VMware vSAN SAP Applications
SAP Applications
Customers deploying Business Critical Applications (BCAs) have requirements such as stringent SLAs, sustained high
Why vSAN for SAP Landscapes?
Customers wanting to modernize their existing complex SAP environments can leverage vSAN, running on both VMware and SAP certified x86 servers, to eliminate traditional IT silos of compute, storage, and networking. All intelligence and management moves into a single software stack, allowing a VM-and application-centric policy-based control and automation. This brings better security, higher performance, operational simplicity, and cost-effectiveness into SAP application environments.
Multiple SAP landscapes can be easilymigrated from aged, bare-metal configurations to a modern, dynamic and consolidated hyperconverged infrastructure based on vSAN.
The benefits of running SAP applications on vSAN include acceleration of legacy application migration, transformation of classic SAP applications to SAP HANA, lower CAPEX and OPEX, simple one-stop support process, high resiliency, improved availability, and many more.
HyperConverged Infrastructure
HyperConverged Infrastructure for Business Critical Applications
Customers deploying Business Critical Applications (BCAs) have requirements such as stringent SLAs, sustained high performance, and continued application availability. It is a major challenge for organizations to manage data storage in these environments. Common issues in using traditional storage solutions for BCAs include inadequate performance, storage inefficiency, difficulty to scale, complex management, and high deployment and operating costs.
VMware, the market leader in HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI), enables low cost and high performance next-generation HCI solutions through the proven VMware HyperConverged Software (VMware HCS) stack. The natively integrated VMware HCS combines radically simple VMware vSAN™ storage, the market-leading vSphere hypervisor, and the vCenter Server unified management solution all onthe broadest and deepest set of HCI deployment options.
vSAN is enterprise-class storage that is uniquely embedded in the hypervisor. vSAN delivers flash-optimized, high-performance hyperconverged storage for any virtualized application at a fraction of the cost of traditional, purpose-built storage and other less-efficient HCI solutions. VMware has completed extensive technical validation to demonstrate vSAN as an ideal storage platform for a variety of BCAs. A recent vSAN customer survey also revealed that more than 60% of customers run their BCAs on vSAN today, making BCA the most common use case.
Built-in Health Checks and Performance Statistics
vSAN has built-in Health Service and Performance Service in the native vSphere Web Client to assist with day-0 deployment and day-2 operations. The Health Service feature monitors items such as network connectivity, cluster health, disk capacity, component metadata, and compliance with the VMware Compatibility Guide. These configuration items are automatically checked once per hour by default. If a problem is detected, an alert is raised proactively informing administrators of the issue.
Multiple performance metrics are available in the vSphere Web Client including throughput, IOPS, and latency. It is possible to look at data on various levels such as the vSAN datastore, host, virtual machine,and virtual disk (VMDK) levels. The time range for these metrics can be set to the last x number of hours or a custom date and time range.
vSAN Sizing for SAP Workloads
It is important to properly size the vSAN configuration based on the capacity and performance requirements of SAP application workloads. When these requirements are not known, VMware recommends using the VMware vSAN Assessment tool to analyze the SAP environment. Based on data collected during the assessment, the tool identifies all of the virtual machines that are suitable candidates for vSAN and the best-fit architecture. Subsequently, the vSAN cluster sizing recommendations can be automatically imported into the vSAN TCO and Sizing Calculator for validation and recommended Ready Node configuration.
SAP also provides the SAP Quick Sizer tool to help perform SAP application sizing. The tool translates business requirements into technical requirements, ensuring that all the needed hardware components are used to build a balanced system. SAP’s comprehensive sizing methodology results in proposals of the right combination of processing performance measured in SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS), amount of disk space, disk I/O, and main memory. Factoring in a small virtualization overhead and vSAN resource consumption, compute resources in a vSAN based HCI system can be accurately sized against the desired SAPS requirement. SAPS numbers can also be used to translate into IOPS for different workloads such as OLTP or OLAP. Together, vSAN Assessment and SAP Quick Sizer provide a systematic way of designing and sizing a vSAN based HCI configuration that satisfies SAP application performance and capacity requirements. More importantly, vSAN allows simple online scale-up and scale-out cluster expansion to meet increasing demands of dynamic SAP application environments.
Deployment Options
VMware HCS offers the industry’s most flexible deployment options, including certified solutions, engineered appliances, and EVO SDDC integrated systems.
The vSAN Ready Node program uniquely delivers the broadest set of certified hardware from all leading server vendors. This is a key driver behind vSAN’s rapid customer adoption and market leadership position. Partners can enable customers to design VMware HCS-based HCI systems with maximum flexibility of hardware, pre-installed software, licensing and support.
When considering hardware configurations for SAP applications, the recommended approach is to select from the large set of available vSAN Ready Nodes, which are pre-configured with VMware HCS and validated to ensure compatibility. Additionally, it is necessary to validate that the servers used are also SAP supported.
Production Support
vSAN is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor and is therefore fully supported in production for SAP applications, like SAP Business One and SAP NetWeaver based products, which are currently supported on vSphere as of SAP note 1492000 and 2161991.
Furthermore, VMware provides the one-stop support experience to customers running SAP applications on vSAN. To escalate vSAN related issues in these SAP environments, simply collect a VMware performance snapshot as described in SAP note 1158363 and vSphere support bundles. Next open a ticket directly with VMware and we will ensure the simplest and fastest route to resolution for the business critical SAP applications.
Summary
VMware vSAN, vSphere, and vCenter Server® collectively power the best HyperConverged Infrastructure solutions for running and managing business critical applications that requirepredictable performance and high availability. The integration of vSAN with vSphere simplifies administration with a single software stack and automation through storage policy-based management. Business-critical workloads such as SAP applications can benefit from shared storage without the cost and complexity of dedicated storage hardware. vSAN Stretched Cluster provides the highest level of protection, coupled with vSphere SRM offering a comprehensive multisite DR solution.
The health and performance levels of a vSAN datastore are constantly monitored to lower risk before, during, and after a disaster recovery. New vSAN storage efficiency features drastically reduce TCO of all-flash configurations that offer consistent performance and predictable latency. Tools are available to help design and size a vSAN cluster to satisfy the most demanding SAP applications. If more capacity is needed, it is simple to expandusing a scale up or scale out approach without incurring any downtime. SAP applications are fully supported on vSAN in production, with the industry’s broadest deployment options available.