Modernize Your Mission Critical SAP IT Environment: Replacing Solaris/SPARC with Linux/HP ProLiant Servers

Moving to an HP Converged Infrastructure with HP ProLiant servers running the Intel® Xeon® Processor E7– 8800/4800/2800 Product Families

Technical white paper

Table of Contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3 

Migration Drivers ............................................................................................................................. 3 

Why SAP Customers are migrating from SPARC-based Servers ................................................................. 4 

Scalable, Standards-based Infrastructure ............................................................................................. 4 

Access to HP Cloud Maps for SAP and Best Practices ........................................................................... 6 

Access to SAP Expertise .................................................................................................................... 6 

Outsourced Services ......................................................................................................................... 7 

Financial Services ............................................................................................................................ 7 

Intel Xeon Processors and ProLiant Servers for Mission-Critical Service Levels .............................................. 8 

HP PREMA Architecture for Business-critical Demands ........................................................................... 8 

Advanced RAS Features of Intel Xeon Processors ................................................................................. 8 

Price and Performance ...................................................................................................................... 9 

SAP Migration Best Practices ............................................................................................................... 11 

Software Licensing and Rehosting .................................................................................................... 11 

Migration Planning ........................................................................................................................ 13 

Virtual Machines for SAP ................................................................................................................ 16 

Oracle Database Migration ............................................................................................................ 18 

Additional Infrastructure Virtualization .................................................................................................. 19 

Storage Factors.............................................................................................................................. 20 

Network Improvements ................................................................................................................... 20 

Business Continuity ......................................................................................................................... 20 

Advantages of the HP Approach ......................................................................................................... 21 

Infrastructure Choices ..................................................................................................................... 21 

Infrastructure Design Considerations and Resources ........................................................................... 21 

Management Tools ......................................................................................................................... 21 

The Decision Is Yours ......................................................................................................................... 22 

Next Steps ........................................................................................................................................ 22 

Planning Assessments ..................................................................................................................... 22 

TCO Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 22 

Proof of Concept Projects ................................................................................................................ 23 

For More Information ......................................................................................................................... 23 

Appendix: Sizing............................................................................................................................... 24 

3

Introduction For the past five years, economic uncertainty has forced many companies to delay investments in SAP software upgrades (to SAP 6.0) and new server infrastructure. Many older UltraSPARC- and SPARC64-based servers have reached risky “End of Support Life” for the hardware and operating system, and they are running older SAP software versions that require expensive extended or custom support contracts. For the thousands of companies that have major investments in legacy SAP applications running on Solaris/SPARC infrastructure, IT costs may continue to grow at an unacceptable rate.

Meanwhile, new server technologies such as virtualization, Linux, and the converged infrastructure have become mainstream drivers for reducing Operating Expense (OPEX) and Capital Expense (CAPEX) costs. This paper outlines how organizations can replace Solaris and SPARC infrastructure with virtualized Linux environments running on HP ProLiant servers with Intel® Xeon® Processors. This resilient, cost-efficient infrastructure can then serve as the foundation for future SAP investments, including the SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA).

This white paper discusses two main areas–how to best migrate from older UltraSPARC/Solaris/SAP environments, and some of the migration considerations that IT managers evaluate. This paper details key attributes of the processes and technologies required to migrate SAP to standards-based, converged infrastructure. There are also pointers to reference documents and HP service resources and capabilities. This paper will assists IT planners and technical decision-makers in taking a closer look at the opportunity with HP.

Migration Drivers Most SAP on SPARC landscapes are several years old, sometimes more than a decade. Table 1 outlines issues that migration can resolve. The remainder of this paper examines how HP infrastructure addresses these issues.

Table 1: Business Drivers and Migration Considerations

Business Driver Migration Consideration

Current budget constraints, necessary reduction in investment

Lower cost of ownership with hardware upgrade; lower support cost with newer systems.

The combination of improved per-core performance and better utilization improves performance while reducing rack space, power, and cooling.

Greater performance means fewer software licenses, reduced software support and maintenance; investment in newer servers can result in investment payback in 6-12 months.

Improved administrative efficiency Lower server count, less floor space, more powerful tools with greater server management capacity means greater efficiency; less dependence on proprietary hardware/OS/management technology means greater choices.

IT standardization initiative Many organizations are moving to standards-based servers and away from proprietary-based technology.

Many initiatives to more to standards-based hardware and marketing leading OS’s key to future success.

Hardware/Technology refresh Current proprietary Solaris/SPARC environment at end-of-life. Tech refresh investment decision drives choices in hardware, operating environments.

New SAP workloads (i.e., HANA) and technology upgrades

New SAP, database application choices not available on older SPARC/Solaris technology.

Upgrading to new SAP versions require significant upgrade of hardware/operating environment.

Supportability issues with the Legacy UNIX/DB combination

Outdated SPARC/Solaris combinations no longer supported by some current database, SAP application versions. No path to upgrade to newer SAP/database combinations

Virtualization of SAP landscapes

Cloud Integration/Migration

In addition to consolidating workloads, virtualization can improve server, storage, and network utilization while simplifying workload management and failover.

Virtualization of SAP landscapes can setup cloud infrastructure.

4

Why SAP Customers are migrating from SPARC-based Servers In the more than two decades since RISC-based UNIX infrastructure was first deployed in the enterprise, the economics of infrastructure has changed dramatically. There have been three complementary shifts:

• Dramatic improvements in hardware performance and capacity have driven hardware acquisition costs much lower, making server acquisition costs secondary to support, staffing, power, cooling, and floor space costs when calculating return on investment (ROI) on IT spend.

• HP ProLiant servers running Intel Xeon processors have become mission-critical platforms that deliver on the scalability, availability, and performance required by enterprise applications such as SAP.

• Virtualization and the compute density of current rack and blade infrastructures enable “private cloud” environments with HP Converged Infrastructure that encompass Windows and Linux environments.

As a result, there is no longer a need for dedicated, proprietary Solaris/SPARC silos managed with discrete tools and requiring a unique infrastructure. Instead, the HP Converged Infrastructure (CI) can be used as the foundation–with common, modular infrastructure elements. HP CI includes architectural blueprints for virtualization, applications and cloud, allowing users to improve costs across the entire IT spectrum–power and cooling, floor space, staffing, and hardware.

HP has accelerated this approach by providing several HP Converged Infrastructure solutions for SAP. These include Cloud Maps for SAP, Converged Infrastructure Reference Architectures for SAP, and HP Appsystem for SAP HANA. HP Converged Infrastructure is a blueprint for the data center of the future, accelerating the provisioning of IT services and applications.

