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Recently, I spent a day at the ASUG conference in Nashville to give a presentation together with Gunther Schmalzhaf, the SAP product manager of Virtualization and Adaptive Computing. We talked about how VMware Infrastructure and SAP Adaptive Computing not only work together and complement each other very well (great information can be found at *https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/adaptive*), but also how SAP currently integrates the AC Controller and VMware VirtualCenter, enabling SAP Basis Administrators to monitor and manage the virtualized SAP landscape all within the Adaptive Computing Controller!

This is not only great from a functionality perspective, but it also shows yet again the alignment between SAP and VMware.

Now, what exactly is being integrated, and why is that good for our customers? Don’t Adaptive Computing and VMware Infrastructure do pretty much the same thing? After all, both start, stop, and relocate application resources, so shouldn’t I mostly use one or the other?

The answer is ‘no’. While both technologies address on a high-level similar pain points, they do so in very different and generally complementary ways. VMware virtualizes the server, and Adaptive Computing (AC) manages virtualized applications. VMware has all of the features/functions and know-how about the infrastructure, and SAP AC provides all of the manageability features for the SAP applications. Together, they provide end-to-end control for SAP Basis Administrators.

Start with the core use cases for parallel operations available today. First of all, Adaptive Computing can be used as an elegant P2V tool. You can quickly relocate (with downtime) your SAP instance from a physical server to a virtual machine. Another use case is that if you increase the size of a virtual machine in VirtualCenter, you can add more application resources through Adaptive Computing. You can also cleanly shut down the SAP instances before shutting down a VM, etc. Lastly, if you want to use Adaptive Computing for start/stop/relocate functionality of SAP services, but you have not installed your SAP instances in a ‘virtualized’ way (i.e. using logical host names, etc.), you can use VMotion to do the relocation, and that without downtime (now of course relocating the application and the OS together).

But the situation becomes a lot more interesting when you actually integrate both technologies, which SAP is doing currently. The present stage of the integration work was shown at SAP TechEd Las Vegas and at the aforementioned ASUG conference, and it will surely also be demonstrated at TechEd Berlin.

What does the integration entail? Let me start with a few customer questions that I frequently get. “With VMware ESX there is a new component in the stack. How do I do the monitoring then?”, “I am an SAP Basis Administrator and I need to see what else is running in my ESX servers. But I do not want to learn a new tool!”, or “My infrastructure manager does not want to give me access to VirtualCenter, so how can I see what is going on in my SAP landscape?” are some of the more common ones.

The upcoming integration addresses all of these points. The AC UI will feature a new tab called “Virtualization”, adding core virtual machine functionality to the existing AC functionality (which basically treats a virtual machine as a physical system). In the “Virtualization” tab you can see which application service is running on which virtual machine on which ESX host, and you get information about ESX hosts and virtual machine usage data. You can also execute core VMware commands like start/stop/suspend/resume for a VM, and trigger a migration using VMotion through the SAP UI. Very cool is also the following feature: If you click on “shutdown” for a VM, the AC Controller displays a pop-up window listing which SAP services are running in the VM and asks you whether it is still ok to proceed with the shutdown. This is clearly new stuff and a great interaction between virtual infrastructure and application.

Below are a few screen shots to provide more detail.

This is one of the new views in the “Virtualization” tab. On the first level, you see the VMs and ESX hosts managed by the underlying VirtualCenter Server with some statistics. In this case we have four ESX hosts and 19 VMs (13 running, 1 suspended, 5 stopped).



If you click on a specific ESX host you get some usage statistics for that server as well as a list of all SAP services running on each virtual machine on that host.



Finally, by selecting a particular virtual machine, you are presented with core management features for the virtual machines, like start, stop, suspend, resume, and VMotion.



Note that this integration is in pre-release status. For more information go to https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/adaptive and/or contact Gunther Schmalzhaf Gunther.Schmalzhaf@sap.com) directly.
As I said in the beginning, this integration will really provide the SAP Basis Administrator with a great tool to monitor and manage the (virtual) SAP landscape! And it is another testimonial to the tight collaboration between SAP and VMware as well…

Joachim