Virtualization for SAP Solutions

Tell Us Your SAP Virtualization Story and Win a MacBook Air with VMware Fusion!

jorad — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:57:00 GMT

Win a MacBook Air with VMware Fusion just for taking a few minutes to explain how you use VMware solutions in your SAP landscape. If you've successfully virtualized any part of your SAP environment, you are eligible to enter the Tell Us Your Story contest. There are seven categories, including one for SAP deployments, and you can apply for as many categories as you qualify for. Obtain more details and the application forms for the contest, which runs until June 27.

Checkpoint Systems Success Story Now Available

jorad — Thu, 29 May 2008 23:51:00 GMT

The customer story we talked about last week, Checkpoint Systems, is now available as a case study.

Here's what Michael Nogger, IT Operations Manager Europe says about Checkpoint's SAP virtualization experience:

"Moving our SAP deployment on to VMware Infrastructure has made it easier to deliver a higher level of service to the business than was previously possible. We have moved our entire SAP environment onto VMware and our lives are now significantly easier. We spend far less time performing upgrades and maintenance tasks, and our service delivery processes are incredibly streamlined."

For more details, please read the story!

Webinar Announcement: "Streamlining SAP Upgrades with VMware Infrastructure 3" (May 28, 9 am PDT)

jorad — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:19:00 GMT

If you are interested in hearing about a customer deployment of SAP ERP on VMware Infrastructure, you may want to attend this Webinar, May 28, 2008, 9 am Pacific Time: Streamlining SAP Upgrades with VMware Infrastructure 3.

Electronics for Imaging (EFI), SAP and VMware are discussing the use cases, best practices and benefits of deploying SAP software on VMware Infrastructure.

New Customer Proof Point for 'SAP on VMware': Checkpoint Systems

jorad — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Check out the new 'SAP on VMware' success story on Checkpoint Systems, published by Manufacturing Computer Solutions. The article illustrates why customers turn to VMware virtualization for their SAP landscapes, and what kind of results they are seeing.

Checkpoint's problem areas - maintenance, upgrades, and provisioning - have been fully addressed by VMware virtualization. The entire ERP environment was virtualized, including database and central instance in production and non-production landscapes. What are the results? Among the most important are improved ability to deliver on internal SLAs and accelerated disaster recovery. The article also cites an 8:1 consolidation ratio, 34% reduction in power and cooling costs, and a reduction of provisioning times from six weeks to one hour. Truly great results, and very typical.

-Joachim

Efficient Disaster Recovery for SAP Landscapes

jorad — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:00:00 GMT

VMware announced Monday that VMware Site Recovery Manager will be available for order next week. Site Recovery Manager is a new product for disaster recovery management and automation that leverages the storage technologies of our storage partners. Clearly, business continuity and disaster recovery are critical for SAP customers, so this is a great time to talk about the DR project that we have been conducting at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab together with SAP and NetApp. See also the NetApp press release.

What are the issues with 'traditional' DR as we know it? First of all, many SAP (and non-SAP) customers do not have a proper DR plan in place, because it is too complex and cost-prohibitive for them. Investing in a heavily under-utilized infrastructure simply does not make sense to them. And if they have plans, they rarely get around to actually testing the framework. I generally hear from customers that they carve out time for this important effort once a year, at best. Concerns about impact on production are another issue. The DR framework is another huge challenge since it usually consists of a long list of manual steps which are often executed by multiple groups, making it very hard to minimize recovery time. Given the critical importance of having a functioning datacenter, these issues leave customers with significant exposure if unexpected failure events occur.

Site Recovery Manager addresses these issues by enabling you to easily create and manage centralized disaster recovery plans, allowing for mouse-click automated testing of these plans without impacting your production systems, and automating the site fail-over in case of a disaster.

In the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (see also VMware Joins the SAP Co-Innovation Lab!) , we tested this scenario for SAP, as it is a critical feature for our joint customers. The DR setup we staged in the lab gives a good example of the product in the SAP context, and it also shows the way Site Recovery Manger integrates with storage partner technologies (NetApp in this case).