Scalable, Standards-based Infrastructure Four or more years ago, proprietary RISC systems were the platform of choice for resource-intensive, business-critical applications. However, today’s Intel Xeon processors deliver exceptional performance while providing more scalability and advanced RAS capabilities. Best-of-breed four-socket servers such as the ProLiant DL580/BL680c G7, and eight-socket servers such as the ProLiant DL980 G7 can easily consolidate SAP landscapes based on legacy 8-, 16-, 32-, or 64-processor SPARC servers. Enterprises can reap major operational cost savings by replacing these older SPARC systems with HP Scale-up ProLiant servers. The advantages include the following:

• Lower OPEX: ProLiant servers feature advanced remote management capabilities that can reduce administrative costs and provide dynamic power capping and thermal control features conservation.

• Software savings: Businesses can reduce core counts by a factor of 2-to-1 or more. This will reduce software licensing and maintenance fees on products that are licensed per core, such as the Oracle Enterprise Edition.1

• IT asset optimization: Replacing RISC server IT architectures with consolidated, standards-based servers allows businesses to use computing resources more efficiently and leaves more money in the IT budget for innovation.

As shown in Figure 1, four large, scale-up, Oracle Sun E6900 servers are replaced with a single four-socket ProLiant DL980 G7, resulting in full investment payback in only five months.

1 Based on Total Cost of Ownership analysis, see www.alinean.com for further information

Figure 1: TCO analysis comparing an HP Scale-up ProLiant server with a legacy RISC server

1 x HP DL980 G7, 32 core

4 x Oracle Sun E6900, 192 core Overall savings of 78% over 3 years

• 75% consolidation• 83% core reduction• 73% power, cooling, and floor space reduction• Payback in 5 months

Relative cost comparison

Oracle Sun E6900 to HP ProLiant DL980 G7

0 20 40 60 80 100

HW & SW Support

Power & Cooling

System Admin

Overall Savings (3 yr)

HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Oracle Sun E6900

Source: Alinean TCO/ROI, http://www.alinean.com

As shown in the previous figure, server consolidation provides major gains. However, the most exciting shift in infrastructure is from the reduction in physical servers and the consolidation and virtualization of workloads. With the feature sets of modern hypervisors, workload densities per rack become an order of magnitude greater.

To enable and provide support for increased workload density, HP Converged infrastructure provides elegant solutions for network (Virtual Connect) and storage (3PAR) virtualization. These solutions reduce management time, automate deployment, and enable thin provisioning to better match today’s pay-as-you-grow, services-based funding models. As shown in Figure 2, traditional dedicated rack servers are replaced by virtual machines.

Figure 2: Conversion from distributed to virtualized infrastructure

5

6

Access to HP Cloud Maps for SAP and Best Practices Deploying SAP using HP Converged Infrastructure simplifies deployment, operations, and management. Many organizations are taking advantage of HP Cloud Maps for SAP Landscapes. HP has predefined these maps to simplify deployment of SAP modules, reducing setup and ongoing operations costs. Each map includes templates, workflows, sizers, and white papers to speed deployment. HP services are also available to help customers apply the maps to their own unique requirements.

Deploying a private cloud embraces the concept of managed change. Unlike traditional server silos, HP’s Cloud System infrastructure enables dynamic allocation of resources to meet business needs. To simplify these tasks, HP Cloud Automation Software delivers intelligent, end-to-end automation for private cloud solutions.

While having a robust destination infrastructure is essential, customers still have to execute the rehosting process. HP offers a complete suite of services: Rehosting, Technical Upgrades, Functional Upgrades, and Business Improvement.

Access to SAP Expertise As customers consider whether to continue on SPARC or migrate to a new platform, the availability of SAP planning and project expertise is always a concern. Most IT organizations have deep skills in managing their own environment. Moving to a new platform may require additional skill sets and short-term project staffing. HP can help with both. The long-term alliance between HP and SAP gives customers a broad range of services. Customers can choose anything from a simple discovery workshop to complete outsourcing with HP SAP Managed Services and SAP certified professionals.

Table 2 below shows examples of “off the shelf” services offerings from HP.

Table 2: HP "Off the Shelf" Services

Service Type HP Offerings

Planning Sessions and Assessments SAP Upgrade Assessment Workshop

TCO Analyses

Upgrade Planning Technical and Functional Upgrade Services

Application Modernization SAP NetWeaver

Enterprise SOA

Supply Chain Management

SAP Finance and Controlling Solutions

HP can assist your business and IT teams in defining and executing your next SAP landscape infrastructure. For instance, for those evaluating a private cloud, HP offers the following:

• HP Cloud Discovery Workshop: The HP Cloud Discovery Workshop provides C-level decision-makers, IT managers, strategists, architects, and key business stakeholders with an in-depth review of the possibilities, risks, and business implications of the cloud. Topics include shared services transformations, cloud concepts, service portfolio concepts, governance, security, business case issues, and HP solutions. The workshop can also include recommendations for using the cloud as part of a service provider and portfolio strategy for your business.

7

• HP Cloud Road Map Service: An eight- to 12-week consulting engagement with our experts helps you through the stages of cloud maturity so that your company can best use the cloud. The service helps your company:

– Identify where your business and SAP landscape can benefit from the cloud infrastructure

– Develop a high-level architecture of the future operating model to match the cloud strategy

– Undertake current state analyses, gap analyses, and program planning

– Recommend the ideal service strategy, governance, and program model for cloud capabilities and SAP

• HP Cloud Design Service: HP experts conduct detailed technical and business analysis and create detailed design leading to specific technology, tools, and standards recommendations based on HP's SAP cloud computing reference architecture. Major deliverables include detailed designs that can evolve from private to public cloud solutions over time. Deliverables also include bill of materials, cost estimates, an implementation plan, and a full mapping of HP and partner technology into the recommended cloud architecture. The deliverables also include a set of ITIL3 process best practice recommendations for the cloud environment.

Outsourced Services HP offers a wide variety of managed services solutions for SAP customers. For example, HP offers the SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) rapid-deployment solution, which can enhance the productivity of enterprise sales, marketing, and service professionals.

Delivered via HP Enterprise Services’ commercial data centers around the globe, the SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution brings together software and services that provide essential CRM functionality, quickly and affordably, while helping clients reduce risk.

For more information on HP managed services for SAP, go to the Managed services for SAP page.

