Are Solaris Zones approved for SAP production environments?

[Former Member]

All,

I am trying to find an official document from SAP that confirms that Solaris Zones are approved for use in SAP NW production environments. I checked the product availability matrix but it does not address Containers or Zones.

Thanks,

Guenther

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

Check

Note 870652 - Installation of SAP in a Solaris 10 zone

Markus

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank Markus,

I saw this note but it does not state anywhere that SAP approves Zones in production environments.

The reason I am a little cautious is that back at TechEd I attended a session for virtualization of SAP environments with VMWare which - at this point - was only certified for non-productive environments.

Thanks

Guenther

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

They don't state it explicitly because you can use it. I comes with the operating system and if they would deny that, there would a be a note stating that explicitly.

On top of that, SAP would not create notes how to install and configure a zone if it wouldn't be supported

We run many instances under zones (production, test, sandbox) and make use of ZFS heavily and it works like a charm.

Markus

root@consbig / >zoneadm list -vi

 ID NAME             STATUS         PATH                          
   0 global           running        /                             
   4 crmtest          running        /zone/crmtest                 
   5 crmqual          running        /zone/crmqual                 
   6 srmtest          running        /zone/srmtest                 
   7 solmgrt          running        /zone/solmgrt
   8 epjava           running        /zone/epjava                  
 124 tdmshost         running        /zone/tdmshost                
 128 nwdi_ext_1       running        /zone/nwdi_ext_1              
 148 icht             running        /zone/icht                    
 204 scheduler        running        /zone/scheduler               
 217 ichp             running        /zone/ichp                    
 220 appl2mp1         running        /zone/appl2mp1                
 221 solmgrt          running        /zone/solmgrt                 
 236 output           running        /zone/output                  
 252 bicopy           running        /zone/bicopy                  
 267 kerberos         running        /zone/kerberos                
 289 spnego           running        /zone/spnego                 

root@consbig / >zpool iostat 
               capacity     operations    bandwidth
pool         used  avail   read  write   read  write
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
dbdata      4,73T  64,1G     68      6  8,34M   430K
dblog       34,6G  15,2G      0     16  62,1K   123K
usrsap       118G  80,9G      2     26   188K   157K
zone        54,7G  44,8G      0     31  56,1K   135K
----------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

And on top of that - Zones/Containers are no real "virtualization" like Xen or VMware, they are not really comparable. It's more like having a multiple instance installation with virtual hosts.

Also see Note 1142243 - MaxDB release for virtual systems

This note (as example) explicitly released zones for MaxDB. Oracle supports it too (I just can't find actually the metalink article, Oracle has even a "best practices guide".

Markus

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Markus!