VBLOCK SOLUTION FOR SAP APPLICATION SERVER ELASTICITY

Transcription

1 Vblock Solution for SAP Application Server Elasticity Table of Contents VBLOCK SOLUTION FOR SAP APPLICATION SERVER ELASTICITY Version 2.0 February

2 Copyright 2013 VCE Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved. VCE believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS." VCE MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 2

3 Contents Introduction... 4 Solution overview... 4 About this document... 5 Audience... 5 Feedback... 5 Technology overview... 6 Vblock Systems... 6 Vblock System Vblock System SAP ERP Central Component... 7 Architecture overview... 8 Physical layout... 8 Logical layout... 8 Hardware and software components... 9 Environment and configuration details Solution validation Use Case 1: Quick provisioning of SAP ABAP application servers Test environment Test procedure Use Case 2: Best practices for optimizing a virtual machine for ACC management on Vblock Systems Test environment Test procedure Validation results Use Case 1 results Use Case 2 results Conclusion Next steps References SAP

4 Introduction Mission-critical business applications and workloads continuously and quickly move at unpredictable levels, causing resource requirements to suddenly shift from one department to another, or from one application to another. In response, IT must rapidly scale up and scale down resources such as server availability. In physical environments, IT over-subscribes resources to meet peak resource demand. Managing physical environments in this manner creates computing silos without the ability to share, offload, or take advantage of all available resources in a time of peak demand. Some applications may be starving for resources, while others are often extremely underused. Better resource management is needed to alleviate the problem, ensure optimal use of resources, and maximize business responsiveness. The Vblock Solution for SAP Server Elasticity provides a virtual environment that addresses these issues. Vblock Systems provide a robust, scalable, and virtualized converged infrastructure that IT organizations can efficiently scale, enabling them to effectively manage and allocate resources to meet changing resource requirements and workloads in SAP environments. Solution overview The Vblock Solution for SAP Server Elasticity enables IT organizations to better manage and allocate their converged infrastructure resources (compute, network, storage) by: Quickly provisioning SAP Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) application servers. The solution uses methods of cloning existing SAP ABAP application servers, and uses a customized script to set up new working SAP application servers. This greatly reduces the time required to provision new SAP application servers. Work that previously required days or weeks to complete now takes only minutes. Applying best practices for optimizing virtual machines for SAP Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC) management on Vblock Systems. The solution describes how to set up SAP ACC to work with VMware vcenter. It also describes how to automate the prerequisite steps of preparing a virtual machine for use with SAP ACC, accelerating deployment and reducing complexity. The solution includes tools to automate the upgrade and migration processes and ensure these processes remain low-risk to business continuity. These tools support processes for both migrating an SAP deployment to Vblock Systems and migrating an SAP application from one virtual machine to another. Solution benefits include: The best-in-class compute, networking, storage, and virtualization components A fully virtualized environment with the inherent efficiencies and flexibilities of VMware Flexibility to scale-up and down with business demand to meet peak and valley SAP requirements 4

5 Load sharing and balancing of resources among multiple users for higher efficiency and utilization Improved SAP service and operations that help reduce IT operational costs About this document This document describes how Vblock Systems and SAP application server elasticity enables IT departments to quickly and efficiently scale and manage SAP resources to meet rapidly changing requirements. Results from two validations tests are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of Vblock Systems with SAP application server elasticity. The purpose of this paper is to show how to: Quickly provision SAP ABAP application servers. Apply best practices for optimizing virtual machines for SAP ACC management on Vblock Systems. Key findings demonstrate that: Using the VCE ABAP quick provisioning method, the total provisioning and deployment time is reduced to 5 to 7 minutes to present a live working SAP ABAP application server. Minimal administrative intervention is now needed to complete this task. Packaging best practice preparation steps for optimizing virtual machines for SAP ACC management speeds the process, compared to all the traditional efforts, and makes the operational tasks easier. Additional features such as impact analysis are provided. These features demonstrate impacts from the application perspective, providing useful input for decision-making. Audience This paper is intended for administrators and architects, as well as technical engineering staff, IT managers, IT planners and other IT professionals who are evaluating, acquiring, managing, operating, or deploying SAP in a virtualized data center environment. System and network or application administrators, as well as all Vblock Systems existing and potential customers with a current or future SAP implementation, will also benefit from the information in this paper. Feedback To suggest documentation changes and provide feedback on this paper, send an to [email protected]. Include the name of this paper, the name of the topic to which your comment applies, and your feedback. 5