Financial Services As part of your overall IT asset management strategy, HP leasing and financing can help you expand the reach and impact of your SAP rehosting budget. You'll benefit from predictable monthly payments and, in addition, leasing helps minimize the financial risks of older hardware. In addition, HP Financial Services has buyback plans to help you get rid of replaced hardware. These capabilities can have a tremendous positive impact on the ROI of your SAP infrastructure refresh.

8

Intel Xeon Processors and ProLiant Servers for Mission-Critical Service Levels Today’s Intel Xeon processor E7 family delivers exceptional performance, while providing additional scalability and more reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features than the previous generation of processors. The ProLiant DL980 G7 is the first HP server to use the HP PREMA Architecture, and is specifically designed to take advantage of the capabilities from the Intel Xeon processor E7 family. Building on the advanced performance and RAS capabilities of the processor, the DL980 G7 provides the resiliency demanded by mission-critical workloads such as ERP, CRM, and decision support.

HP PREMA Architecture for Business-critical Demands The HP PREMA Architecture–HP’s design for scale-up industry-standard servers–is the foundation for industry-standard Intel-based servers that need to deliver more scalability, resiliency, and efficiency to meet the requirements of the most demanding data-intensive workloads. It is the first step in delivering the “Project Odyssey” family of mission-critical HP ProLiant servers.

With HP PREMA Architecture, the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server can address customer requirements that exceed the performance and capacity available with old SPARC servers. The architecture supports an appropriately balanced system with more processors, more memory, and more I/O than previous generation systems have provided. The HP PREMA Architecture leverages HP’s years of experience in engineering mission-critical servers in RISC, EPIC, and UNIX environments and applies that knowledge and expertise to the design of the DL980 G7. As a result, the DL980 G7 provides significant benefits beyond four-socket system scaling, such as:

• Directory cache to reduce memory latency and provide more efficient performance scaling

• High-speed node controller fabric, leveraged from the HP Integrity Superdome 2 Crossbar Fabric, to interconnect the system. This adds resiliency features essential to mission-critical servers

Advanced RAS Features of Intel Xeon Processors The Intel Xeon processor E7 family provides advanced RAS capabilities in the processor itself, enabling the following key functions and benefits:

• Superior data integrity: Advanced support for error detection, correction, and containment is supplied across all major processor components and communication pathways

• Improved system availability: Multiple levels of redundancy, and processor-level reliability features such as Machine Check Architecture Recovery, provide OS-assisted system recovery from certain uncorrectable errors that would have brought down previous-generation servers. Features such as the Intel Xeon processor E7 family’s enhanced double device data correction (DDDC) add greater protection against data loss than single device data correction by recovering data if two memory devices fail

• Enhanced serviceability: Predictive failure analysis enables strong workload isolation and more efficient maintenance cycles

• HP Memory Quarantine: Based on Intel’s Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery, HP Memory Quarantine allows the operating system to detect and notify users when there are processor or memory errors

• Increased application uptime with self-healing resiliency:

– Stay up and running with VM isolation, using the MCA Recovery technology within the processor to isolate and contain bad data in specific applications or virtual machines (VMs). This feature requires operating system support, such as that provided by VMware ESXi 5.0.

– HP has extended the link resiliency features of the Intel Xeon processor to improve enterprise-level functionality.

9

Price and Performance In this section, target HP and Oracle Sun platforms are compared core-to-core using several public benchmarks. It is important to note that many of these public benchmark comparisons use hardware multi-threading and parallel application execution as a means of demonstrating peak relative performance. However, since SAP applications are single-threaded, the benchmark comparisons do not address that aspect.

SAP SD 2-tier Benchmark

The SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark covers a sell-from-stock scenario that includes the creation of a customer order with five line items and the corresponding delivery, with subsequent goods movement and invoicing. This comparison provides a convenient OLTP benchmark in a real-world 2-tier scenario.

Since this benchmark is extensively run by hardware vendors, it is useful for making comparisons. Table 3 below shows the 80-core HP ProLiant DL980 G7 (124,430 SAPS capacity) next to the Oracle Sun M9000 system (175,600 SAPS capacity). The Oracle Sun M9000 server accomplished this higher SAP capacity with 256 cores, while the HP system results were based on running 80 cores. This large core count difference indicates the much greater efficiency of the HP ProLiant server.

Table 3: SAP SD Performance Benchmarks

Date of Certification

Central Server Processor Type Processors/ Cores

SAPS Operating System RDBMS Release

12/2/2011 HP ProLiant DL980 G7

Intel Xeon processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz, 30MB L3 Cache)

8/80 124,430 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2

MaxDB 7.8

8/5/2011 HP ProLiant DL580 G7

Intel Xeon processor E7-4870 (2.4 GHz, 30MB L3 Cache)

4/40 66,680 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1

MaxDB 7.8

11/18/2009 SPARC Enterprise Server M9000

SPARC64 VII (2880 MHz, 6MB L3 Cache)

64/256 175,600 Solaris 10 Oracle 10g

SPECint2006 Benchmark Comparison

Similar to the previous two benchmarks is the SPECint2006 benchmark. SPECint2006 is part of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s (SPEC) industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system’s processor, memory subsystem, and compiler. SPEC designed CPU2006 to provide a comparative measure of compute-intensive performance across the widest practical range of hardware using workloads developed from real user applications.2 SPECint2006 is an excellent way to compare processor/core performance for processor-intensive workloads. Every workload has processor operations; many exercise throughput, input/output (I/O), or memory more than the processor itself. However, this comparison can provide an indication of relative processor-based server performance, especially if other benchmark information is not available. Table 4 below illustrates the per-core advantage of the ProLiant G7 servers.

2 www.spec.org

Table 4: SPECint2006 Performance Benchmarks

HW Vendor System Result # Cores # Chips # Cores per Chip Published

Oracle SPARC Enterprise M9000 (SPARC64 VII+, 3000MHz)

3,150 256 64 4 Dec-10

Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL980 G7 (2.4 GHz, Intel Xeon processor E7-4870)

2,180 80 8 10 Oct-11

Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL580 G7 (2.40 GHz, Intel Xeon processor E7-4870)

1,130 40 4 10 Nov-11

TCO Analysis

In this section, an Oracle Enterprise M9000 and two HP ProLiant DL980 servers are analyzed as comparable target platforms. This comparison shows that the DL980 G7 delivers savings of 72% over three years.

Figure 3: TCO analysis comparing an HP Scale-up ProLiant server with an Oracle Sun M9000

10

11

SAP Migration Best Practices Migration and rehosting of SAP landscapes is a well-understood process. It requires a well-defined set of objectives, coupled with a detailed planning and execution methodology. This section covers best practices, including areas not typically part of traditional platform upgrades:

• Areas of customization: Older landscapes often reflect piecemeal alterations and customizations. A thorough review is required to locate and address these areas.

