Virtualization for SAP Solutions

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!

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 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

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

Welcome to the 'Virtualization for SAP Solutions' Blog

jorad — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:34:00 GMT

This entry marks the start of a new VMware blog that will focus on the ins and outs of virtualization for SAP landscapes. The VMware SAP alliance team will share blogging duties here, so a brief introduction is in order. I am Christoph Reisbeck, director of the global alliance team. The others who will contribute include Matthias Czwikla, senior business development manger for the SAP team in EMEA, Joachim Rahmfeld, senior business development manager for the Americas, Wee Meng Thoo, senior technology alliance manager in APAC, Michael Hesse, staff systems engineer, and Vas Mitra, solutions engineer.

If you’re an administrator or manager of an SAP environment, a developer who works with SAP Netweaver, an architect, consultant, or systems integrator working on SAP deployments, put this blog on your list of favorites and check back often. We expect to cover a wide variety of topics drawing from product news, developments in the relationship between VMware and SAP, reports of interesting customer experiences or responses to customer comments and questions, short how-to guides, tuning recommendations, and whatever else that we have to report of timely interest.

As I write this, we’re just reviewing our experiences at the SAP TechEd events this fall, in Las Vegas, Munich, Shanghai, and Bangalore. We were very pleased by the large number of attendees who crowded our booths at the events, even though we weren’t giving away any prizes. We are also happy to note that at TechEd Munich, Klaus Kreplin, SAP Corporate Officer and Member of the Executive Council, mentioned VMware during the NetWeaver Composite Environment demo on a USB stick. Some customers referred to this keynote when they visited our booth. We were also mentioned in six other SAP presentations, including two that were live demos – so all in all, we saw a lot of interest in VMware and a larger awareness of the benefits of virtualization for SAP environments.

We got a lot of positive comments about the benefits of virtualization for SAP software, and we answered a lot of questions. One thing we discussed in particular is how much easier upgrades can be within a virtualized environment, on top of the consolidation and flexibility benefits that users are already aware of. SAP administrators tell us they are worried about potential delays and budget over-runs. By putting everything into a virtual infrastructure, you can be sure your developers and consultants will have the environments they need to get the upgrade done, because you can provision a new virtual server for them in an hour or even less without the need to have extra hardware allocated. Very useful is also the ability to take snapshots of your virtualized SAP systems in between upgrade steps. This allows you to quickly return to an earlier point in time when a modification has not worked out as well as planned. Check here for the story of one SAP customer who used VMware Infrastructure to do a migration from a proprietary Unix environment to Linux and do an SAP upgrade at the same time. As a result of using virtualization, the project came in on time and on budget.

That’s all for now, but check back soon for the latest news and information on how virtualization can make your SAP landscape more flexible and productive.

- Christoph Reisbeck