Below we illustrate how easy it is to test the DR setup with Site Recovery Manager.

Starting Point:

We start with two SAP applications on the production site: IDES-prd and SCM-prd. The applications are located on two separate physical servers. On the DR site, we only have one physical server, which already is used by a sandbox system, SCM-sbx. The two SAP production instances are 'protected' and a DR plan is created automatically (although it is still customizable) to govern the fail-over steps in case of a disaster. In this case, we want both system to fail over to the one physical node on the DR site, and we choose to keep the sandbox system running. The protected systems are replicated in short intervals to the DR site.

Testing:

To illustrate the testing, we open VMware VirtualCenter in both the production and the DR sites. In the production VirtualCenter window, we open an SAP GUI from the console and look at the SAP sales orders, shown in the upper left window in Figure 1 below. In the DR VirtualCenter window, we execute the DR test scenario. Testing steps is as easy as pressing the button "test" for the appropriate plan. The test plan integrates with the underlying NetApp storage to create a FlexClone of the replicated VMs, boots them in an isolated (for test purposes) network, so that there is no interference with the production systems. The picture below (click on it for a better resolution) shows that the SAP VMs (IDES-prd and SCM-prd) are “recovered”, which means that the VMs have been started.

Figure 1: SAP DR plan in Action (upper left: production site, lower right: DR site - please click on the image for better resolution)

Now we are ready to test the systems. We go to the Inventory at the DR Site and open the console for the IDES-prd system. We login to the SAP UI and look up the sales orders. Note that the prd system and the DR system are running simultaneously, but that there is no interference, since the DR systems are created from a clone of replicated environment in an isolated network (try doing all of that in a physical environment!).

Figure 2: Test of Recovered SAP Systems (upper left: production site, lower right: DR site - please click on the image for a better resolution)

The sales orders exactly match between production site and recovery site, since in this case we haven’t created new sales orders since the last replication.

So the test is successful! Note also that both SAP systems started on the same host, while the pre-existing sandbox system was still running on that host as well. Of course, you can automatically suspend all existing VMs as part of the plan so that the recovered production instances have maximal resources.

Conclusion:

How long did it take to test the DR scenario?
In this case, a few minutes.
How complex was the test?
Very simple, one mouse-click followed by some testing. Even non-technical people can easily accomplish that.
Was there an impact on production?
Absolutely not.
How often can I run the test?
As often as you want.

So VMware Site Recovery Manager really should help you to improve your existing disaster recovery setup, or even to implement the framework you wish you had.

Interested in a demonstration? Please send me a private message.

Joachim

P.S.: The SAP Co-Innovation Lab is a great place to create these proof points, and it really helps in bringing innovation much quicker to customers.

Visit VMware at SAPPHIRE 2008 in Berlin, Germany

m@t — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:37:00 GMT

One of the most thrilling SAP events in EMEA is happening in Berlin. VMware invites you to meet our SAP alliance team in booth ER 2.13 at SAPPHIRE in Berlin from May 19-21. You can find us at the SAP ERP area in Hall 3, floor 2. Learn how you can use VMware technology as the infrastructure foundation for efficient business process management and continuous innovation based on SAP NetWeaver. Visit the VMware and HP booth at SAPPHIRE to participate in a drawing of exciting prices. You do not have to be present to win the price.

VMware has forged a strong, collaborative relationship with SAP AG to maximize the benefits for our joint customers. VMware is one of a very limited number of SAP Global Technology Partners, and VMware ESX is the only virtualization platform supported by SAP across both Windows and Linux for all environments, including production. VMware is also a charter member of the SAP Enterprise Virtualization Community, which unites leading virtualization
vendors to develop new strategies for business-process driven virtualization.

We look forward to talking with you at SAPPHIRE. At the VMware booth you'll see demos, customer case studies, product information and receive a CD containing the complete set of VMware SAP white papers and more.