• Testing environment: Although application versions typically stay the same, deploying in the virtualized environment requires planning to address automated provisioning, utilization, application stacking, layering overheads, and other factors not found in dedicated server landscapes.

• Service levels: Methods for achieving high service levels are often different from traditional UNIX environments. This means allowing investment in the sandbox environment to support testing of alternatives.

Software Licensing and Rehosting The goal of infrastructure is to provide a cost-effective platform with appropriate service levels. This section looks at key changes to the database and application environment that result from the shift to virtualized Linux. These changes include licensing implications, mapping of workloads to viable OS alternatives, and recommended SAP upgrades. This section also covers opportunities to improve service levels, and considerations when deploying specific landscape elements on dedicated or virtualized infrastructure.

Oracle DB Transfers Upgrades and Transitions

Oracle licenses are not tied to the product version. For example, an Enterprise database license is equally valid for Oracle 9i, Oracle 10g, and Oracle 11g. Upgrading from Oracle DB 10g to 11g does not require a new license. However, you must have a support contract. Oracle doesn’t use software keys. A copy of the software for the new platform can be obtained, installed, and used.

Oracle database licensing can be purchased per site or per CPU/core. The site-wide license provides unlimited use of Oracle DB licensing. The per-core license is based on the number of physical CPUs in the server. Multi-core processors are priced as (number of cores)*(multi-core factor).3

When licensing per CPU/core, Oracle supports only hardware-partitioning technologies such as Solaris 10 Containers, LPAR, nPar, vPar, etc., and the Oracle Virtual Machine (VM) server for x86 with hard-code CPU binding. For software-partitions such as hypervisors from Red Hat Linux Enterprise, SUSE Enterprise Linux, and Hyper-V from Microsoft, Oracle requires licenses for all CPUs installed in the system. See http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf for more details.

Migrating SAP applications from SPARC Solaris to HP ProLiant with Intel Xeon processors and Linux also provides an opportunity to explore database alternatives. In addition to Oracle Database, SAP also supports Sybase, MaxDB, IBM DB2, and IBM Informix on Linux.

Transitioning to a different, non-Oracle database is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is a viable option being explored by many organizations.

SAP Licensing

SAP licensing is based on the software package and the number of users. Migrating SAP from SPARC-Solaris to x86-Linux does not require a license purchase. Since the SAP license is tied to the hardware key, you need to request that for the new platform.

3 Platform core factor table at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf.

12

SAP Unicode Conversion

Today, all SAP applications are available in Unicode-based versions, and new software products from SAP, such as the SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) or the SAP NetWeaver Portal, are now delivered only as Unicode versions. All new installations of applications based on SAP NetWeaver require Unicode.

The following are common reasons for a Unicode conversion:

• The organization wants to upgrade the existing Multi Display Multi Processing (MDMP) system to SAP ERP 2005. MDMP was the solution SAP developed for support of combinations of multiple code pages with SAP R/3 3.1I. MDMP installations are only supported up to SAPNetWeaver 2004 (ERP 2004).

• English is needed as the central log-on language for all countries or languages.

• Rollout is needed in other countries not covered by the existing non-Unicode solution in the system.

• The organization needs to display certain characters that are supported only in Unicode.

If your business requires one of the above, you should consider including the Unicode conversion in your migration plan.

Support for obsolete solutions for a combination of languages and code pages–such as MDMP in SAP R/3–is being terminated. SAP ERP 2005 no longer supports MDMP, so a Unicode conversion is required. For SAP 4.6B or below, a twin upgrade followed by Unicode conversion is required. For SAP 4.7 or above, the Unicode conversion can be carried out before the upgrade.

Third-party Application Compatibility and Licensing

When moving SAP-based applications to Linux on ProLiant, a careful assessment of third-party applications that may be running with SAP on the source server needs to be done. Make sure that the application supports the new environment, or that an acceptable substitute is available, and evaluate any changes to licenses that the migration may incur. The overall migration schedule should include time to migrate to these new versions or applications.

Porting In-house Applications from Solaris to Linux

In addition to commercial applications, many customers have developed in-house applications and written scripts to do special things that are not in the production software. These in-house applications and scripts need to be reviewed and adjusted to work, or replaced with something better, or eliminated if the same functionality is available in the new environment.

Once applications are identified as candidates to be ported, key aspects of the application code need to be assessed, and requirements are defined for the target Linux platform. Porting an application requires adapting the existing application to the standards of the new environment while ensuring that the application continues to behave as intended. The HP technical white paper titled Solaris to Linux Porting Guide provides detailed information on how to port applications to Linux.

Dedicated or Virtualized Resources

SAP applications can be deployed in a two- or three-tier architecture. In general, two-tier architecture is deployed for small department applications, as well as for sandbox, development, training, and test systems. Three-tier architecture scales to support large enterprise applications. The number one driver behind choosing a two-tier versus a three-tier environment is user demand. For example, expanding a two-tier department application into an enterprise-wide application can substantially increase the number of users. It may be a good time to move that application to a three-tier environment.

Figure 4: Dedicated and virtualized resources for SAP landscape

The SAP landscape can run on a dedicated scale-up server, or be distributed on a large number of small servers or on multiple virtual machines. Your HP SAP solution architect can assist you with making this decision.

Further discussion on infrastructure choices is covered in the section “Customer Advantages of the HP Approach.”

Migration Planning This section provides a brief overview of migration planning based on HP’s experience with migrating hundreds of customers to HP server platforms. The typical migration project phases include the following:

1) Plan: Evaluate business needs and constraints; develop approach and detailed task breakdown

2) Prepare: Ready the infrastructure and tools for migration

3) Test: Test the tools, applications, and data in an environment that models the production environment

and

4) Implement: Carry out the migration

The migration process covers five key areas, with each area requiring resources for that specific effort. These efforts are undertaken in parallel, with the project management office providing overall coordination and leadership. The five key areas are as follows:

• Project management: Coordinating and setting priorities for the migration, while ensuring rigorous attention to detail

• Infrastructure: Providing architecture, servers, and operating system choices, workloads, consolidation, virtualization

• In-house or custom applications: Evaluating source code and build inventories, architecture options, compiler compatibility, and database compatibility

• Commercial applications: Providing versions, upgrade paths, database versions, helper applications

• Database: Confirming version compatibility, database upgrade requirements, and migration strategies

HP recommends that a project management office oversee and coordinate the individual tasks. This ensures that critical information is passed between teams on time, and ensures consistent program review and resourcing priorities.