6 Technology overview This solution uses the following major hardware and software components and technologies: Vblock Systems SAP Vblock Systems The Vblock System from VCE is the world's most advanced converged infrastructure one that optimizes infrastructure, lowers costs, secures the environment, simplifies management, speeds deployment, and promotes innovation. The Vblock System is designed as one architecture that spans the entire portfolio, includes best-in-class components, offers a single point of contact from initiation through support, and provides the industry's most robust range of configurations. Vblock System 720 The Vblock System 720 is an enterprise, service provider class mission-critical system in the Vblock System 700 family, for the most demanding IT environments supporting enterprise workloads and SLAs that run thousands of virtual machines and virtual desktops. It is architecturally designed to be modular, providing flexibility and choice of configurations based on demanding workloads. These workloads include business-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and database, messaging, and collaboration services. The Vblock System 720 leverages the industry s best director-class fabric switch, the most advanced fabric based blade server, and the most trusted storage platform. The Vblock System 720 delivers greater configuration choices, 2X performance and scale from prior generations, flexible storage options, denser compute, five 9s of availability, and converged network and support for a new virtualization platform that accelerates time to service and reduces operations costs. Vblock System 320 The Vblock System 320 is an enterprise and service provider ready system in the Vblock System 300 family, designed to address a wide spectrum of virtual machines, users, and applications. It is ideally suited to achieve the scale required in both private and public cloud environments. The Vblock System 320 has been engineered for greater scalability and performance to support large enterprise deployments of mission-critical applications, cloud services, VDI, mixed workloads and application development and testing. The Vblock System 320 delivers greater configuration choices, 2X performance and scale from prior generations, flexible storage options, denser compute, five 9s of availability, and converged network and support for a new virtualization platform that accelerates time to service and reduces operations costs. Every Vblock System 320 is available with the marketleading EMC VNX storage arrays. For more information, go to 6

7 SAP ERP Central Component SAP NetWeaver ERP Central Component (ECC) 6.0 was used to validate the solution. The SAP ERP application is integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. It targets business software requirements of midsize and large organizations in most industries and sectors. ECC 6.0 allows for open communication within and between all company functions, as well as with other businesses outside the firewall, due to its Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). 7

8 Architecture overview This solution uses methods of cloning existing SAP ABAP application servers, and a customized script to set up a new working application server. The solution reduces the time required to provision a new SAP application server to minutes, when it previously required days or weeks. Physical layout Figure 1 shows the Vblock System setup used to validate this solution. Figure 1. Physical configuration Logical layout Figure 2 shows the logical configuration of the components used to implement the solution. It shows the cloning and customization provided by vcenter, as well as request workflow paths for adding an application server and for preparing a virtual machine for ACC installation. 8

9 Figure 2. Logical configuration Note: This document does not cover the management of EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM). Hardware and software components A Vblock System with two Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blades was used to validate this solution. The following table lists the software used to validate this solution. Software Quantity Configuration SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) ECC 6.0 SR3 SAP Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC) Standard VCEAgent software, which manages the SAP monitoring and elasticity operation tasks 1 N/A 9

10 Environment and configuration details The following table describes the configuration details for the test environment. Application Name Virtual machine host name vcpu Memory (GB) SAP ECC EC1 EC1DBCI 4 64 SAP ECC EC1 SAPAPP SAP ECC EC1 SAPAPP SAP ECC EC1 SAPAPP SAP ACC AC1 AC1DBCI 2 32 VCEAgent VCEAgent VCEAgent

11 Solution validation Two use cases were validated in this solution: Use Case 1: Quick provisioning of SAP ABAP application servers Use Case 2: Best practices for optimizing a virtual machine for SAP ACC management on Vblock Systems Use Case 1: Quick provisioning of SAP ABAP application servers The objective of Use Case 1 is the quick provisioning of an SAP application. The steps are shown in Figure 3. Figure 3. Quick provisioning of SAP application servers 11

12 Test environment In the Use Case 1 validation environment, the quick provisioning procedure was set up to run on a Linux OS on Vblock Systems, as shown in Figure 4. An SAP application server clone request set off the quick provisioning process to begin the cloning. An existing SAP ABAP application server was chosen and resources were collected. A pre-impact analysis was performed. Approval was sought, and when it was obtained, the virtual machine was cloned with the designated resource, the virtual machine received SAP customization, and the provisioned SAP application server was started and added to the login group of servers. Figure 4. Use Case 1 validation environment Test procedure The following system screenshots show the steps described in Figure 4. The steps began at the main VCE control web interface: Select SAP Instance Clone Request. 1. For an application in NotActive status, selected Prepare for SAPACC Installation in the Operation column. 12

13 2. On the request screen, completed the source and target parameters for the cloning procedure. Clicked Submit. 3. Ran an impact analysis before committing, for the virtual machines. 13

14 4. Clicked Commit on the request screen. 14

15 The cloning status was displayed. 5. A confirmation was displayed. The cloned and provisioned application server was added to running server group. 15