Matthias

Announcing: VMware SAP Solutions Partner Community

jorad — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:08:00 GMT

We have recently been very busy with SAP activities and events, including SAP Virtualization Week in Palo Alto, SAP Sapphire Orlando, the completed VMware Site Recovery Manager project with SAP and NetApp at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, and the announcement of the SAP Enterprise Virtualization Community. We're not done yet: SAP Sapphire Berlin happens in less than two weeks. All will be discussed shortly when we get a few minutes to write about them.

But first, I want to announce the VMware SAP Solutions Partner Community. We created this growing community of VMware consulting/SI partners specifically to address the needs of customers who want to virtualize their SAP environments. All partners have demonstrated their SAP and VMware expertise, and they are well-qualified to support our customers. We will work with them to extend best practices, develop new use cases, and build new solutions for virtualized SAP landscapes. The partners are also encouraged to collaborate with each other. In short, it's an outstanding group of diverse, qualified, and enthusiastic partners and VMware is very excited to work with them!

If your organization needs a service partner/integrator to assist you in virtualizing your SAP landscape, this is a great place to start. And if you are a service partner, consider joining the community!

Joachim

SAP Hardware certification for VMware ESX

jasondinalt — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:04:00 GMT

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.

NEWS from the SAP Benchmarking Front

jasondinalt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:32:00 GMT

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

SAP Virtualization Week - April 7-10 in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto!

jorad — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:45:00 GMT

If you haven't yet, please have a look at SAP's announcement of the SAP Virtualization Week April 7-10! This great virtualization event takes place in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (see also my previous blog) of SAP Labs in Palo Alto. You can learn how other customers have virtualized their SAP environments, evaluate new technologies, and of course you will hear from SAP about their virtualization strategy. There are many great sessions.

VMware will have two sessions. The first, presented together with HP, provides a lot of great information resulting from an 'SAP on VMware' workload characterization study with HP. Test scenarios cover multi 2-tier and 3-tier scenarios of ECC 6.0 on NUMA and UMA based HP X86-64 ProLiant servers with results demonstrating scalability, ESX Server NUMA optimization and performance improvements from ESX Server 3.0.2 to ESX Server 3.5. Really good stuff.

In our second presentation, we will discuss service automation provided by VMware technologies. Very specifically, with NetApp as co-presenter, we will talk about disaster recovery facilitated by the upcoming VMware Site Recovery Manager, which will simplify protection against disasters by leveraging and extending the VMware virtualization framework. We will also discuss other new VMware products that will provide SAP service management. The presentation is in part based on one of the two projects on the way in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab -- more details to follow).

Several customers will present their experiences with VMware in an SAP environment. If you're interested in virtualization in an SAP environment it will be a great event!

Note: you only have until March 16 to register!

- Joachim

P.S.: If you miss it... all of the presentations will be available on SDN. And we will also surely write about it in this forum.

VMware Joins the SAP Co-Innovation Lab!

jorad — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:19:00 GMT

As you may know, VMware recently not only announced SAP production support, but also our new status as an SAP Global Technology Partner. This new level of partnership has already spurred many new initiatives with SAP, and significantly accelerated our engagement with other partners in the SAP ecosystem as well. To convert these initiatives into proven and documented solutions, VMware has joined the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (or COIL) as a member, also providing key infrastructure to the lab. (In fact, just about any project hosted in the lab will now run on a VMware virtual machine.)

COIL is a well-resourced facility with expert, knowledgable staff, and it provides a focal point for many of our SAP activities, particularly in the Americas. Partners have instant access to the SAP systems they need, which greatly reduces ramp-up and development times for new solutions and integrations. Just as important, SAP is intimately involved in the projects, which enhances the solutions. COIL also allows VMware to demonstrate solutions to our customers without having to maintain a complete SAP infrastructure in our own facilities. Please see their website for more information.

In the end, this is really a great benefit to our joint customers, as innovation finds its way faster into their datacenters.