In the project kickoff, the teams must agree on specifics for the development, testing and QA processes, and environment, as well as common tools to facilitate information sharing and documentation. HP and its authorized partners can work with the customer to understand staffing requirements, and provide specialists to meet business objectives.

13

Software Version Dependencies

Before deciding on a migration strategy, you need to determine whether the versions of SAP applications and Oracle database in the current source system are supported by the Linux OS in the target system.

The table below shows key SAP software stack dependencies and compatibility.

Table 5: SAP Software Dependencies and Compatibility

SAP Version Oracle DB Version Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)

Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL)

SAP R/3 4.6C4 9i, 10g RHEL 4, 5, 6 SLES 10, 11 No

SAP R/3 4.7 9i, 10g RHEL 4, 5, 6 SLES 10, 11 No

SAP ECC 6 10g, 11g R2 only RHEL 4, 5, 6 SLES 10 OEL 5 on x86-64 only

• minimum Oracle DB 11.2.0.2

• all SAP products based on NetWeaver 7.x

• Unicode only (SAP application and database servers)

The following factors should be taken into account when making a software upgrade decision:

• Oracle 9.2 (only with version 9.2.0.8) is now in Sustaining Support.5

• Oracle 10g is now in Extended Support until July 31, 2013. Only version 10.2.0.5 is eligible for Extended Support, and this is a premium charge.6 Oracle 10g is supported by SAP ECC 6. This combination is supported only with RHEL and SLES.

• For Oracle 11g release, SAP is certified only on Oracle 11g Release 2 (11.2), and only with SAP products on 640_EX2 kernel (SAP ECC6) and later. This combination is supported by all three Linux distributions.

The following table shows the SAP upgrade path to ERP 6.0 with Enhancement Package 6.

Table 6: SAP Upgrade Path to ERP 6.0

4 Systems on 4.6C and above involve less risk, as it introduces smaller changes to the ECC. 5 See SAP Note 1330038 for detailed information. 6 See SAP Note 1110995 for detailed information.

14

15

SAP applications in the source Solaris system at SAP R/3 4.6C and above, or on SAP NetWeaver technology, such as NetWeaver 7.0, can be migrated to Linux on ProLiant servers using the SAP installation utility that comes with each SAP platform. This process follows the standard SAP migration procedures.

Migration Paths

Depending on which SAP version is running on the source Solaris system, there are three general paths for migrating SAP to Linux on ProLiant. They apply to migrating from physical server to physical server as well as from physical server to virtual server.

• One-step migration: Combines hardware migration and SAP migration plus SAP version upgrade in a single process step. This path is possible when the version of SAP technology running on Solaris is also supported on Linux/x86. The minimum SAP version is SAP 4.6C for RHEL and SUSE, and SAP ECC 6.0 for OEL 5.

– Few customers choose one-step migration, due to downtime and impact on production. But there are cases where one-step migration is necessary, for example, if the move involves Unicode conversion and the SAP R/3 4.6C is running on the source system. After migrating to the Linux platform, it will be necessary to upgrade to SAP 4.7 or higher before doing Unicode conversion.

• Two-step migration: Does hardware migration and application upgrade in two separate steps.

– Hardware migration is accomplished in one planned downtime window to take advantage of faster hardware.

– SAP is upgraded to the newer version in another downtime window. This path is possible when the version of SAP technology running on Solaris is also supported on Linux/x86, and immediate SAP upgrade is not required. The minimum SAP version is SAP 4.6C for RHEL and SUSE, and SAP ECC 6.0 for OEL 5.

– The majority of customers use this approach, since it minimizes downtime and has the least impact on production.

• Three-step migration: Is required when an earlier version of SAP (3.0, 3.1i, 4.0b, etc.) is running on Solaris. It is required to upgrade SAP in the source system to at least the 4.6C release. This additional upgrade step is required to bring the SAP solution stack up to the oldest level supported by the Linux platform. Then, depending on business requirements, the one-step or two-step migration process can be used.

– The source SPARC system may need to be augmented to support additional OS instances and storage during the upgrade.

The database and the application tier do not have to be migrated at the same time in the same maintenance window. A phased approach is possible, where the database is migrated first and the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is then returned to production use. This can be followed later by the application tier migration. Breaking the SAP ERP system migration into two separate steps helps reduce the length of time the system is unavailable to users, as well as reduce overall risk within the project.

Migration Preparation

Below is a recommended list for preparation:

• Perform sizing for the new hardware

• Order hardware for the new platform

• Contact SAP regarding your migration

• Select an SAP-approved consultant to perform the migration

• Order SAP migration services

• Submit the project plan to SAP for approval

• Install the new equipment

HP offers comprehensive SAP platform migration services, and a proven process based on nearly two decades of working with SAP and its largest customers. HP uses experienced, certified SAP migration consultants and tested processes and tools to safely migrate your environment. This can decrease your effort, increase your return on investment, and deliver a migration that is supported by SAP and usable by the end user. With HP consultants carrying out the migration, you will receive the following benefits:

• SAP certified migration consultants who work with you throughout the migration process

• Platform and infrastructure expertise to maximize your return on investment

• SAP-supported migration

16

Learning through a Test and Development Environment

As with any significant change to a production SAP ERP environment, it’s highly recommended to conduct appropriate testing and tuning in a non-production environment. Testing the actual target application in a test/staging environment similar to, but isolated from, the production environment is the most effective way to discover and resolve problems with the migration process in your environment. Use a representative target hardware and software platform with a recent copy of the production database. Testing and tuning can also be used to estimate the length of time the migration may take in your production environment.

Adequate time is needed for testing, including application functionality (even though it should not change), operational tests (backup/recovery, DR, database maintenance), and performance testing.

Based on your experience with the sandbox system as well as the DEV and QA systems, the production system migration can proceed. The migration should be performed under exactly the same conditions as those pertaining to the test system. For instance, the patch level of the kernel should be identical to that of the other systems.

Production Cutover Best Practices

The final phase before going live with SAP is often referred to as the cutover phase, the process of transitioning from one system to a new one. One needs to plan, prepare, and execute the cutover by creating a cutover plan that describes all cutover tasks that have to be performed before the actual go-live. Following is a list of best practices cutover tasks:

• Planning elements:

– Plan how to execute the upgrade process according to the available business downtime window

– Start planning early–communicate to business users about downtime

– Create a detailed cutover plan listing tasks, responsibilities, and dependencies

– Finalize a business contingency plan

• Process elements:

– Communicate and confirm SAP support during the production server upgrade

– Automate transport of the modification/change request to the production system

– Automate transport of authorization roles

– Finalize the backup strategy before and after the production server upgrade

– Set up help desk service to support users

Once the cutover to production has been completed, set aside a stabilization period after the migration before starting an SAP upgrade.

