SAP on VMware

[Former Member]

Hi there,

Seeking a great help from you champs!!!

We are going to implement VMware ESX 5.0 in our organization to create about 40VMs to accomodate 24 SAP applications. SAPS values differ from one to another.

There are 6 blade servers with 20 intel xeon E7-2870 processor cores and 192GB RAM each.Before we go ahead and deploy VMs on each server, number of VCPUs required for each VM has to be figured out.  Since this is a virtual environment we need to understand which is the best practice we can adopt to go forward.

For instance, One of the application has 3000 SAPS recommended which needs to be converted to VCPUs. how many VCPUs can satisfy 3000SAPS in a virtual environment?

If hyperthreading is enabled, what would be the minimum SAPS a single thread(VCPU) can deliver?

Is there a standard/best practice for keeping the VMs in HA mode?

Thanks,

Sree

[chad_patrick]

Sreejith,

As has been stated in this thread, you should work hand-in-glove with your hardware vendor for these numbers as you are going to find that they will vary from system to system.  Given the CPU that you mention, I think that you will be pleased with the SAPS they will provide and the resulting VM density that you will get.

Here are some published benchmarks that may give you some idea of what you can expect.

I hope that this helps.

Chad

[Former Member]

If you have a current SAPS count you should be able to work with your hardware provider and/or VMWare to get a starting config needed for a virtual environment.  However I would only use this as a starting point, as we have gotten deeper and deeper into a fully virtualized platform we have found in most cases SAP is running more efficient on our VM stack than it was on physical hardware.  A lot of your performance concerns will most likely only get solved by making the move to the virtualized platform.  Minimize your risk by starting with dev/qa then you will have a better idea of how to configure your prod platform.

[Former Member]

Sizing - also in a virtual environment! - is always matter of the hardware partner. He knows best how many SAPS a vCPU can provide. Of course one can roughly estimate by comparing with the existing SAP benchmarks, but such estimations can be very inaccurate.

[Former Member]

Hi,

You can get the SAP certification for the saps from the Hardware vendor. Based on that you can calculate how may CPUS you require can be arrived at.

With respect to HA factor.

Please note this will be enabled and will be working properly only if there is sufficient resource available in the Node. Please ensure your landscape on the VM has that enough free resource. If you keep on adding VMs and utilized the resources then obiviously you can't achieve the HA.

My suggestion is to keep all the Dev, QA and Project related stuffs in VM and have your Prod stuffs separately in Physical. Moreove you have to do the Rack Vs Blade analysis with related to performance.

Please refer Hardware cerification @

http://www.saponwin.com/ or http://www.saponsolaris.com/

Regards

Mukunthan