We are just returning from SAP SAPPHIRE in Orlando and would like to share some of our experiences and impressions.

Given the economic climate and the flu, the overall attendance was a bit down from the previous year. I believe Leo Apotheker (SAP CEO) talked about 10.000 participants, plus 8.000 attendees on the web. But while the drop was noticeable in the overall traffic, the discussions were excellent. First of all, we had more time for much more in-depth conversations with customers and partners. We heard about new customer successes and talked (and listened) to new customers who are considering implementing SAP on VMware. Interestingly, while customer discussions until last year were more focused on support and core functionality, now they generally center around how VMware software can be leveraged more strategically in SAP environments. It is good to see that the thoughts are heading towards the SLA-driven SAP datacenter, very similar to what Dr. Krips (Sr. VP, SAP Managed Services) talked about in his keynote in Cannes (see also: SAP Managed Services Keynote at VMworld Europe). Correspondingly, also the overall partner community mindset has clearly moved from “This is interesting, let us see how we can make this work in a few engagements,” which we often encountered in previous years, to “This is our VMware strategy – how can we best work together?”. Very nice progress indeed. In light of this, it was very good timing that we had this year also our first breakout session at SAP SAPPHIRE/ASUG (with Mike Somers of Dow Chemical – see discussion below).

Most importantly however, it has become clear that SAP has discovered virtualization as a critical area. Virtualization and cloud computing were highlighted in three keynotes, including those of Leo Apotheker and Hasso Plattner.

Leo Apotheker talked about virtualization in the context of Timeless Software. Timeless Software enables customers to take advantage of new technologies and developments in a non-disruptive manner:


It is very much self-evident (and always has been for you and us) that virtualization and cloud computing support a concept of this type extremely well by making the compute infrastructure supporting the business processes flexible and scalable, and allowing it to be easily upgraded without disruption. We are glad to see that SAP sees the synergies here as well.

Hasso Plattner talked mostly about in-memory databases, which was extremely(!) interesting by the way. From my layman’s view, this approach opens up completely new possibilities in terms of what you can do with your data. And the demos were very, very cool as well. However, Hasso also briefly talked about virtualization and cloud computing, and how they support today’s and tomorrow’s computing needs for businesses. The picture below visualizes this nicely.



On the opening day, Stefan Kneis, who heads up SAP's Global Customer User Groups, showed a screen shot of the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller interfacing with VMware- (and Xen-) virtualized SAP landscapes (see also News on the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller: Integration with VMware Infrastructure), using it as an example of how SAP works with the partner ecosystem.

VMware participated in the second event of the SAP Green IT Community. One always needs to be a bit careful in terms of what to expect from these communities in actual output, but this one seems very promising, as it connects customers, service partners, software partners, and hardware partners with the goal of delivering end-to-end energy savings for SAP customers. And it is output-focused, so stay tuned.

Last but most certainly not least, there were excellent customer sessions. Mike Somers of Dow Chemical did a great job explaining how Dow Chemical uses VMware virtualization in its SAP datacenter (and I added a few details around VMware’s products and strategy in the SAP space). Dow now has about 200 SAP VMs, and they haven’t even migrated all of their apps to their new NEA operating platform. Also, Jeroen van Hemel (VP of Operations at Infonet, Netherlands) discussed their architecture leveraging Suse Enterprise Linux and VMware virtualization. See this video for more details.

So overall SAP SAPPHIRE was quite exciting for us, and an excellent continuation of the SAP Virtualization Week three weeks ago (more to come on this as well).

• Joachim

Sustainability is one of the main topics and initiatives at SAPPHIRE 2009 and the 2009 ASUG Annual Conference, May 11-14, 2009 at the Orange County Convention Center. Sustainable is also a perfect description for the value provided -- in cost savings and optimized resource utilization -- if you run SAP solutions on VMware virtualization.. If you're attending SAP SAPPHIRE in Orlando this year, come by the VMware booth, no. 547, (and attend our presentations) to meet the VMware SAP team and learn how the advanced features in products from SAP and VMware combine synergistically to create a powerful and sustainable business process automation system.