Virtual Machines for SAP Correctly sizing an SAP landscape is essential to achieve planned levels of performance and reliability. In general, a virtual machine can be treated just like a physical server. Installing an SAP system on a physical machine is technically no different than installing on a virtual machine. However, sizing a virtualized SAP landscape is more complex than a non-virtualized landscape, where resources are typically dedicated to a particular SAP instance.

In a virtualized landscape, multiple independently running VMs compete for host resources and may even cannibalize resources intended for another SAP system. Although resources can be bound to a specific VM to ensure performance and reliability, this tends to limit the number of VMs that can be supported on a host, while also lowering the overall level of resource usage. Identifying the right balance between resources dedicated to a particular VM and those that are dynamic and over-committed becomes critical when sizing a virtualized SAP landscape.

17

Memory Sizing. Experience suggests that older SAP and database systems tend to have insufficient memory. Moving such systems to a new, virtualized landscape with over-committed memory will repeat the poor performance, due to excessive memory paging. Since SAP requires assigning approximately the same amount of RAM to a VM as in a physical server system, one should not over-commit memory for SAP production systems.

The following guidelines apply to production VMs:

• Do not over-commit memory for SAP production systems. Instead, assign a fixed amount of RAM to production SAP and database VMs.

• HP does not recommend lowering the memory footprint. Assign at least as much memory as that installed on the physical server system. Only after you have established true memory utilization levels should you consider over-commitment.

• When sizing a new SAP VM, use 8GB per 1000 SAPS user. For smaller systems, use at least 8GB.

The following guidelines apply to non-production VMs:

• Memory over-commitment is acceptable, and is even recommended to reduce resource needs and improve utilization.

• Configure memory over-commit for a non-critical SAP system by setting the appropriate share priority rather than configuring a resource reservation.

VM Resources. Assigning appropriate resources helps provide adequate performance levels for VMs, while optimizing the utilization of the host system. Sizing recommendations for an SAP VM can be summarized as follows:

• General principles:

– Limit CPU utilization on the host to 80%. SAP assumes that at least 20% of CPU resources are needed for optimal hypervisor operation.

– Deploy only CPUs that support virtualization technologies such as Intel VT.

– If you can guarantee that a production system will receive all the resources it needs or if you are prepared to accept performance degradation, configure fewer CPU and memory resources.

– In general, do not over-allocate resources to any particular VM, thus optimizing utilization and ensuring that there are sufficient resources for other VMs.

– Include extra storage to support backups of virtual machine files. Supplying extra processors and memory allows for growth within SAP virtual machines.

• Memory and CPU best practices:

– Do not over-commit physical memory. You should commit only the amount of memory installed on the host, minus the memory used by the hypervisor.

– Reserve (production systems) or prioritize and share (non-production systems) CPU and memory resources.

– Extreme resource over-commitment is possible only when you know the load profiles of all your SAP VMs.

– Using weighted SAPS and memory values helps you achieve a good balance among system usage, performance capacity, flexibility, and cost.

After the landscape has been deployed, resource reservations or share-level priorities can be modified to meet a VM’s need. In a VMware environment, the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) feature can be used to dynamically align VM resources.

18

Automating Provisioning

A benefit of virtualization is the ability to clone a controlled virtual machine configuration so that deployment is less error-prone and time-consuming. SAP virtual machine images can be easily passed from developers directly to testers. The images can be easily passed back from test to development to replicate and resolve problems.

The administrator can create a golden image of a virtual machine that can be used as a master copy to create and provision new virtual machines. The golden image VM includes the guest OS and application data.

The cloned VM has an SAP system ID (SID) identical to the golden image VM. The SAP SID rename step is required to deploy a unique SAP system in the environment. The subsequent SAP SID renaming process creates a new SAP system running on the same guest OS but with a different SID and host name. This process is much faster than installing a virtual machine, guest OS, and SAP system from scratch.

From the data perspective, once the database is successfully migrated to the new environment, a clone of the production data should be made for subsequent dev/test/training.

Server and Application Management

A major benefit of migration is converting the SPARC server management silo into a unified, standards-based management environment. Because of greater efficiencies and skill sharing, IT can reallocate duplicate resources to other tasks such as the following:

• Capacity planning: Managing workloads, servers, and storage under the umbrella of HP Systems Insight Manager enables data center managers to make much more efficient use of resources. Tools such as Matrix Operating Environment enable operations staff to track resource loading, while tracking power usage. Putting these tools together lowers data center costs while keeping service and performance levels up.

• Provisioning: For blade environments, HP Virtual Connect simplifies workload provisioning and access to storage resources. Workloads are defined as “logical servers” within the HP BladeSystem environment. They can be moved to wherever spare blade capacity resides. The workload can then occupy either a full blade or a virtual machine. Storage access is virtualized, so that servers can be assigned storage resources without the need to make cabling changes.

• Remote or branch server management: In many cases, consolidation eliminates the need for remote data centers or branch servers. However, if there is a need for remote servers, HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO 3) lets data center staff manage the servers remotely, including troubleshooting boot sequences and updating applications. These capabilities are consistent across HP servers, and take advantage of the same browser-based user interface.

Oracle Database Migration Migrating the Oracle database from one platform to another platform is a well-understood process. The process also provides an opportunity for upgrading to a new version of the Oracle database during migration–for example, migrating from Oracle 9i running on Solaris/SPARC to Oracle 11g running on Linux/x86.

Before proceeding to migrate the data from the source system, make sure that the target Linux database system has been fully prepared to receive the relocated database. To reduce migration time, the following steps should be carried out and the environment tested before starting any of the database export processes involving the source system:

Plan Disk Storage Requirements and Layout

How much disk storage is needed and the layout of that storage on the Linux target system will be heavily influenced by the current disk usage on the source SAP database system. This planning step is also a good opportunity to prepare for any future database expansion and to make sure that sufficient storage is available to handle planned growth.

19

Data Migration

From the database perspective, migrating the database data from the source to the target environment is the most important activity in a migration project. The following are components that should be considered when determining and planning the data migration strategy:

• Infrastructure considerations: Before deciding on the data migration methodology, consider the existing and the new infrastructure. Some of the key items to consider are the number of servers, the operating system levels and amount of storage, the volume managers, the types of databases and applications, the network bandwidth/speeds and server clusters, and the backup source and size.

