Clone SAP installation using VMWare

[Former Member]

Hi Gurus,

I have a question regarding VMware and its ability to create Clone/Image of SAP installation. Here is the question in Detail.

We have a SAP Installation (R/3 4.7)...It is running fine as of now.

The Server on which it is hosted is having lot of hardware issues and I want to switch the hardware.

The question is...

1) Can I somehow clone my current SAP installation to another hardware which is better and more stable.

2) Can I do it through VMware...and by this I mean can I create a image using VMware and put it on the new hardware and run it

as a Virtual Instance on the new hardware.

3) Finally can this virtual Image be converted to real on the new system.

These are merely challanges I want to venture and try out. Please provide any inputs in order to do this.

Rgds

Ram Kumar.

[Former Member]

>

> Hi Gurus,
> 
> I have a question regarding VMware and its ability to create Clone/Image of SAP installation. Here is the question in Detail.
> 
> We have a SAP Installation (R/3 4.7)...It is running fine as of now.
> The Server on which it is hosted is having lot of hardware issues and I want to switch the hardware.
> 
> The question is...
> 
> 1) Can I somehow clone my current SAP installation to another hardware which is better and more stable.
> 2) Can I do it through VMware...and by this I mean can I create a image using VMware and put it on the new hardware and run it
> as a Virtual Instance on the new hardware.
> 3) Finally can this virtual Image be converted to real on the new system.
> 
> These are merely challanges I want to venture and try out. Please provide any inputs in order to do this.
> 
> Rgds
> Ram Kumar.

1) I wonu2019t do that, cloning to new hardware involves some risks if not done properly, you can end with a nice blue screen

2) Yes, You can with VMware, as RAJ said earlier, With P2V it shoud work, but do some testing first, we have done this in our company to virtualize SAP; no big issues

3) Going from physical, to Virtual to physical i would not recommend, stay virtual

As for the supported / not supported, as Markus said, Oracle is not supported, if you have a single system, with database and app server on the same host I would do a system copy

If your system has DB and APP server separated, virtualizing the app server should be no problem.

Also, it would be new hardware, you will need to install a new license.

Regards

[Former Member]

Here's another quick question. This might be slightly off the topic but, I would really appreciate if someone can throw some light on this.

Does P2V demand a new SAP license because, its a new hardware? Or as we are cloning, to SAP, it doesn't see the difference and still accepts the old license key? Let me know please.

Thank you.

[former_member204746]

SAP license on windows is based on the SID and servername, so, if you clone it, you will probably need to change servername, thus change license.

[Former Member]

Hi Eric, thank you for the prompt response. Please don't take me wrong. Are you sure that the license is based on the combination of SID and Hostname? And if I maintain the same SID and hostname on the other server, it wouldn't ask for license? And by the way, the Hardware Key is simply based on SID and Hostname? Isn't that associated to any of the hardware components like NIC on the server? Please clarify.

[markus_doehr2]

LIcense keys on Windows are based on SID, hostname and MAC addresse of the network card. If you make sure that the MAC addresse is the same and that it's at the same place as before (so sequence of multiple network cards is the same) you can use the old license key.

Markus

[former_member204746]

Read SAP note Note 174911 - Determining the hardware key (customer key)

Only Windows uses a hardware key that does NOT depend on the hardware. A new installation of Windows definitely causes the hardware key to change.

[markus_doehr2]

"Cloning" or using images to do system copies is not supported in a SAP environment. The reason is simple: If you clone an instance and rename it the whole system configuration is invalidated. Profiles, registry and their permissions, filesystems and their permissions, if you have Java the wrong/old hostname is cluttered everywhere on the filesystem etc.

To copy instances you can do a backup/restore or use R3load. Which process is preferred is your choice.

Markus

[Former Member]

Hi,

If you are running as a central instance (App + DB on same server) , you can do a VMWare - P2V (Physical to Virtual) and we have done this as part of our DR exercise .

[Former Member]

Hi there

CLONING of course works -- that's EXACTLY what it is --a COMPLETE CLONE. Neither MS nor SAP nor anyone else can prevent you from cloning a VIRTUAL MACHINE.

As for ORACLE or SAP not running on a Virtual machine -- that's nonsense -- a load of SERVER FARMS already provide "Virtual Servers" for their clients who quite happily run their SAP systems on them without even knowing that these are all on Virtual servers.

What you MUSN''T do of course is to have more instances running (on different networks) for more licenses than you are entitled to.

I'm not a lawyer but I'm sure if you were moving your Virtual Machine to new hardware you could temporarily have 2 instances just to check functionality - but you certainly wouldn't be allowed to run full scale production on both instances.

In a multi-landscape scenario using Virtual servers etc actually makes a HUGE amount of sense and can make better use of the real hardware too.

Just use the vmware CLONE VM and then start it up again. You can't have two clones of course running on the same network - ip address / host name etc will conflict.

Your IT dept if its doing this sort of exercise might like to look at Microsoft's Hyper-V Virtualisation or Vmware's ESXi / ESX type of environment. Incidentally Windows 2008 R2 server makes an excellent platform also for this type of activity.

If you don't believe Oracle / SAP run on a VM -- just create a simple Windows XP 2GB RAM VM (you don't even need to create a server OS ) and install the 4.7 IDES on it -- this has an oracle DB -- works fine and is a FULL OFFICIAL IDES system.

(For virtualisation software you can use vmware server -- free or vbox -- also free if you just want to test the process out-- try this on a spare machine in your Lunchbreak !!).)

Cheers

jimbo

[markus_doehr2]

> CLONING of course works -- that's EXACTLY what it is --a COMPLETE CLONE. Neither MS nor SAP nor anyone else can prevent you from cloning a VIRTUAL MACHINE.

Nobody said it doesn't work. As long as your keep hostname and SID everything is fine. I didn't argue about "preventing" things, I was just stating about what is allowed and working from a support perspective.

>

> As for ORACLE or SAP not running on a Virtual machine -- that's nonsense -- a load of SERVER FARMS already provide "Virtual Servers" for their clients who quite happily run their SAP systems on them without even knowing that these are all on Virtual servers.

Also true - but those customers can not expect getting support in case of performance problems or if they get corrupt blocks on their disks since it's not a supported combination. Oracle clearly states that VMware is not supported as underlying infrastructure and that they don't provide support in case of an error. I'd be grossly negligent running a production instance on VMWare what does not mean that it doesn't work (that was not my topic).

> If you don't believe Oracle / SAP run on a VM -- just create a simple Windows XP 2GB RAM VM (you don't even need to create a server OS ) and install the 4.7 IDES on it -- this has an oracle DB -- works fine and is a FULL OFFICIAL IDES system.

As I said, it's not about that it doesn't work, it's not supported.

Note 1173954 - Support of Oracle for VMWare and XEN
<...>
Oracle is not certifying any of its products on XEN and VMWare virtualized environments. 
XEN and VMware virtualized environments on Linux and Windows platforms impact critical
runtime related areas for the Oracle Database such as process scheduling, network and 
disk IO access.
Therefore Oracle does not support to run production databases in XEN and VMWare virtualized environments.
<...>

So if your run a system like that as production system and you get into trouble and need support you can't expect a quick help neither from SAP nor from Oracle. They may also bill you separately because you're not acting according to the contract of running only supported combinations on certified hardware.

Technically this is a total different story, of course does cloning work and all the other VMWare/VSphere features, the question is, if you're allowed to use them in a SAP environment and that was what I was talking about.

Markus

[sunny_pahuja2]

Hi,

If you are using database as oracle, then vmware is not supported.

Check SAP Note 674851 - Virtualization on Windows

Thanks

Sunny