How many external application servers?

[stefan_zapf112]

Our SAP system is quite small and serves about 150 users (Netveaver 7 and ERP 2006)

We are moving our very old physical servers from hardware to a virtual environment, which is very powerful.

At the moment we use three application servers on three seperate hardware servers, and one on the central instance.

Now all servers (SAP central instance plus application servers) will be moved to one physical machine on VMware.

Does it make sense to install again more application servers in seperate Windows-VM's, or ist it ok just to use one application server at the central instance for all users? The VM-host has much more power then all existing servers together.

I didn't find any information about this question in SAP's documentation.

best regards

Stefan

[Former Member]

Hi,

I would consider the HA dependancies as well, do you have HA in current setup?

If yes, then you need more than one application server. If it is just to manage the resources then yes you can have single application server with more work processes.

For better resource management and for availability - It is always advicable to have more than one application server so that you can have other application severs up and running if you have issue with one.

Regards,

Nick Loy

[Reagan]

Hello

What matters here is the number of work processes. If you are planning to configure the target system with CI and an AS then you are losing the work processes provided by the other 2 AS's from the existing setup unless you set up the target system with more work processes for CI and AS. I would check the total number of work processes in the present setup and calculate the difference with the target configuration (CI + AS). If the target machine is powerful and if there is a need to have more work processes then I would increase the work processes on the CI and AS instead of having 3 AS's. There is nothing wrong in having more than 1 AS but there is no point in having more AS's if there is no use. If the requirement can be achievable with the help of additional work processes then I would consider increasing the work processes than having an additional AS.

You can make use of this consulting note for configuration of work processes.

39412 - How many work processes should be configured?

Regards

RB

[Former Member]

Hello Stefan

Are you using SAP AS Java Engine? For J2EE Engine, 1 instance is sufficient to handle 150 users. Even if you need to add resources it is recommended to add server nodes and not Server Instance. One instance can handle upto 4 server nodes.

I hope this information is relevant for you.

Thanks,

Tapan