• Migration schedule: Consider the time required to install and configure all of the components for migration. Depending on the resources available and the methodology adopted, the time required to move the data can vary significantly.

• Methodology and tools: Various software products enable migration of data. Some are volume management products, host- or array-based replication products, and/or relocation utilities, as well as custom-developed scripts. Each has strengths and weaknesses–including performance, operating system support, storage vendor platform support, and how much downtime is required during migration. Depending on the migration requirements and the available infrastructure in the organization, one or more software products can be used to migrate the data.

Byte Order (Endianness)

A significant aspect when migrating applications from Solaris to Linux is endianness. Endianness refers to the way in which data is stored, and defines how bytes are addressed in multi-byte data types. The SPARC system architecture is big endian, and the x86 architecture is a little endian. Due to the differences in endianness, extra steps are necessary to migrate from SPARC to x86 without corrupting the SAP data. To migrate from RISC-based systems to Intel-based systems, SAP recommends transferring the database content using the SAP tool that understands SAP and the endian issues between different hardware platforms.

The SAP R3load tool must be used to move SAP content from RISC-based systems to Intel-based systems. R3load is initiated indirectly via the SAP installation tool. During the import phase of the data source for the new target system, the correct SAP code page, 4103, for a little endian machine must be added. SAP Note 552464 describes the differences in endianness with respect to SAP. Also, SAP does not recommend using the native database backup/recovery tools to copy the contents of the SAP database between different endian platforms, even when the operating system and the database remain the same. Additional Infrastructure Virtualization Traditionally, SAP landscapes reflect one-to-one relationships between the SAP systems and the physical servers the systems run on. With virtualization, multiple SAP systems can be run on the same physical hardware, reducing real estate, power, and cooling requirements to lower IT costs. The SAP instances run in separate operating system environments on isolated virtual machines, providing a high level of server containment and enhanced availability and manageability.

Key benefits of using virtualization for the SAP landscape include the following:

• Consolidating dedicated and isolated SAP environments to a few physical systems, improving server use, reducing costs, and freeing up data center resources. In some cases, application stacking can also be used to reduce operating system instances.

• Moving active VMs among physical servers for workload balancing, zero-downtime maintenance, high availability, and disaster recovery.

• Deploying new applications more quickly by deploying new VMs on existing systems to eliminate the costs and delays of adding physical infrastructure.

• Quickly cloning production environments to enable higher-quality development and testing, without the delay of purchasing and manually provisioning servers.

• Maintaining compute resource for “occasionally” used applications such as training systems. Their VM images are available “on demand” from SAN storage.

20

Storage Factors Virtualization has greatly improved server utilization but has also increased the demands on storage, increasing the complexity while reducing the predictability of the workloads. Storage in virtual server environments must have the following attributes:

• Highly scalable and reliable, able to support large, high-throughput workloads

• Consolidated pooling of resources delivering better utilization without contention

• High performance supported for random peak workloads

• Automated optimization including thin provisioning and tiering

Traditional storage architectures have not kept up with the needs of virtual server environments. For example, moving multiple workloads onto a single physical server increases I/O rates and makes them much more unpredictable. Due to the way virtual server hypervisors schedule resources to maximize system utilization, I/O workloads are now interleaved. As a result, consolidation of virtual workloads transforms sequential access patterns into random workloads. At the same time, tolerances for delays have decreased.

Virtual server environments are notorious for having a high degree of storage over provisioning. With hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines stored on one storage device, each virtual server is often assigned far more storage capacity than required. Thin provisioning delays storage allocation until it is required. Storage cost and volume savings can be significant.

Carefully consider the role and capabilities of storage when architecting a virtual environment. Bringing storage planning into the process for deploying your new environment will improve longer-term abilities to scale. Performance and capacity requirements are obvious items to consider, but also plan for backup jobs, recoverability, and even high availability requirements. Assessing capital expense and total cost of ownership, and extending the economies of scale to the entire storage infrastructure, will help ensure maximum technical benefit and ROI.

Network Improvements Today’s data center networks were designed to support conventional siloed IT architecture in which servers are dedicated to specific functions or organizations. Each server is typically dedicated to a specific function (i.e., Web server, application server, database server) and can be reasonably well protected using conventional security solutions such as intrusion prevention systems. Typical traffic flows in and out of the data center (north-south). The server infrastructure and the networking infrastructure are typically administered independently, by separate teams using distinct toolsets.

However, traditional data center networks designed to support siloed IT architectures simply can’t meet the performance, security, availability, and agility requirements of the virtual environment. Simpler and more efficient networks are required to support bandwidth-intensive, delay-sensitive server-to-server (east-west) traffic flows. In addition, a stringent service level agreement (SLA) and security demands often accompany a virtual environment. Products such as HP TippingPoint address this new threat.

Business Continuity Each virtual machine is an encapsulation of an operating system, an application, and its data connectivity, running on top of a hosting environment. The virtual machine is stored as a data file in shared storage accessible to all clustered servers in the infrastructure, and can be easily moved from server to server within the infrastructure. The virtual machine can even be transmitted to another location and be available on a remote server for users to access. Virtualizing the SAP environment can enhance business continuity in several ways:

NOTE: The hypervisor high availability (HA) function monitors health only at the virtual machine (VM) level. When a VM itself crashes or the physical server crashes, the hypervisor HA function detects the failure and restarts the failed VM on another running server. However, the hypervisor HA function does not detect whether a SAP application fails while running inside a properly functioning VM. HA clustering solutions from Linux distributions can be used to monitor the health of a SAP application.

Depending on your HA requirements, it may be necessary to combine the SAP application health monitoring provided by clustering software with hypervisor HA features. For example, SAP software can be deployed with the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension inside VMware VMs.

21

Advantages of the HP Approach Customers can choose from a well-defined suite of HP Converged Infrastructure solutions for SAP, based on HP ProLiant servers and Intel Xeon processors. This means that SAP solution architects can choose scale-up or scale-out environments and leverage either dedicated or virtualized servers, storage, and networks.

Infrastructure Choices Based on landscape size and operational requirements, HP offers several choices:

• Scale-up solutions include HP DL580 and DL980 servers, with a single server supporting up to 80 Intel Xeon processor cores. These solutions are ideal for a very large single-instance database or as a partitioned environment supporting multiple virtual machines.

• Scale-out solutions include BL4xx and BL6xx series server blades, as well as a wide variety of ProLiant rack servers. The larger rack servers and blade servers can be deployed as either virtualized or dedicated servers.

