Design Options - SAP MII 12.0 on Netweaver 7.0 on Windows

[Former Member]

Hello,

About 3 weeks ago I was suddenly tasked with designing a

zero-downtime infrastructure for a 9 site SAP/MII on windows

implementation.

I can barely spell SAP, and have been furiously reading 60

hours a week for 3 weeks.

Now the common wisdom seems to be to use Windows Clustering.

I have never been comfortable with windows clustering for a number

of reasons, and we are chronically short-staffed to the point of

lunacy and have no in-house expertise and no budget for

consultants.

(we also have NO remote IT staff, and facilities that are 2 hours

drive from the nearest airport)

I'm supposed to order parts in 17 days.

In an effort to avoid windows clustering at all costs I have looked at

two other alternatives:

1) vmware.

I love vmware. I know vmware. Vmware never lets us down. Vmware

solves most of our problems.

My reading says that vmware is FULLY certified and acceptable

per SAP support note #0001159490

However to be ultra conservative we called up SAP and they

said categorically that we may not use vmware and receive

any support whatsoever.

I'm really confused.

Our hardware is 10x over-specced. We could support 200 heavy

ERP users on it, and only need to support like 20 light MII

users. It could run on a desktop PC with 4 gig of ram.

Ok, so another alternative I came up wtih was to use an all

boot from ISCSI san design for a very rapid boot to a backup

box. I could script the whole thing, so that a remote secretary

could failover with a web page link if necessary.

However our main internal SAP guy wants nothing to do with this

design.

So I have 3 designs in mind, none of which I can use, and 17

days to order parts.

Question #1:

Would any of you recommend the use of Windows clustering,

at remote sites 2 hours drive from civilization, with no remote

support staff and no competent support staff back at corporate?

(I'm a principal engineer with 17 years windows/network experience

and I don't classify as competent on windows clustering)

Question #2:

Can someone in a position of authority clarify about whether

virtualization with vmware VI 3 is or is not supported?

Question #3:

What would you do?

Thanks,

Kevin

[Former Member]

>

> 
> Question #1:
> 
> Would any of you recommend the use of Windows clustering,
> at remote sites 2 hours drive from civilization, with no remote
> support staff and no competent support staff back at corporate?
> (I'm a principal engineer with 17 years windows/network experience
> and I don't classify as competent on windows clustering)
> 

Oh come on, Windows Cluster is not that bad. It's easy, only problem is the shared storage (single of failure). I would recommend this for non-production environment. For an environment where you are 2 hours drive away from civilization, I would recommend (see what I write below)

>

Question #2:
> 
> Can someone in a position of authority clarify about whether
> virtualization with vmware VI 3 is or is not supported?
> 

My experiences with virtual <anything> is that there are some serious supportability and performance issues. Either VMWare or Windows Hyper-V based technologies.

>

 Question #3:
> 
> What would you do?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Kevin

I would:

1. Implement MS Cluster in non-production environemnt. Again, the only down fall with MSCS is single storage and slowness (up to 5 min) in failing over the virtual name.

2. Implement the following for production, where the site is 2 hour away from civilization.

- A MSCS for SAP CI only. Not the database.

- Two servers each with identical storage for the database, and run SQL 2005 DB mirroring.

- Redundent application servers with login groups. At least two instance (on different physical servers) per login group.

Edited by: Kevin Lin on Aug 14, 2008 3:29 PM

[markus_doehr2]

My experiences with virtual <anything> is that there are some serious supportability and performance issues. Either VMWare or Windows Hyper-V based technologies.

I can´t confirm this generally.

We run Solaris Zones as well as Xen, performance "impact" is less than 10 % on each of them compared to bare metal - and both are officially supported (we don´t run Oracle on them). However, this is not Windows (and that´s what is fact here). That´s though an interesting statement.

Markus

[Former Member]

I really wonder if Solaris Zones are 'supported, supported'.

SAP support note #0001159490 clearly states with no ambiguity that windows on vmware vitualization is

100% supported.

Hell, the large company checkpoint runs 16 vmware servers that house 100% of their SAP ERP environment;

I wonder if they know yet that SAP won't support them?

