HP: Virtualized Infrastructure for MySAP By Ann Ernst published: Friday, July 01 2005
The Enterprise Solution Alliance team works with software and system integrator partners to ensure the ease of use of HP systems, storage, software and services in applications and customer solutions.
VSM spoke with Ron Eller, VP and General Manager of Enterprise Solution Alliances, about HP Virtualized Infrastructure Solutions for mySAP Business Suite, a recent announcement for HP.
VSM: How does an SAP environment normally work?
RE: Most customers run a three-tier deployment with a Web tier, an application tier and a data tier. They have multiple development environments, test environments and production environments. Within each tier and each environment, the traditional model is dedicated resources. Within the development, testing or production environment they may be accessing a single data infrastructure, but otherwise they have dedicated groups of systems.
The big benefit for customers using virtualization is being able to more efficiently and effectively use their resources, whether they are compute, storage or network resources. We’ve been working to help customers move to IT environments that are less rigid and can be more responsive to business needs and processes, and where business processes have changing loads, to provision the environments in support of those at the time they’re needed.
We have delivered, with increased ease of use, a virtualized infrastructure solution for the mySAP Business Suite. We take advantage of HP’s virtualization technologies, HP System Insight Manager, Ignite/UX and Rapid Deployment capabilities and SAP’s Adaptive Computing Controller.
VSM: What benefits did HP and SAP bring to this collaboration?
RE: SAP’s Adaptive Computing Controller allows the management of SAP applications across multiple systems or resources, whether those are virtual or physical. HP’s Virtualized Infrastructure solutions, hardware, software and services have been combined to dynamically allocate computing power, storage and network resources according to the SAP application’s demand.
We want to help customers make their IT environments more efficient, more agile and more responsive so that the IT infrastructure can become an agent for change, rather than a barrier to change. In certain cases it’s very easy to add another system to a load-balanced pool and be able to accommodate more volume, for instance, depending on how applications are architected.
In the full range of applications, some are very easy to flex up and down, and others are not so easy. SAP would have been on the “less easy” side of that continuum. Databases are also at the harder end of the continuum, especially certain types of data. Stateless data, like Google or Yahoo, is not such a big problem. Stateful data is a little bit more of a problem when you are trying to flex up and flex down. Oracle and Microsoft are making significant investments to make virtualization work more seamlessly. SAP and HP are integrating these types of technologies within their solution development work.
VSM: How does the HP Virtualized Infrastructure for MySAP handle stateful data? In addition to the work Oracle is doing, is HP doing work in this area as well?
RE: When it comes to virtualization of SAP application services, we can divide them into several virtualized SAP instances, such as SAP database instances or SAP dialog instances. When virtualizing the SAP database instance you have to provide a persistent environment. Some of the technologies provided by HP are provided by LUN-masking, and a clear change management, which provides central configuration management for Operating Systems, user groups, networking, etc. including O/S deployment and patching.
VSM: Why did HP choose to use its virtualization technology with SAP?
RE: Nearly half of the SAP installations in the world are on HP technology, so we have a lot of customers in common. We’ve been working very closely with SAP to be sure that as architectures evolve, we’re able to take customers to those new architectures in a relatively straightforward fashion.
Customer benefits are:
- The ability to consolidate.
- The ability to separate the SAP applications from the underlying IT infrastructure and have them deployed where and when needed in the scale that’s needed.
- Simplified management of the compute power, storage, network and the SAP applications.
- Certified deployments of the adaptive computing infrastructures so they can have confidence in deploying these newer architectures.
- With virtualization they get the benefits of pooled and shared resources to optimize use, reduce costs, improve productivity and efficiency.
VSM: How is all of this managed?
RE: We have tools to help with the management of these new environments, from the management of the virtualization itself through to the management of the data center via tools like Rapid Deployment, Ignite/UX, OpenView software and Systems Insight Manager.
In the SAP installations on HP infrastructure, we’re supporting these capabilities across HP-UX, Linux and Windows. HP-UX and Linux are supported by SAP’s Adaptive Computing Controller, and for Windows we use our Rapid Deployment capabilities, the extension of Systems Insight Manager.