• HP also offers preconfigured, integrated infrastructure. The HP CloudSystem Matrix and HP VirtualSystem offer a range of sizing options. Each includes software and services to assist with private cloud deployment.

Infrastructure Design Considerations and Resources Infrastructure design must take into account several criteria, such as initial deployment effort, operational costs, and availability. The relative cost and effort involved in these criteria differ for distributed and scale-up environments. The criteria also vary based on whether the solution is meant for dedicated servers or a virtualized environment. The following table illustrates some of the differences that can affect the final design decision:

Table 7: Dedicated Versus Virtualized Resources

Scale-out Rack Infrastructure Scale-out Blade Infrastructure Scale-up Servers

Dedicated Often simplest to deploy for smaller configurations. Provides most consistent mapping to existing SAP dedicated server landscapes with RISC/UNIX servers.

Supports mid-size and larger environments. With at least 10 blades and two cabinets, provides a flexible approach for clusters and high availability.

Ideal for large database instances or servers with large batch workloads.

Virtualized Networking can be complex to manage because of the combined virtual and physical networks required when using large numbers of smaller servers.

Enables IT to take advantage of virtualized networking (such as HP Virtual Connect) to maximize network usage. Virtual networks enable simple workload movement and reconfiguration.

Can simplify management for large-scale test and development environments. Easy to carve up the server to support many small virtual machines. Also supports large virtual machines to assist with estimating production sizing.

Management Tools The key software building block for HP Converged Infrastructure is HP Insight Dynamics. Insight Dynamics builds on the essential server management delivered by HP Insight Control and enables you to proactively manage server health (whether physical or virtual), deploy servers quickly, optimize power consumption, and control servers from anywhere. Insight Dynamics also leverages HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM), which centralizes connection management and workload mobility for HP BladeSystem servers that use Virtual Connect to access LANs, SANs, and converged network infrastructures.

22

Deploying Virtualized Workloads

Insight Dynamics delivers three key capabilities:

• Provisioning: Whether for a single virtual machine or an infrastructure for a complex three-tier application, Insight Dynamics finds available resources, streamlines the approval process, and automatically provisions and configures what’s needed across infrastructure pools.

• Optimization: Insight Dynamics captures key data points every five minutes about actual system use such as power draw, CPU, and network usage.

• Protection: Insight Dynamics protects quality of service, and offers continuity of services with a wide spectrum of high availability and recovery solutions.

Managing Private Cloud Environments

For Cloud initiatives, HP offers HP Cloud Service Automation for Matrix–the industry’s most extensible cloud management solution. HP Cloud Service Automation for Matrix provides comprehensive service assurance, cloud monitoring, application lifecycle management, security, compliance, and service governance functions for private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Key capabilities include the following:

• Application provisioning that enables IT to provision platforms and applications to the appropriate infrastructure quickly and easily–all through one service template definition.

• Agentless monitors that are automatically deployed when new services are delivered through Matrix, helping to ensure the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures and application components.

• Complete lifecycle management for physical and virtual servers and applications–from establishing a baseline to provisioning, patching, managing the configuration, and assuring compliance.

HP Cloud Service Automation delivers a broad range of critical features that help enterprises perform the key functions necessary to deliver a private cloud. A full HP Converged Infrastructure SAP deployment can take advantage of all of these functional areas.

The Decision Is Yours SAP customers around the world are adopting virtualized SAP landscapes based on HP Converged Infrastructure. The value proposition is simple:

• Mainstream platform software supported by thousands of developers

• Long-term stable road map based on published standards, backed by industry leaders

• Impressive investments in technology and products for simplifying deployment and operation of SAP landscapes

Next Steps HP can assist you in understanding the options and provide rigor for your SAP infrastructure refresh process. HP leverages industry-standard tools and methodologies combined with years of experience in deploying and upgrading SAP environments. Contact your HP sales representative or authorized reseller to get started with these important decision-making resources.

Planning Assessments As mentioned above, the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop is an excellent way to provide IT and business teams with a common understanding of private cloud technologies, deployments, and business advantages for SAP. HP can also provide assessments that address rehosting specifics, such as stack assessments, database migration effort, and options for maintaining current service levels.

TCO Analysis Major business decisions always require solid financial justification. HP can assist you in creating a detailed TCO analysis that covers infrastructure costs, migration costs, licensing cost implications, and support costs. This study can provide crucial information regarding payback time and project return on new SAP investments.

23

Proof of Concept Projects SAP is a mission-critical application, and risk identification and avoidance are critical for migration planning. HP can work with you to define key Proof of Concept examples to demonstrate the added benefits of a virtualized Linux infrastructure.

For More Information Intel Xeon Processors

• Intel Xeon Processor E7 Family Home Page

HP Hardware

• HP Servers

• HP ProLiant Server Home Page

• HP solution blocks

• Linux and HP servers

HP software

• HP Matrix Operating Environment Reference Architectures

• HP Systems Insight Manager

• Solaris to Linux Porting Kit

• Solaris Transition Kit

Cloud Computing

• HP Cloud Solutions

• HP CloudMaps for SAP

HP services

• HP SAP Migration Services

• Sun to HP Migration

Whitepapers

• Solaris to Linux Porting Guide

• HP Reference Solution Guide: ERP/CRM: SAP Business Suite 7, ERP 6.0 Configuration Use Case

• Migrating SAP Applications on Sun SPARC servers to HP BladeSystem Matrix

• Virtualizing Enterprise SAP Software Deployments: A Proof of Concept by HP, Intel, SAP, SUSE, and VMware

Appendix: Sizing Sizing recommendation for SAP landscape

Concurrent Medium SD Users

500 users or less 500 to 1500 users 1500+ Users

Production System: Database Server, Application Server

2 CPU, 16GB to 48GB RAM, Cluster recommended, 400GB to 900GB DB

2 to 4 CPU, 96GB to 128GB RAM, Cluster recommended, 2TB to 3TB DB

4 to 8 CPU, 192GB to 256GB RAM, Cluster recommended, 4TB DB

Test and Quality Assurance System

2 CPU, 8 GB to 24GB RAM, DB size as production

2 CPU, 48GB RAM, DB size as production

2 CPU, 96GB to 144GB RAM, DB size as production

Development System 2 CPU, 8GB to 12GB RAM, 100GB to 200GB DB

2 CPU, 16GB to 24GB RAM, 200GB DB

2 CPU, 16GB to 24GB RAM, 200GB DB

© Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Intel Xeon is a trademark or registered trademark of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

4AA4-0648ENW, Created April 2012