Virtualization for SAP Solutions

Taking place at the Novotel London West, Monday 10th and Tuesday 11th November, the SAP UKI User Group’s annual conference and exhibition is the UK & Ireland’s premier SAP related event bringing together SAP professionals and business managers from across the UK, Ireland and Europe and is an event not to be missed! For its first time, VMware will also be present at this event. Do not miss to meet with us at the booth and please join us for our presentation on Tue, Nov. 11. Illustrated with customer references including Astra Zeneca and T-Systems, this presentation will show how running SAP on a virtualized platform can enhance availability, reduce operational costs and complexity, accelerate deployment and upgrade processes whilst mitigating risk and compliance issues.

Presentation: Deploying SAP applications in a virtualized environment

Date: Tuesday, 11. November 2008
Start Time: 14:05
End Time: 14:50

During the past weeks I attended two major conferences for SAP users - German SAP User Conference (DSAG), Leipzig and SAP TechEd EMEA 2008, Berlin. I'd like to share my impressions of these events with you.

At DSAG, I gave a presentation about VMware virtualization of SAP. The room was packed and some of you who visited my presentation had to stand at the back of the room. Despite the 115+ attendees, it was a great, interactive presentation, with discussions around Live Migration of SAP using Vmotion and DRS, Disaster Recovery Management using our latest member of our product family VMware Site Recovery Manager, and last but not least our reference customers. Some of the visitors hardly believed that it is possible to move a live SAP Systems while 100s of users are putting the system under stress from one server to another without any downtime, without loosing a single user, nor a user context. About 25% of my audience were already running SAP on VMware, 15% run SAP production on VMware.

At SAP TechEd EMEA 2008 in Berlin, VMware Virtualization was once again a topic presented by many companies and discussed in many presentations (see my previous blog). The sessions that I attended were again packed and the VMware presentation as part of Roland Wartenberg's session LCM300: Enterprise Virtualization Map was visited by 250+ people. IBM claimed that x86 virtualization was the key topic on their booth where they showcased a 96-core server - perfectly suited for VMware. The VMware live-demo on HP's booth was another highlight and received a lot of positive feedback from visitors. I spoke to SAP customers who told me that the integration of Virtual Center into SAP Adaptive Commuting is a step into the right direction.We are very happy to hear this.

Overall, both event were great, and I am sure VMware will be back next year.

Matthias