We have SAP running on SUSE on XEN virtualization for 8 years without any
glitch. We have to keep in mind the this was the early stages of
virtualization we had to take great care as SAP was expensive tool and if
the base virtualization fails, then my and organizations reputation was at
stake.
To make things complicated the existing Microsoft Dynamic ERP was to be migrated to new SAP.
To make things complicated the existing Microsoft Dynamic ERP was to be migrated to new SAP.
The race was between VMware, KVM and XEN
How SUSE XEN won the race. First SAP was supporting SUSE platform and SUSE
was supporting XEN, so the entire platform was being supported
KVM lost because at the point of time we did not get any support next
competitor was VMware, the client was very particular on costing and ease of
expansion in the latter.
VMware proposal was, it provided limited VMs and over every VM there would
be license cost and again a lock on a number of core and memory usage, this
was a bottleneck if the organization was to expand, it will have to yield to
VMware's demand, So the client asked for alternative and best alternative
was XEN no limitation on VMs and Memory usage, and CPU core was also not a
limitation.
We did not stop at these findings, we wanted to test XEN failover and VMware
failover, both did a prototype for testing.
VMware cluster failover and Vmotion was seen with system not available to users during
the fail-over around 5 minutes. Which was a bit concerning to all of us. Otherwise
the failover happened and the other system came up successfully.
SUSE XEN was also put to test on the same test hardware, the flavor was
almost pretty smooth we did not notice and noticeable non-availability
to users. Only issues was we had do all in command line.
Both were demonstrated to client, client decided on XEN based on cost,
support and performance test results.
One highlight of VMware had pretty user friendly Admin GUI interface, which
SUSE XEN lacked, but the client was in the view that command line interface
is better as people who are not experts will not touch the servers.
At that point of time VMware also was new to bare-metal implementation, were XEN score well over VMware. But today XEN is nowhere to be seen, VMware is seen as the king of virtualization and KVM also has better market after many companies have started supporting it development.
The SAP Architecture we used was Three Tire model, we have two physical servers and 4 VMs, for Production, Application, Database and Sandbox
I had a team of Basis and Abap developers and everyone worked in sync for this project. One of the major problems was backing up the VM, so to take snapshots , we had to allocate huge space in storage for the same, regular backup from DB2 database, DB2 was used as the client wanted to reduce costs further.
0 comments:
Post a Comment