VMware features in Vpshere 4.1 supported by SAP?

[Former Member]

Hi, we're currently redesigning our VMware environment and to that end I'd like to hear whether the following VMware features are supported by SAP for production use:

First of all; the farm is based on Vsphere version 4.1 hosting SAP applications/DBs on w2k3 OS..

• the use of EVC AMD Opteron Generation 2 (Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support)?

• the use of Wide-VM NUMA Support when using EVC (if that's a possible scenario!)?

• the use of ballooning in terms of being able to utilize the ressources on the VM hosts?

• the use of Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) for memory management?

• the use of memory Compression?

I've been looking into to the specific notes and guides;

Note 1056052 - Windows VMware ESX 3.x or vSphere configuration guidelines.pdf

Note 1409608 - Virtualization on Windows.pdf

SAP-Best-Practices-White-Paper-2009.pdf

But I dont seem to find an answer to the above questions. Does anybody knows of these issues?

/kurt

[Former Member]

Hi Kurt,

I already answered you through the support channel, but it's good to repeat the answers for the community:

the use of EVC AMD Opteron Generation 2 (Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support)?

You can use EVC. Consider that you have to restart your VM in order to activate EVC.

the use of Wide-VM NUMA Support when using EVC (if that's a possible scenario!)?

Wide VM NUMA is an automatic scheduler enhancement and does not conflict with EVC.

the use of ballooning in terms of being able to utilize the ressources on the VM hosts?

We recommend to install the ballooning driver (which comes with the VMware Tools). But it is required that a VM with an SAP Instance reserve 100 % of its memory ("no-memory-overcommitment-policy"). In that case, no real ballooning takes place, but the driver is recommended to be installed for technical reason. See SAP Note 1056052, paragraph 6.

the use of Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) for memory management?
the use of memory Compression?

These two features are absolutely transparent to a Virtual Machine and

therefore they do not conflict with SAP Systems. It is supported to use

them.

Kind regards,

Matthias

[Former Member]

I am not sure but have you gone through the first thread of the SAP on VMware? which has all the technical docs.