It has been a busy and exciting 10 days, and it isn’t slowing down yet. Last week, we had a big presence at SAP TechEd, and this week VMworld is happening. Both events took (take) place in Las Vegas, extending the busyness into the evening hours. And as I write this, I am on my way to Nashville, TN, to speak together with Gunther Schmalzhaf, Product Manager for SAP Virtualization and Adaptive Computing, about the integration of the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller with VMware Infrastructure at the ASUG Conference 'Operations Optimization'.
But one thing at a time. Let’s start with our impressions and take-aways from TechEd (I will talk about the other events in my next post). Unfortunately, I was severely weakened by a bad cold, stopping me from spending much time at the VMware (and Intel) booth(s) talking to customers and partners. But that is what a team is for. So what are our impressions?
First of all, it is clear that VMware virtualization is becoming mainstream in SAP environments. In our booth we had twice as many customer contacts as last year, and we learned about many new customers who have virtualized their SAP environments. Overall, we spoke with more than 500 people, and we seriously need to think how we will handle the traffic next year (and ‘no’, we did not have any give-aways attracting people to our booth, these are all real interested practitioners). A good problem to have. We demoed our Efficient Disaster Recovery for SAP Landscapes (which we set up jointly with SAP and NetApp in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab), and it was enthusiastically well received -- a robust, testable, and cost-effective DR framework is extremely important for SAP customers. We also met partners interested in joining our VMware SAP Solutions Community , and we look forward to working with them. Customer comments included “We are using VMware for many months in production now, and it works just perfectly”, and even “please could you help to convince my IT guy that virtualizing my SAP environment is really a good thing!”.
In addition to our booth presence, quite a few Tech Ed breakout sessions dealt with virtualization in general and contained at least part of the VMware story.
Our own session, “Running VMware in Production: From Consolidation to Disaster Recovery” was attended by about 150 people. We were very pleased to learn that the vast majority were already using VMware in their SAP environments. By a count of raised hands, roughly a third of them are running in production, which is quite consistent with our internal intelligence. Vas Mitra, SAP Solutions Architect at VMware, provided technical best practices. We talked about the four big reasons customers are running their SAP production environments on VMware: Consolidation, Performance, DR & Availability, and Serviceability. We have customer stories available that show all of these uses. For example, our latest reference customer, medical device maker NuVasive (running their SAP environment on 14 HP Blade servers), says:
“Our SAP implementation was a multimillion-dollar project, probably one of the most important ones we’ll do for years to come, so we were all pretty nervous about it. But SAP is running great on VMware. Everyone is very happy with the performance–including the SAP contractors we have here. They have given rave reviews. I think that speaks volumes for VMware.” (Bill Moore, IT Infrastructure Manager).
The main points of the presentation were a) many customers have already virtualized SAP production environments, and b) consolidation is just the beginning of the benefits they have gained.
The presentation from Suba Garlapati at EFI on how his company leveraged VMware Infrastructure during its SAP upgrade project led to a very animated discussion with the audience. Suba explained how EFI used snapshots to accelerate the upgrade. He also talked about their overall environment and how they use VMware now in production.
SAP offered a few sessions on related topics. Roland Wartenberg (Chief Virtualization Strategist at SAP Labs) talked, like last year, about the entire virtualization stack (storage, network, application, server, desktop, etc.), and we demonstrated our joint disaster recovery solution for a few minutes. This session was extended to two hours compared to last years’ one hour, and that was really required to cover everything that is going on. The big takeaway for VMware from Roland’s talk is that, apart from our own activities in the areas of server, desktop, and application virtualization, ‘Virtualization’ is a wide field, and there are many opportunities for us to work with our partners, as we do within (and outside of) the SAP Enterprise Virtualization Community. Our DR solution integrating VMware Site Recovery Manager with our storage partners technologies (see for example our work in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab) is living proof of that.
Last but not least, Gunther Schmalzhaf talked about SAP Adaptive Computing and its integration with VMware Infrastructure. Gunther’s first session was so crowded that the organizers had to lock the doors. I will talk more about this session in an upcoming blog after Gunther and I give a joint session at the SAP User Group Conference in Nashville on Wednesday Sept. 17.
So that was it from SAP TechEd. To summarize: great traffic, a lot of interest, a lot of new customer testimonials and partner discussion, and a lot of fun.
SAP solutions on VMware Infrastructure in production – beginning to be mainstream!
Joachim
