Is there an alternative to use of NFS in SAP Installations

[former_member185954]

Hello All,

My customer is very concerned about the use of NFS in his landscape. I am planning a build of a new application server on a seperate UNIX box as the existing box has maxed out (capacity wise).

The new dialog application server would need to share interface directories , sapmnt etc , however the IT Security policy at our customer end prohibits NFS mounts

Now that application server could run with its own set of profiles and kernel directories , however sharing the interface directory should be mandatory.

I am wondering if there is any alternative to this ?

Regards,

Siddhesh

[markus_doehr2]

The new dialog application server would need to share interface directories , sapmnt etc , however the IT Security policy at our customer end prohibits NFS mounts

You could use NFSv4 which has lots of new security features compared to old NFSv3 (or even v2). What is his concern? I´m sure he also use Windows shares in his company for the frontends..

Now that application server could run with its own set of profiles and kernel directories , however sharing the interface directory should be mandatory.

You need a single transport directory shared across the landscape.

Depending on what OS you use you can use SMB/CIFS to share/mount the directories, however, I would still use NFS.

Markus

[former_member185954]

Hello Markus,

>You could use NFSv4 which has lots of new security features compared to old NFSv3 (or even v2). What is his concern? I´m sure he also use Windows shares in his company for the frontends..

I had suggested the same, however we are on AIX 5.2 and NFSv4 i think needs AIX 5.3, so to have NFSv4 we would need to go for AIX 5.3 which is essentially an upgrade of the OS.

Windows front ends cannot be shared as per company policy..

>You need a single transport directory shared across the landscape.

Not neccessary, we can still have transports working, SAP would use RFCs to copy over data.

Currently we do not have any transport directories shared.

>Depending on what OS you use you can use SMB/CIFS to share/mount the directories, however, I would still use NFS.

Yes i agree totally NFS is clean and simple!

Anyways the project is stalled for the moment and I have forced them to have a waiver for the policy as an exception

Regards,

Siddhesh

[Former Member]

I was curious too about using SMB/CIFS to install SAP Netweaver 7.0 stacks so decided to run some tests.

I did successfully install Netweaver 7.0 SR3 media, ABAP+Java on RedHat AS 5.2 with all SAP media sources located on a Windows Server 2003 box, using SMB/CIFS. There is nothing else to say, it works fine, setup runs as usual and no weird errors.

So we now use our central SMB server hosting all SAP media for all installations.

[markus_doehr2]

> Windows front ends cannot be shared as per company policy..

So they don't have a Windows network to share files? Do they send everything via email? Just curious...

> Anyways the project is stalled for the moment and I have forced them to have a waiver for the policy as an exception

I could understand NFS not having been a reliable and safe protocol at the times of v2 - but those are long gone

Markus

[former_member185954]

no reply from anyone, hence closing