As I write this, VMware is working with SAP and other partners on two exciting projects, which I will blog about very, very soon.

Last but not least, the lab is right across from our headquarters in Palo Alto. So if you come to visit VMware and you are interested in our SAP activities, please let us know and we will show you around!

- Joachim

VMware Best Practices for SAP installations

jasondinalt — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:57:00 GMT

My name is Michael Hesse and I am responsible for the technical side of the SAP Alliance. I have spent the last four years on how to run SAP solutions on VMware and convincing SAP that it works well and even is a good thing. I would like to pass on to this community some of the recommendations we have developed during all our test cycles.

In general you can treat a virtual machine just like any standard server. All the recommendations for configuring your server, storage and OS are equally applicable to the virtual machine. From my experience, if you follow these guidelines your SAP solutions will run smoothly on VMware ESX Server.

There are some recommendations that are specific to setting up your environment so it works well with VMware software. The first four recommendations are valid for both Windows and Linux guest operating systems:

1. Use the latest processor generations (Core2duo or Quad from Intel Xeon 51xx,53xx, Rev. E/F or Barcelona from AMD), due to their enhanced support for virtualization.

2. For optimal results use virtual machines with one or two virtual CPUs. It is possible to use four virtual CPUs if your workload requires more processing power, but performance-wise two virtual machines allocated two vCPUs each will give better throughput.

3. Follow the SAP rules for setting up file systems for your database installation. These include:

Distribute database files over different physical/virtual disks.
Separate log and db files.
Use at least two separate VMFS (VMware Filesystem) volumes to create the virtual disks.
If you are planning to use Storage based Backups (Snapshots/Clones) we recommend to put the Database files on Raw Mapped Luns (RDM) and all the other parts on standard virtual disks. This way you get easier integration with the Storage based tools.
Distribute SAP large tables onto their own disks (LUNs) to use some of the database specific features like parallel load or queries etc for improved performance.

4. Don't over-commit memory! With VMware it is possible to assign more virtual memory to the virtual machines than there is physical memory available in the host. This practice is not recommended at all with SAP solutions. SAP allocates memory permanently and does not release it again. To enforce this policy, we recommend setting the "Memory Reservation" to the amount of memory configured for the virtual machine. This will ensure that the virtual machine with the SAP instance will always have the full amount of memory available. The same can be done for the "CPU Reservation," but we recommend enabling this only in case of performance problems, since the reserved resources are not available to other virtual machines any more.

The following recommendations are specific to Windows guest operating systems:

5. Install VMware Tools to avoid time conflicts. We also highly recommend that you use NTP (Network Time Protocol) on the ESX Server host machine.

6. If you are using SQL Server as the database, use "fixed memory allocation" to avoid the allocation overhead of "dynamic" memory allocation.

7. For CPU-bound systems with sufficient memory resources, use the SAP flat memory model with memory protection (mprotect) switched off. For more details on this configuration, see SAP note 1002587. This configuration yields the best performance and repsonse times.

8. For memory bound systems, use the classical SAP view memory model. To improve performance for this configuration, implement Microsoft hotfix 931308 (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931308).

These recommendations have also been documented in the SAP Notes:

1056052 for Windows

122388 for Linux

Here is a list of the SAP Notes relevant to VMware:

1122388 Linux: VMware ESX Server 3 configuration guideline

1056052 Windows: VMware ESX Server 3.0 configuration guideline

674851 Virtualization on Windows

895807 SAP support in virtualized SAP Environments

1104578 Virtualization in Windows: Enhanced monitoring

1122387 Linux: Supported virtualization technologies with SAP

171380 Linux: Released IBM hardware (Intel and AMD processors)

300900 Linux: Available DELL hardware

1002587 Flat Memory Model on Windows

597470 Linux: Released Sun Microsystems hardware

1019567 Corrections for new operating system monitor

Another very good place to look for VMware best practices is:

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/resources/cat/91

And last but not least, VMware has recently published a new paper, Best Practice Guidelines for SAP Solutions on VMware® Infrastructure. You can find it on the SAP portal on the VMware web site.