With the recent introduction of powerful new features in the VMware vSphere product suite, there has never been a better time or a better platform for virtualizing SAP solutions. Many SAP customers are already using VMware solutions to achieve cost-effective high availability, true fault tolerance, efficient, simplified disaster recovery, and lower energy consumption. (According to a recent study, 48% of SAP customers on the x86 platform already use virtualization in their SAP environments, and 79% of those who virtualize use VMware virtualization.) At SAPPHIRE, we've got experts with deep SAP technical expertise ready to explain how you can take virtualized SAP environments to the next level by leveraging SAP NetWeaver enhancement packages and VMware vSphere to achieve the kind of seamless, efficient network of interrelated processes that has long been envisioned but nearly impossible to achieve.

VMware at SAPPHIRE 2009:

Booth location: no. 547

Booth demos: Zero Downtime of SAP Central Services using VMware Fault Tolerance.
VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) leverages the encapsulation properties of virtualization by building high availability directly into the ESX hypervisor in order to deliver hardware style fault tolerance to virtual machines. This demo demonstrates how FT can provide zero downtime to SAP Central Services in a distributed SAP deployment across virtual machines. SAP transaction locks are preserved and processed during a load created by the SD benchmark kit whilst experiencing a server failure.

Speaking Sessions:

A Business Case for SAP on Linux
Wed., May 13, 11:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Location: Consumer Industries Village
Mr. Andreas Nemeth, SAP Partner Product Manager, Novell, Inc.
Jeroen van Hemel, VP Operations, Infonet Nederland BV

VMware Virtualization and SAP at Dow Chemical
Date: Thurs., May 14 10:30 - 11:30 a.m.
Location: 220E
Michael Somers, Technical Architect, Dow Chemical
Joachim Rahmfeld, Sr. Business Development Manager, VMware Inc.

The 3rd annual SAP Virtualization Week was just kicked off with a presentation by Zia Yusuf, Executive Vice President. A focus point of SAP moving forward is Green IT, and as an integral pillar of this initiative is the creation of the Green IT Community, of which VMware is a key founding member.

Definitely the right direction to go!

• Joachim

Dr. Wolgang Krips, Sr. VP at SAP Managed Services, gave an excellent keynote address today at VMworld Europe, taking place in Cannes. He spoke about his view and vision on how virtualization enables new business models and service innovations, that are needed to meet user requirements. You can see the keynote here. (His keynote starts at around 75:00, but you should of course also see the address by Paul Maritz, VMware's CEO, discussing VMware's strategy going forward).

--Joachim

Last week marked the anniversary of VMware becoming an SAP Global Technology Partner, and SAP's official support for VMware ESX as a platform for SAP applications on Windows and Linux in test, development and production environments. In just twelve months, we've seen an enormous amount of momentum among customers and partners, and significant advances in the VMware-SAP partnership. Looking back over the year, we've seen:

• Great customer adoption with hundreds of customers using VMware in their SAP environments. This has allowed us to create several new case studies, with more being developed for publication next year. And more customers are talking publically about their experiences with running SAP landscapes on VMware Infrastructure - for example, Dow Chemical, T-Systems and Colgate gave presentations at SAP COIL Virtualization Week in April. Checkpoint Systems spoke at SAP TechEd in France.
• The rapid expansion and maturing of the VMware-SAP partner ecosystem. The VMware SAP Solutions Partner Community now has 24 members in countries around the world. We're also working on several technical and go-to-market initiatives with our server and storage partners. Highlights of last year's activities include:
  • The Virtualization Competency Center for SAP that VMware co-sponsors with AddOn sees lots of customer traffic.
  • At SAP COIL in both Palo Alto, CA and Tokyo, Japan we have built disaster recovery solutions using partner storage and VMware SRM, as well as an upgrade proof point using VMware. Many customers have been able to see demos of this solution in one of the labs.
  • SAP COIL in Palo Alto and Tokyo, as well as the CoE, run on VMware Infrastructure - allowing the member partners to provision environments for demos and projects rapidly and maximizing use of the IT resources in these facilities.
• VMware and SAP are becoming more and more strategically and technically aligned; some of the ways we are working together include:
  • Attending and speaking at each other's conferences. We saw a great deal of interest from customers at our booths and sessions at various SAP events, including SAP TechEd and SAPPHIRE conferences and SAP Virtualization Week. SAP spoke at VMworld this year, along with some of our joint customers.
  • A successful implementation of the integrated support framework between VMware and SAP - meaning customers can be assured that support issues related to virtualization will be handled seamlessly.
  • SAP gave a technical preview of the integration between SAP Adaptive Computing Controller and VMware vCenter at various conferences including SAP TechEd, generating a great deal of customer interest.
  • SAP awarded VMware the silver medal for the SAP Pinnacle Award in the first year we were able to apply.
  • VMware is a charter member of the SAP Enterprise Virtualization Community

