VMware High Availability (HA) has helped our SAP customers achieve their uptime requirements and meet their target SLAs. VMware vSphere 4 introduces VMware Fault Tolerance (FT), a feature that allows a virtual machine to continue running even when the underlying physical server fails. It is a software solution that runs on commodity hardware and does not require any modifications to the guest operating system or SAP applications running inside the virtual machine. This new FT feature can provide further protection to SAP single points of failure with zero downtime. An ideal candidate for this feature is the lightweight central services component – SAP enqueue can be protected in the event of hardware failure with no loss of locks without the complexity of configuring replicated enqueue and clustering.

VMware FT and VMware HA satisfy the requirements of different HA scenarios for SAP customers. These scenarios, along with third party clustering solutions certified on VMware such as Microsoft Cluster System, are described in the paper "SAP Solutions on VMware: High Availability" which can be found here.

The paper describes and compares the different scenarios to help our customers architect highly available SAP solutions in a VMware virtualized environment.

-Vas Mitra

As you likely have heard, VMware has announce a major new version of its
virtualization software for servers called vSphere 4. This version is the
successor to the VMware Infrastructure software suite.

We have spent the last couple of months with SAP testing this new version
to make sure no problems or SAP specific issues arise when using vSphere.

vSphere is now officially supported in Production for Linux operating systems.

The support note from SAP is 1122387 "Linux: SAP Support in virtualized environments."

We have also updated the note 1122388 "Linux: VMware ESX 3.x or vSphere configuration guidelines"
to reflect the latest guidelines.

For Windows, we are expecting the updated support statement by the end of May,
pending the general availability of vSphere 4.

All tests of vSphere 4 have shown improved Performance, reduced
overheads and excellent scalability for SAP components. With the introduction of
support for up to 8 virtual CPUs, vSphere 4 is able to handle even large database
loads.

We are currently working with our hardware partners on sizing and publishing
new SD Benchmarks and expect those results to come out over the next couple of months.