This submit was co-authored with Sherry Yu, Director of SAP Success Architect, SUSE.

In in the present day’s enterprise world, service availability and reliability are key to a profitable digital transformation. Intensive downtime not solely prices a enterprise income and productiveness, however can also trigger reputational injury. SUSE and Microsoft have been working intently to offer a trusted path to SAP Options within the cloud, together with options to scale back unplanned and deliberate downtime.

SUSE and Microsoft work collectively

SUSE is the chief in SAP Options, particularly the developer of excessive availability (HA) options. HA Options are first examined, supported on-premises, and documented within the official configuration guides which are printed on SUSE’s website. Microsoft exams the options in Azure’s infrastructure, tunes the settings and configurations, then releases Azure-specific HA configuration guides on Microsoft’s documentation website. Microsoft actively supplies suggestions and requests help for brand spanking new situations from SUSE. The working course of might be summarized within the chart beneath. It’s been a easy collaboration between SUSE and Microsoft to help prospects’ digital transformation journey.

Options to scale back unplanned downtime

Excessive availability options—that may forestall 24/7 SAP methods from being disrupted by numerous points attributable to {hardware}, community, and purposes—are generally based mostly on cluster applied sciences. Pacemaker is an open supply cluster, utilized by numerous HA options.

For SAP HANA, the HA options are based mostly on HANA System Replication (HSR). SUSE has developed useful resource brokers to automate the failover of HANA System Replication in scale-up and scale-out situations.

For SAP S/4HANA and NetWeaver, the HA options are based mostly on ASCS/ERS enqueue replication. SUSE’s HA options for ENSA1 and ENSA2 are each licensed by SAP HA-Interface certification. Not too long ago SUSE launched a brand new structure known as Easy Mount File System, that reduces the complexity of the Pacemaker configuration for SAP ASCS/ERS structure. It’s additionally SAP HA-Interface licensed. Microsoft was the primary cloud supplier to launch a configuration information for SAP ASCS/ERS easy mount construction.

HA for SAP ASCS/ERS on Azure with SLES for SAP Functions

The next configurations are supported on Azure based mostly on ASCS/ERS Enqueue Replication, ENSA1 and ENSA2, respectively:

The paragraph beneath outlines the most important variations between the assorted situations:

New easy mount structure for SAP ASCS/ERS on Azure VMs with NFS

This can be a new structure to simplify the administration of shared file methods on NFS. As an alternative of utilizing a FileSystem useful resource agent to handle the shared file methods by the cluster, shared file methods are managed by the OS and mounted at boot time. A brand new useful resource agent SAPStartSrv was created to manage the beginning and cease of the SAP begin framework of every SAP occasion. The profit is a extra strong cluster structure.

This resolution has been examined and launched on Microsoft Azure with the official configuration information printed.

HA for SAP HANA on Azure with SLES for SAP Functions

HA Options for SAP HANA are based mostly on HANA System Replication (HSR) in scale-up and scale-out. The next situations are supported on Azure:

There are some issues in choosing the right state of affairs based mostly on what you are promoting wants:

• How important is it to attenuate downtime within the case of a failover?
• What’s the willingness to extend spend and/or decrease downtime, in case of incident?

Azure digital machine availability overview

Azure provides a number of compute deployment choices and it’s essential to know their variations, particularly the SLAs as famous beneath:

Options to scale back deliberate downtime

Deliberate downtime usually is related to upkeep of the setting. SUSE and Microsoft current the next options to attenuate the deliberate downtime.

For example, when performing upkeep on a SAP HANA system operating in a cluster, whether or not it’s to improve of the OS or apply HANA SPs, it’s beneficial to do a rolling replace. Which means to improve the secondary HANA node first, carry out a takeover, then improve the previous major HANA node. It’s an efficient technique to scale back the deliberate downtime to the time essential to carry out a takeover. The identical strategy might be utilized to SAP Central Companies in HA configuration.

To maintain the SAP methods safe, system admins should apply safety patches in a well timed method. Kernel Stay Patching is offered by SUSE to successfully assist keep away from reboots for as much as one 12 months. It’s extremely sensible and beneficial for mission-critical HANA methods.

When performing upkeep to the SAP ASCS/ERS operating within the cluster, it’s important to leverage the sap_vendor_cluster_connector that SUSE has developed for the SAP HA-Interface certification, to keep away from split-brain. Throughout upkeep, a system admin can cease an SAP ASCS or ERS occasion through SAP instruments akin to sapcontrol or MMC. If the occasion is managed by the cluster, through the cluster connector, the cluster shall be notified that that is supposed and as a substitute of attempting to remediate the “failure,” the cluster won’t intrude. The HA-Interface helps keep away from accidents throughout deliberate upkeep home windows. You will discover the main points and an instance on this weblog.

Speed up your SAP S/4HANA migration to Azure

SUSE and Microsoft present options to automate, validate and monitor the SAP Panorama:

•    Automation: Microsoft Automation Framework for SAP supplies built-in greatest practices to hurry up provisioning and scale back errors. Deployment time is lowered from months or weeks to days. SUSE as a contributing companion offered greatest practices particularly for the HA deployment.

•    Validation: SUSE Challenge Trento, a part of SLES for SAP Functions, supplies rule-based autodetection of SAP configuration points in Azure infrastructure. It may be used as a strong pre-go-live validation software to make sure high quality. In Day 2 operations it repeatedly checks the manufacturing system to detect deviation and stop outage.

•    Monitoring: Microsoft Azure Monitor for SAP helps prospects achieve insights into the SAP panorama, particularly HA clusters. The proactive monitoring helps to repair points earlier than outages occur. Monitor for clusters on SLES for SAP Functions co-developed with SUSE.

SLES for SAP Functions

SLES for SAP Functions is the main Linux platform for SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver, and SAP S/4HANA options and is an SAP Endorsed App. Two of the numerous key elements of SLES for SAP Functions are the Excessive Availability Extension and Useful resource Brokers. The Excessive Availability Extension supplies Pacemaker, an open-source cluster framework. The Useful resource Brokers handle automated failover of SAP HANA System Replication, S/4HANA ASCS/ERS ENSA2, and NetWeaver ASCS/ERS ENSA1. On Microsoft Azure’s market, the PAYG picture of SLES for SAP Functions consists of Stay Patching.

Be taught Extra

Microsoft Azure is an enterprise-class cloud platform optimized for SAP that gives vital value financial savings, new insights from superior analytics, and unmatched safety and compliance.

SUSE has greater than 20 years in SAP Partnership with greater than 130 worldwide benchmarks. Among the world’s largest SAP workloads run on SUSE on Azure. The primary reference architectures for SAP on Azure had been SUSE based mostly. Because of the shut collaboration between Microsoft and SUSE, a complete portfolio of HA Options for SAP on Azure is obtainable for patrons, leveraging the strengths of SUSE on Microsoft Azure.