It boggles my mind that SAP support says virtualization isn't supported on the phone, but fully documents in

dozens of documents and links that it IS fully supported on the web.

For the life of me, I cannot find a 'supported' design for windows that everyone will agree to support

for those very remote locations.

Oh sure, I can try windows failover clustering, but when it breaks at 2 in the morning (and it eventually will), do YOU

want to drive to Demopolis Alabama and fix it while several hundred people scream for your blood?

-K

[markus_doehr2]

It boggles my mind that SAP support says virtualization isn't supported on the phone, but fully documents in

dozens of documents and links that it IS fully supported on the web.

To whom did you talk on the phone? I mean, you certainly have "good connections" (speaking of Vitamine-B). Either that one person was just undereducated or too single threaded or there are internal informations that are not known at the outside - what would be totally ambivalent.

SAP is totally on the "virtualization trip" (see comment in ) - and this is totally house made.

Landscapes are exploding and "at best" you have a separate instance for each component or you will end up in dependency hell (means, trying to upgrade ST-PI on a CRM system and ending up upgrading your HR system because of the dependency chains).

If we wouldn´t do that virtualization thing we would have ~ 30 - 35 more bare metals in our datacenter - consuming power and producing heat while most of the time idling around...

Oh sure, I can try windows failover clustering, but when it breaks at 2 in the morning (and it eventually will), do YOU

want to drive to Demopolis Alabama and fix it while several hundred people scream for your blood?

Well - I´m in Germany - would take me a while to get there... do you really have that little trust in (your) installations?

Markus

[Former Member]

First question first:

My SAP guy (principal basis engineer for unix) called SAP support and got this

email response from them:

-

---

Here is SAPu2019s response on VMWare use in Production.

14.08.2008 - 21:51:19 CET - Reply by SAP

Hi Dennis

I regret to inform you xMII was not tested on these systems yet.

Also, VMWare is not supported for production

I am sorry I can not provide you with more positive answer this time.

Thank you very much for your kindly understanding.

Best Regards

Davison Tadeu

SAP Active Global Support

---

Second Question:

I have 99%+ confidence in systems that I design and implement, if in my past experience and in conjunction with

much research the positives outweight the negatives.

I have 100% positive experience with vmware ESX 3.0 - 3.5.

I have 0% negative experience with vmware (so far - could change tomorrow).

As for windows clustering, I do not wish to bash the technology at a high-level. I'm sure its great 95% of the time

or people wouldn't use it.

But if you search for windows clustering on this forum alone (not the millions of others), you will see limitless

frantic appeals for help with windows clustering.

If it was just in our main data center, I wouldn't blink twice.

But when the systems are from 100 to 1500 miles away, up to 2 hours from the nearest airport,

wtih no local support staff... WELLL...

I hope you can see my hesitation.

-K

[Former Member]

Hi,

as i am very much involved in SAP's virtualization strategy allow me to add here that SAP is actually supporting VMware for productive envrionments (with Windows and Linux as guest OS inside the virtual machine), together with Xen-based virtualization with Novell and Red Hat. Please look at https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/virtualization for all details.

Regards,

Roland

Enterprise Virtualization Strategist

SAP Co-Innovation Labs

SAP Labs Palo Alto

[Arne_Manthey]

Hi,

one comment from my side. The reason why you might heard that vmware is not officially supported for MII by SAP could be the following:

At SAP we take a lot of effort to test and validate our solutions. In the case of MII this means that for every combination of operation system and database we need to conduct a good deal of testing. As an example for MII 12.0 we have 8 different databases tested with approx 10 operating systems which leads to a total of 80 different test packages. If you add another dimension like the type of virtual machine versions this of course would increase the number enormously (On every version of VM you can of course run multiple types of operating systems).

Therefore there is no official general release of any combination of database/operatingsystem/vmsystem for MII. This does not mean that it won't work.

Regards,

Arne Manthey

Solution Management Manufacturing

SAP AG

[Former Member]

We went back again to global support and they changed their mind;

we were told that MII was no longer an xApp, so it WAS formally

supported on VMware.

As a result of that we are implementing on VMware as we speak.

-Kev