• The next major release of VMware Infrastructure will include support for virtual machines with 8 vCPU and cool features like fault tolerance.
• SAP User Group Germany founded a "Workforce VMware". During their annual event in February called "Technology Days" both SAP and VMware will talk about benefits of SAP virtualization.
• SAP Virtualization Week: VMware will be speaking, and there are already several VMware-SAP joint customers who've signed up to talk about their virtualized SAP environments.
• As always, we'll have lots of discussions and beneficial exchange of knowledge with our customers at conferences and events, so we hope you'll come and see us in 2009!

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

VMware Virtualization will be once again a hot topic at SAP TechEd. This time in Berlin (Oct 14 -16) after an exciting presence at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas and the German SAP User Conference (DSAG) in Leipzig. VMware is a sponsor of SAP TechEd and our Booth is located on the first floor of the ICC (*Booth No. 2.07*). Also, our SAP Alliance team will be present, and we invite you to meet with us. At the VMware booth we will show you:

• How customers have leveraged VMware during an SAP Upgrade
• How to use VMware to build a fundamental strategy for ESOA
• New technology presented at VMworld 2008

• LCM223: Surf on the Virtualization Wave - Run SAP Systems on Virtual Server Technology (Vegas, Berlin, Bangalore)
  The operation of SAP Solutions on virtual server technology increases the flexibility and optimizes the HW utilization. This technology not just reduces the TCO, it also contributes the the "Green IT" approach. With the release of virtualization technology from of SAP technology partners for productive SAP systems, a lot of questions around this topic raise. This presentation gives an overview over the used technologies, the currently supported technologies, the Management of virtualization technology and how SAP optimizes the SAP NetWeaver technology to run smoothely in virtual environments. The session will also provide information about future concepts of SAP systems in virtual environments.

• LCM205: Use Cases and Integration Scenario's of Adaptive Computing and Virtualization (Vegas, Berlin, Bangalore)
  Combining the power of Adaptive Computing with virtualization technology increases the flexibility and reduces the complexity of SAP system management. This session presents several use cases showing when and how Adaptive Computing combined with virtualization technology can help to lower costs, increase flexibility and allow for optimal management of SAP applications. Another important part of this session is how the Adaptive Computing Controller can be integrated with SAP applications like Hypervisor Virtualization Technology and into the E-SOA world.

• LCM270: Get your Hands on Adaptive Computing Controller (Vegas, Berlin, Bangalore)
  The Adaptive Computing Controller in SAP NetWeaver 7.1 optimizes operation and management of SAP systems in the datacenter. This hands-on session emphasizes the features of adaptive computing, technical details of the implementation, and also preparations in the landscape. In addition to this you will really get hands-on experience with the Adaptive Computing Controller in configuring and operating SAP systems.

• LCM300: Enterprise Virtualization Map – Your Guide Through the Virtualization Jungle (Berlin)
  At the SAP Virtualization Week in April 2008 SAP, a group of 11 major virtualization vendors founded the Enterprise Virtualization Community to develop concepts and strategies to bring virtualization to the business level. One of the first projects this community was working on was the creation of an Enterprise Virtualization Map, which will help customers to get the complete overview of how the various virtualization technologies and products can be used for SAP solutions in the best possible way. Please join SAP and its partners for this session to see the newest version of the Enterprise Virtualization Map and to see how it can help you in your daily work in operating and managing a virtualized SAP environment.