The management tools are integrated, so you have the ability to control the IT and the applications stack. You don’t need plug-ins at all. It’s HP’s management technology along with SAP’s Adaptive Computing infrastructure, so aspects are automated already. HP also provides open storage area network (SAN) support. The natural fit for a flexible and consolidated “easy to manage” storage environment is the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, providing built-in virtualization technologies for SAN storage environments.
VSM: When the single point of control manager is looking at resources, is it looking just at the resources that support the SAP deployment, or is it looking at the whole data center?
RE: It really depends. The HP OpenView console (OpenView Operations or OVO) can consolidate and display all data center resources (servers, storage, network) for HP or other vendors. It is supplied with a standard set of "adaptors" that allow it to collect monitoring and event information from most leading data center vendor products. This applies to storage products as well, so OVO can consolidate and display the health and status for both HP and 3rd party storage products that support management industry-standard management interfaces, such as SNMP, ARM, JMX, etc.
The HP management offering looks at the whole data center. However, when it comes to a fully SAP Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC) integrated solution, the administrator sees those resource, that were made visible to the SAP ACC control station.
VSM: What kinds of policy options are available in this solution?
RE: The Rapid Deployment Solutions have the capability to do things manually or set up policies based on the occurrence of certain events. So policies are re-configurable, and event responses can be policy based. A policy might see a specified traffic pattern or load build, and deploy more resources toward that application.
VSM: And in deploying resources, does it pull from the pool of virtual resources to create new servers?
RE: Let’s say you have an image for the SAP Factory Management System on your SAN, and you need an additional system provisioned to carry additional load. Rapid Deployment Solutions will take that image, move it to whatever is the available system and add that system to the load balance pool for that application.
You can either drag and drop it from a screen, or you can set up parameters that say, when you’ve got the following circumstances that occur, do this process. The system can grab the image, provision the system and add it to the pool. When integrated with our vPAR or WLM/PRM technologies, available resources can be automatically added to a server to meet SLA or defined resource requirements for an application.
The policies have to be developed; there could be some canned policies put in place if certain resources are hitting peak load. But also there could be some that are business process based. And that’s actually where the bigger application is. The business process based policies are evolving right now in the industry.
VSM: You’ve provided a chargeback capability.
RE: We’re seeing a lot more customers focused on that internally, to be able to tell which departments are using what. They aren’t necessarily charging back, but they’re using it for visibility. A few are actually using it to bill.
VSM: How have customers responded to the Virtual Infrastructure integration?
RE: Mentioned in one of the sheets is one of our customers, a service bureau to the German university system. They are a hosted environment for the whole university system in Germany, where they’re using and training for SAP.
On any given day, depending on classroom demand, student load demands, they could have anywhere from a few users to 40,000 users on one application. By using the combination of our virtualized infrastructure and SAP’s capabilities to rapidly move the applications around, they’ve been able to significantly simplify their environment, reduce costs, and dial up and down as they see application capacity needs based on what’s going on in the student base.
This is probably a more extreme example than what you would see in a mainstream enterprise, where you have monthly financial closings that might take a lot more resources, or seasonal factory loading. Even though it’s an extreme case, it also shows the extreme value.
VSM: How would you summarize the benefits of this solution for customers?
RE: The power of HP Virtualized Infrastructure Solutions for mySAP Business Suite lies in the provision of agility. This agility is provided through a range of solution capabilities and design principles:
- Fully integrates with the mySAP Business Suite, but is not limited to this application.
- Leverages the breadth of HP’s offering in management and virtualization technologies.
- Supports a broad range of architectures and environments, including HP-UX, Linux and Windows; Oracle and SQL; and both SAN and NAS storage.
These capabilities deliver customers:
- Improved speed and responsiveness to adapt to changing business needs.
- Simplified and streamlined operation of application and infrastructure landscape.
- Increased flexibility and reduced complexity.
- Optimized utilization of IT resources.
- Reduced operating costs.
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For more information about the HP Virtualized Infrastructure Solution for mySAP, click here.
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