Recently, I spent a day at the ASUG conference in Nashville to give a presentation together with Gunther Schmalzhaf, the SAP product manager of Virtualization and Adaptive Computing. We talked about how VMware Infrastructure and SAP Adaptive Computing not only work together and complement each other very well (great information can be found at *https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/adaptive*), but also how SAP currently integrates the AC Controller and VMware VirtualCenter, enabling SAP Basis Administrators to monitor and manage the virtualized SAP landscape all within the Adaptive Computing Controller!

This is not only great from a functionality perspective, but it also shows yet again the alignment between SAP and VMware.

Now, what exactly is being integrated, and why is that good for our customers? Don’t Adaptive Computing and VMware Infrastructure do pretty much the same thing? After all, both start, stop, and relocate application resources, so shouldn’t I mostly use one or the other?

The answer is ‘no’. While both technologies address on a high-level similar pain points, they do so in very different and generally complementary ways. VMware virtualizes the server, and Adaptive Computing (AC) manages virtualized applications. VMware has all of the features/functions and know-how about the infrastructure, and SAP AC provides all of the manageability features for the SAP applications. Together, they provide end-to-end control for SAP Basis Administrators.

Start with the core use cases for parallel operations available today. First of all, Adaptive Computing can be used as an elegant P2V tool. You can quickly relocate (with downtime) your SAP instance from a physical server to a virtual machine. Another use case is that if you increase the size of a virtual machine in VirtualCenter, you can add more application resources through Adaptive Computing. You can also cleanly shut down the SAP instances before shutting down a VM, etc. Lastly, if you want to use Adaptive Computing for start/stop/relocate functionality of SAP services, but you have not installed your SAP instances in a ‘virtualized’ way (i.e. using logical host names, etc.), you can use VMotion to do the relocation, and that without downtime (now of course relocating the application and the OS together).

But the situation becomes a lot more interesting when you actually integrate both technologies, which SAP is doing currently. The present stage of the integration work was shown at SAP TechEd Las Vegas and at the aforementioned ASUG conference, and it will surely also be demonstrated at TechEd Berlin.

What does the integration entail? Let me start with a few customer questions that I frequently get. “With VMware ESX there is a new component in the stack. How do I do the monitoring then?”, “I am an SAP Basis Administrator and I need to see what else is running in my ESX servers. But I do not want to learn a new tool!”, or “My infrastructure manager does not want to give me access to VirtualCenter, so how can I see what is going on in my SAP landscape?” are some of the more common ones.

The upcoming integration addresses all of these points. The AC UI will feature a new tab called “Virtualization”, adding core virtual machine functionality to the existing AC functionality (which basically treats a virtual machine as a physical system). In the “Virtualization” tab you can see which application service is running on which virtual machine on which ESX host, and you get information about ESX hosts and virtual machine usage data. You can also execute core VMware commands like start/stop/suspend/resume for a VM, and trigger a migration using VMotion through the SAP UI. Very cool is also the following feature: If you click on “shutdown” for a VM, the AC Controller displays a pop-up window listing which SAP services are running in the VM and asks you whether it is still ok to proceed with the shutdown. This is clearly new stuff and a great interaction between virtual infrastructure and application.

Below are a few screen shots to provide more detail.

This is one of the new views in the “Virtualization” tab. On the first level, you see the VMs and ESX hosts managed by the underlying VirtualCenter Server with some statistics. In this case we have four ESX hosts and 19 VMs (13 running, 1 suspended, 5 stopped).



If you click on a specific ESX host you get some usage statistics for that server as well as a list of all SAP services running on each virtual machine on that host.



Finally, by selecting a particular virtual machine, you are presented with core management features for the virtual machines, like start, stop, suspend, resume, and VMotion.



Note that this integration is in pre-release status. For more information go to https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/adaptive and/or contact Gunther Schmalzhaf Gunther.Schmalzhaf@sap.com) directly.
As I said in the beginning, this integration will really provide the SAP Basis Administrator with a great tool to monitor and manage the (virtual) SAP landscape! And it is another testimonial to the tight collaboration between SAP and VMware as well…

Joachim

We invite you to visit us at the German SAP User Group (DSAG) Conference 2008 in Leipzig. The conference will take place at the Congress Center Leipzig from Sep. 23-25. This is the first year that VMware has joined this group and we're excited to sponsor this conference. The SAP Alliance team will be available for you at the VMware booth in the exhibition area.

If you would like to learn more how VMware impacts the SAP datacenter, then visit these sessions at DSAG:

"Adaptive Infrastructure" by Hella, Dr. Norbert Muth (Day 1, Tuesday, Sep 23, 2:15 pm)
VMware Virtualization: Next Generation SAP Datacenter, VMware, Matthias Czwikla (Day 2, Wednesday, Sep 24, 5:30pm)

At the VMware booth we will show you:

• How customers have leveraged VMware during an SAP Upgrade
• VMware technical and functional added values
• How to use VMware to build a fundamental strategy for ESOA
• New technology presented at VMworld 2008, Sep 15-18

We look forward meeting you at DSAG.

Matthias

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.

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.

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:

1. How long did it take to test the DR scenario?
   In this case, a few minutes.
2. How complex was the test?
   Very simple, one mouse-click followed by some testing. Even non-technical people can easily accomplish that.
3. Was there an impact on production?
   Absolutely not.
4. 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.

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

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

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