Michael Hesse

SAP Windows Support Note Updated!

jorad — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 22:20:00 GMT

The news of support has been out for about ten days, and SAP has just now updated the support note 674851 "Virtualization on Windows".

Here are key passages:

"VMware ESX Server 3.0 is the first virtualization solution for Industry Standard Server and Microsoft Windows that meets the prerequisites of SAP applications..."

"..In internal tests, SAP applications could be reliably used under VMware without affecting the system stability. Currently, no problems are known that restrict the use of SAP applications under VMware. In addition, published benchmarks from Dell, HP, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens display good performance...."

(Let me add that Sun has a certified benchmark as well. See http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx for a complete current list.)

Also important is note 1104578, which describes how SAPOSCOL, the SAP kernel, and transaction OS07 need to be adjusted so that important key figures are visible in the SAP System Monitoring.

This is all very good. But how does the support framework work in practice? Generally, per the note, the call is opened with SAP. If the cause is suspected to be related to the VMware software component, "... SAP will transfer the problem to VMware support. [...] SAP and VMware have defined a process for a common solution to this problem."

Note though that the note specifically refers only to VMware ESX Server. If the question concerns higher-level VMware Infrastructure elements, like VMware High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduling, live migration with VMotion, etc., VMware support should be contacted directly.

This should be a very clear framework for our customers!

Happy holidays,

Joachim

One Week SAP Windows Production Support for VMware - Comments on Comments

jorad — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:46:00 GMT

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 Mirchandani wants 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

SAP and VMware: Global Technology Partners. Support for Windows in production!

jorad — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:20:00 GMT

VMware just put out a press release announcing that SAP is providing support for Windows production applications running on VMware ESX Server. Here is the first paragraph:

“VMware, Inc., the virtualization software leader, today announced that SAP AG will provide immediate full support to its solutions in 64-bit Windows- and Linux-based production environments running on VMware ESX Server. Servers from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, IBM and Sun have achieved hardware platform certification for SAP® solutions running on Windows and Linux with VMware ESX Server, a component of the VMware Infrastructure software suite. VMware Infrastructure supports SAP solutions with both Windows and Linux on industry-standard hardware. SAP and VMware will assist joint customers in cooperative support services and problem resolution, backed by a global technology partnership agreement and dedicated support staffing.”

We are very happy to be able to announce this news. The negotiations took some time to complete because both companies wanted to create a framework that would have the systems and processes in place to guarantee the relationship would mean a better experience for our joint customers. Finalizing the contract is gratifying for me especially as the alliance director, but the whole team celebrated together last week in Walldorf where we were gathered to talk about our plans for 2008.

What this agreement means is that, with NO limitations, SAP supports

SAP Netweaver-based applications, industry solutions, components, and add-ons (Linux for NetWeaver 2004 and NetWeaver 7.0, and Windows for NetWeaver 7.0)
running in any environment (dev, test, or production)
running on Linux or Windows 64-bit on VMware Infrastructure, as long as the hardware on which the stack runs has been certified by SAP.

See also the SAP support notes 1122388,1122387, 895807 for Linux. We will update this information with the appropriate Windows notes as soon as they have been posted/updated.

Also, with the agreement VMware is now a Global Technology Partner of SAP.

Talking with customers we’ve heard about multiple pain points that VMware Infrastructure is a great solution for, such as server and infrastructure sprawl in the multiple SAP component landscape, impending upgrades to 64-bit, provisioning dev and test environments that sometimes require more hardware than production environments, availability (“job one” for the SAP administrator), and integrating new technologies like NetWeaver, ESOA and xApps.

In September we gave a webinar called “The benefits of deploying SAP Enterprise Applications on Virtual Infrastructure” and if you’d like to replay it you can find it on the VMware-SAP web page (www.vmware.com/sap) or you can go directly to it here .

- Christoph Reisbeck