VMware Communities: Virtualization for SAP Solutions : 2008 : April

SAP Hardware certification for VMware ESX

A topic that comes up frequently is, which Servers are supported to run SAP software on VMware ESX in Production ?

To answer this question I have to differentiate between Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Windows:

Up until recently, to run SAP on VMware ESX on a given server, the server vendor had to do an additional certification specifically for VMware ESX. These certifications were published as SAP Benchmarks on http://www.sap.com/benchmark. In January, SAP agreed to remove this additional certification. This change was announced in the Benchmark Council in February. From now on, any server is supported that is

a.) on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (http://www.vmware.com/resources/guides.html) AND !

b.) on the SAP certified hardware list, maintained at http://www.saponwin.com/

This decision shows that SAP trusts the stability of the VMware ESX platform and widens server choices for our joint customers.

Linux:

For Linux, the hardware vendors are responsible to decide which servers they would like to support for SAP running on VMware ESX. Below you will find a reference for each vendor. I reference the notes, since they are updated frequently. You can also find this information under: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/linux -> Supported Platforms

FSC: <https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/linux?rid=/webcontent/uuid/930e18ae-0e01-0010-1a96-dcf4164503ff>

IBM SAP Note: 171380

HP SAP Note: 171371

Dell SAP Note: 300900

SUN SAP Note: 597470

Please keep in mind that server certification is only a factor for servers that run "productive" SAP instances. For test and development you can use any server that is on VMware's HCL at: http://www.vmware.com/resources/guides.html.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: sap, certification, server, sap_certification

NEWS from the SAP Benchmarking Front

For those of you who follow the published SAP benchmarks, there are already quite a few VMware-based results. You can find the results here:

http://www.sap.com/benchmark -> 2 tier results.

Just recently two new results were published.

1.) * 2008007 HP on Windows with 516 SD users on ESX 3.5. This is the first Benchmark published on VMware ESX 3.5 and it shows an improvement of about 10 percent compared to a similar setup with ESX Server 3.0.2.
2.) * 2008009 FSC on Linux with 550 SD users on ESX 3.5. This is the first Benchmark published with Linux as the OS.

All of the published benchmarks were run using only two virtual CPUs.

As you can see, over a timeframe of less than a year the results have improved significantly from a little over 400 SD users to more than 500 SD users. This increase is due to faster processor speeds along with improvements to the VMware ESX platform. These benchmarks show how well-performing a virtual environment can be, and give an idea of what can be achieved with a virtual machine. As always the results will vary with the server used and the setup of the SAP system.

Michael

The above mentioned SD Benchmarks were achieved with

SAP ERP 6.0 (2005) and the following configuration:

2008007: Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on VMware ESX Server 3.5 (using 2 virtual CPUs)

RDBMS: SQL Server 2005

HP ProLiant DL580 G5, 4 processors / 16 cores / 16 threads, Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X7350 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache per core and 4 MB L2 cache per 2 cores, 64 GB main memory

2008009: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on VMware ESX Server 3.5 (using 2 virtual CPUs)

RDBMS: MaxDB 7.7

Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY Model TX300 S4 | RX300 S4,2 processors / 8 cores / 8 threads, Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5460, 3.16 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache per core and 6 MB L2 cache per 2 cores, 32 GB main memory

0 Comments Permalink Tags: benchmarking, sap_benchmarking, sap