Virtualizing SAP implementations can significantly reduce hardware costs, increase server utilization rates, and ease the burden of system upgrades and platform migrations. Virtualization allows organizations to streamline testing environments, accelerate upgrade planning, and meet availability and performance SLAs. It enables dynamic, on-demand provisioning of resources to build a more flexible and cost-effective IT infrastructure.
1. Virtualize your SAP? Only if you want to save money, Time, and your companies future Presenter: Christopher M. Carter Of CCI www.ccierp.com [email_address]
2. SAP deployments can generate significant server sprawl due to its tiered architecture and the need to provision separate systems for development, quality assurance/test and production environments. As a result, SAP implementations often span 50, 100 or more servers, and even smaller implementations feel the burden of a relatively large IT footprint. In a typical deployment, every layer of the environment is hosted on dedicated physical systems that are not fully utilized much of the time. SAP implementations on Microsoft Windows have an average application server CPU utilization rate of 15-20 percent. Underutilized hardware resources take up space and eat energy. Computing equipment has become increasingly dense, energy costs are on the rise and many datacenters simply lack the power or space IT services require. Industry analysts estimate the annual cost of powering a server will soon exceed its acquisition cost. SAP customers use virtualization to reduce their hardware and energy costs and dramatically increase hardware utilization
3. Easing SAP Solutions Upgrades and Platform Migrations Many SAP solutions deployments will undergo a major upgrade over the next year or two as SAP ends support for SAP R/3 Enterprise and SAP R/3 4.6c 32-bit applications. Many of these companies are using the upgrade window as an opportunity to move their SAP solution-based landscape from older, proprietary platforms to cost-effective industry standard servers and Microsoft or open source operating systems. Problems with the complex upgrade process can have a significant business impact. Upgrades must be thoroughly planned and tested to ensure the smoothest and least disruptive transition possible. You can accelerate and improve the planning and testing phase with virtualization, achieving faster and more cost-efficient upgrades while reducing risk to the business. Streamline provisioning of development, testing, and staging instances: An important task in the upgrade project is the setup of environments. The initial setup is one part of this task, but ad-hoc deployments of new environments for test or development purposes are commonly required as well. The ability to provide new environments as quickly as possible is especially important if the project includes a migration or an operating system upgrade. In a traditional native deployment, this process tends to be time consuming and can cause expensive project delays, particularly if available hardware is not sufficient. “Configuration drift” may also become a source of problems for the non-SAP aspects of the upgrade (OS, OS patches, database binaries, etc.).
6. Meeting SLAs for Availability, Application Performance, and Disaster Recovery SAP application owners, basis administrators and the IT staff are on the hook to meet Service Level Agreements that guarantee availability and performance targets for solution users. Virtualization works alongside SAP-provided functionality to deliver infrastructure and application performance and high availability for critical business functions.
7. Data center Evolution Under utilized hardware Increasing costs of ownership Difficult management Barriers to expansion Phase 1 – Recognize Dynamic Workload Delivery Automation / Policy Chargeback / Utility Pervasive Virtualization Phase 4 – Dynamic Datacenter Some tier 1 applications High Availability Disaster Recovery Mobility Phase 3 – Agility Test/Dev Encapsulation Consolidation “ Craplications” Phase 2 – Consolidate
8. Barriers to adoption ? Cost prohibitive Complexity Mission critical readiness Performance Traditional concerns… Platforms supported Vendor Lock In Physical requirement Windows Linux Web tier servers Test/Dev DBMS Physical boxes Production Tier 1 apps Custom Apps 86% Unvirtualized OLTP Infrastructure Servers Etc…
9. Dynamic Workload Streaming (Provisioning) Network storage Provisioning Server (streaming service) Silo One Silo Two Silo Three A B
10. Reducing Server Count Solution: Virtualize the server 3-4x more users per server 16 GB RAM Two Quad-core processors 4 Virtual Machines (4 GB RAM, 2 Virtual CPU’s for each) Physical Server 4 GB RAM Two processors Before – 100 users After – 300+ users A A A A A
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13. Business Continuity Business Continuity With automated high availability integrated disaster recovery , and tools for zero-downtime server maintenance, Virtualization makes it easy to keep a business running.
18. XenServer with XenApp Reduce server count up to 75%... Enhance Agility… Increase Availability… … without compromising performance
19. VMware and SAP VMware Infrastructure 3 is a flexible and cost-effective industry-standard hardware virtualization suite for SAP solution implementations, helping you introduce and manage a smarter SAP application-based landscape.SAP AG provides full support to its solutions in 64-bit Windows- and Linux-based production environments running on VMware® ESX, the first and so far only virtualization platform to earn this distinction.
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21. Microsoft Hyper-V: Performance tests at SAP and with H/W partners went very well and the performance numbers we have seen are very good. Current test results are based on SAP Web Application Server 7.00 on Windows Server 2003 in a VM with 2 virtual processors. I expect soon to have the first published benchmark results on http:// www.sap.com/benchmark . SAP provides feedback on these tests as well as tips for optimal configuration on their URL https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/windows . There is a general White Paper about virtualizing SAP applications on Windows as well as specific Hyper-V info. Additionally, you can check SAP note 674851 which is frequently updated.
23. Citrix & VMware Enterprise Features VMware XenServer Multi-server management Role-based administration Auto-placement of VMs (load balancing) Live migration High Availability DR support Optimized for XenApp Workload streaming (provisioning Advanced storage integration Proxy Server Backups Workload streaming (provisioning)
24. CCI is the ONLY certified SAP partner to support, install and manage Virtualized SAP environments around the world CCI will provide SAP certified staff with Virtualized certified staff from all virtualization products, we support you through POC, to purchases to implementation and full testing before ANY go-live.
25. Please feel free to ask any and all questions that you may have? Q&A Session