16 16

17 Use Case 2: Best practices for optimizing a virtual machine for ACC management on Vblock Systems The objective of this use case was the quick preparation of a virtual machine for SAP application server installation by ACC. The steps are shown in Figure 5. Figure 5. Optimizing a virtual machine for ACC management 17

18 Test environment The quick ACC application server installation validation procedure is shown in Figure 6. The scenario started with creation of a virtual machine from a standardized template. Resources were collected and added, and SAP ACC was installed. Figure 6. Quick preparation for SAP ACC application server on Linux OS Test procedure We used the following procedure to validate Use Case 2: 1. Initiated an SAP instance prepare request to prepare the virtual machine for SAP ACC installation. 2. Clicked the link to the SAP ACC URL. 18

19 3. Selected the Configuration tab. 4. In the Found Resources section of the screen, in the Action list, clicked Auto Assign to Pool. 5. The Advanced Resource Selection screen showed the new virtual machine available as a resource for ACC installation. Clicked Go. 19

20 6. The ACC installation proceeded. Validation results This section lists the validation results for each use case. Use Case 1 results Figure 7 compares the validation results to traditional SAP application server installations. The validation shows that with the new automated solution, the time taken to clone, provision, and put into service a new SAP application server is reduced to minutes, rather than hours and days, and that human intervention is rarely necessary during this process. 20

21 Figure 7. Installation with VCE technology, compared to the standard SAP application installation. Additional benefits include: Speed: A typical SAP ABAP application server was added within 5 to 7 minutes, compared to the traditional method in which it takes days to add the server. Easy-to-use GUI: All user interaction was HTTP web-based. There is no need to directly access vcenter. Convenience: The traditional tasks for SAP application server installations are packaged into one action. All the NFS mounted file systems (FS) were automatically carried over from the source application server. Only approval and confirmation require human intervention. Consistent configuration: The target SAP application server carried OS configuration and kernel patches and SAP application server configuration identical to the source. This consistency significantly reduces human error, compared with the traditional method. Pre-analyzed impact: The impact analysis that must be performed before taking action provides a way to guarantee the specified SAP application server capacity is met, and that there is little impact on existing servers. Use Case 2 results The quick SAP application server installation by ACC provides the following benefits: Convenient: The virtual machine creation with desired capacity specifications and necessary preparation tasks, such as FS creation and mounting, group and account creation, Java installation, and so forth, for ACC are done in a packaged method. 21

22 Consistent: By using a standard template or cloning an existing SAP application virtual machine, the new SAP application virtual machine carries OS configuration or kernel patches that are identical to the existing ones. An impact analysis before action: Provides a way to guarantee that the specified SAP application server capacity is met, with very little impact on existing servers. 22

23 Conclusion The Vblock Solution for SAP Application Server Elasticity enables IT organizations to efficiently scale operations in order to effectively manage and allocate their compute resources to meet changing resource requirements and workloads in the SAP environment. The solution enables pre-provisioning SAP ABAP application servers in an automated process that requires minimal human intervention. This is an important innovation, as it provides IT with more time for other tasks, and very importantly provides instant access to already provisioned SAP ABAP servers. The solution enables very quick scale-up when additional servers are needed, and scale-down when demand is low. When scaling down, the servers can then be used by other applications concurrently in a demand situation where more capacity is needed. The solution also provides packaged preparation steps for readying virtual machines for SAP ACC management, greatly reducing management and operational time and effort. The two validations performed for the Vblock Solution for SAP Application Server Elasticity demonstrate the following results: Using the VCE ABAP quick provisioning method reduced the total operational time to a 5- to 7- minute time range, compared to work that formerly required hours, days, or weeks using traditional provisioning methods, to present a live working SAP ABAP application server. Minimal administrative intervention was needed to complete this task. Packaging best practice preparation steps for optimizing virtual machines for SAP ACC management speeded up the process, compared to traditional efforts, and made the operational tasks easier. Additional features such as impact analysis were provided. These features helped by demonstrating impacts from the application perspective, providing useful input for decision making. Next steps To learn more about this and other solutions, contact a VCE representative or visit 23

24 References Refer to the following sources for supporting and additional information: SAP Note: To access SAP documentation on the SAP Service Marketplace, SAP requires that you register and have a user ID and password. 24

25 ABOUT VCE VCE, formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through the Vblock Systems, delivers the industry's only fully integrated and fully virtualized cloud infrastructure system. VCE solutions are available through an extensive partner network, and cover horizontal applications, vertical industry offerings, and application development environments, allowing customers to focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating, and managing IT infrastructure. For more information, go to Copyright 2013 VCE Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Vblock and the VCE logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of VCE Company, LLC and/or its affiliates in the United States or other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.