VMWare: Good thing or Bad thing?

[Former Member]

Hi All

Again I need some advice on the best course of action when it comes to advances in SAP / 3rd Party technology.

So here we go, the new word in our company is 'Consolidation' and it has be asked of me the best way to consolidated and improve or SAP environment. I am currently responsible for our complete SAP landscape stratergy, which includes EP7, ECC6, Solution Manager 4, BW 3.5, TDMS and soon PI. These are all due to be upgraded to 64-Bit and I am concidering VMWare aswell to allow us to reduce our server numbers and become more proactive, interms of Application server deployment.

So I want to know if anyone has any experience of VMWare they would like to share, documentation or even some advice. I would be very gratefull and I will award lots of point for those who help me.

Many thanks for your time and effort

Phil

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

check note 674851 - Virtualization on Windows for a general statement about VMware.

Keep in mind that the administrative tasks are not becoming less, it may become even more complicated. Apart from that, if you can go with the current limitations (4 virtual CPUs etc.) it should be smooth.

Markus

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for that Markus

Do you know if there is any other documentation regarding VMWare?

Thanks

Phil

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

Check

http://www.vmware.com/partners/alliances/technology/sap.html

for more information (blogs, PDFs)

Markus

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks - However, I have seen that and had a good look round the site. Seems like a bit of a sales pitch!

So far it does seem like a good idea and worth doing for DEV and QAS systems, but with productive systems I am not too sure - yet!

[former_member204746 · Accepted solution]

Personally, I had problems when migrating an application server on WMware. it was slow as hell!

maybe for DEV/QAS/sandoxes, it may be a good tool, for production systems, I would avoid this. up until november 2007, SAP was not supporting VMware in productive mode. I still do not recommend it.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

If it is a PRODUCTION SYSTEM, never recommended these things.

Cheers

Deepanshu

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Ok, there seems to be a similar messages coming across!

I would like to try with Productive Application servers (with 2 Non-VMWare on standby), as it will allow us to deploy more app servers when business activity requires it.

However, I think it needs to be implemented slowly e.g. One App Server every 2 months and see what happens.

[former_member204746 · Accepted solution]

application servers seem like a good target for VMware. it was not the case for us.

SAP servers uses up a lot of CPU and memory, VMware does not seem like a good fit for large applications.

We use VMWare for web servers, small Oracle databases, small SQL databases. For SAP systems, I only use VMware for sandboxes because we can handle the slowness.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks, that does seem to be the general response. I have spoken to quite a few people now and no-one uses VMWare in any form in a PRD environment - which makes sense!

But for consolidation of Sandbox and DEV systems, where performance and memory are not a priority it is ideal and lowers TCO.

I have heard that VMWare is used instead of TDMS (Cost reasons!) which does not seem like a bad idea!

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

Well.. our harddisks are MUCH more expensive than a 2 x DualCore box with 16 GB RAM So if I need to copy a 1.8 TB (or bigger) databases the storage is more expensive than the actual box it runs...

Markus