars discussing the announcement. For me, as VMware’s Business Development Manager responsible for our SAP activities in the Americas, truly an exciting week.

Today, I want to discuss some of the blogs which have picked up on the news.

Larry Dignan of ZDNet is asking: "VMware, SAP in virtualization support pact; Will ERP implementations become easier?". He comments on the fact that there are obvious (and large) savings in hardware costs, but that there should be more savings to be had around testing and SAP uptime.

And Vinnie Mirchandaniwants to know: “Can it also cook breakfast?". Vinnie writes:

• “….Sizing and provisioning and administering hardware is a very small part of labor in an SAP implementation. Process design, table configuration, data conversion, integration, end-user training, testing, change management - are the big bad boys...."

While the comments disagree a bit on the size of the hardware savings (and Larry has got it right!) they bring up a very important and valid point: in the big scheme of SAP implementations/upgrades, hardware savings and reduced sizing risk are good, but there are other major ticket items. Can VMware also help with these?

And the answer is a clear “yes". Certainly, SAP customers will still need to configure their tables, convert data, write their custom code if required, and so forth. But VMware offers great benefits in a variety of other critical areas, such as:

• - increased opportunities for test cycles
• - mitigation of project risk
• - improved application up-time across all environments
• - increased business continuity and simplified disaster recovery

The ROI of all of these benefits scale with the criticality of your SAP implementation to your business, and not with the price of the underlying hardware. Therefore, massive savings can be derived from virtualizing your SAP implementation with VMware from benefits going far beyond hardware savings. (And let us not forget about operational savings - more on that in an upcoming blog).

To make this more concrete, I want to briefly highlight how VMware Infrastructure has helped customers with SAP upgrades, a critical activity which many SAP customers will be undertaking very soon. A great case study is provided by the customer we mentioned already in our first blog. Here, VMware virtualization was introduced in an SAP upgrade project (R3 v4.7 to ECC 6.0, plus Unix to x86/Linux migration, plus Oracle Unicode – needless to say a major endeavor). It is also important to stress that in this case virtualization was not a goal by itself, but a means to improve the SAP upgrade process.

How did it help? Which VMware features were used? First, by utilizing the VMware Snapshot technology, the customer was able to very quickly roll-back to known good versions if a problem occurred during the upgrade steps. A lot of flexibility was gained, more new features could be tried, and the project was progressing much more rapidly and effectively. Also, more test cycles could be run. Secondly, new environments could be created with a few mouse-clicks, also greatly benefitting the upgrade project and reducing its risk.

Overall, the customer realized the following benefits (over and above infrastructure TCO savings!):

• - 100% more opportunity for test/dry-run cycles
• - 20% reduction in development/deployment time
• - 'Project creep' mitigation
• - On-the-fly unforeseen environment spin-up

Thanks to VMware virtualization, the project came in on-time and on-budget. And, oh yes, they are now able to support 1800 SAP users with only two SAP administrators, and they have reduced their hardware footprint despite a lot of new features.

These benefits combined with other standard VMware features, like high-availability across all environments and distributed resource scheduling to ensure adequate compute resources for all application components, very much address some of bigger items in SAP implementations and upgrades.

To summarize: "VMware for SAP – much more than hardware savings!"

• Joachim Rahmfeld