VBLOCK SOLUTION FOR SAP APPLICATION HIGH AVAILABILITY

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Vblock Solution for SAP Application High Availability Table of Contents

VBLOCK

™

SOLUTION FOR SAP APPLICATION

HIGH AVAILABILITY

Version 2.0

February 2013

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Introduction ... 5

About this document ... 5

Solution overview ... 5

Objectives ... 6

Audience ... 6

Feedback ... 6

Technology overview ... 7

Vblock

™

_{Systems ... 7}

Vblock System 720 ... 7

Vblock System 320 ... 7

SAP ERP Central Component ... 8

VMware High Availability ... 8

Symantec ApplicationHA ... 8

Architecture overview ... 9

Architecture diagram ... 9

Hardware components ... 11

Software components ... 11

Design considerations ... 13

ApplicationHA configuration ... 13

Storage and layout ... 14

Disk/file systems layout ... 14

Solution validation ... 15

Test case 1: High availability during a hardware failure ... 15

Test procedure ... 16

Test results ... 19

Test case 2: Operational ability ... 20

Test procedure ... 20

Validation results ... 24

Test case 3: Restart a failed SAP instance using Symantec ApplicationHA ... 24

Validation steps ... 24

Validation results ... 27

Test case 4: Restart a failed Oracle database instance using Symantec ApplicationHA ... 27

Validation steps ... 27

Validation results ... 28

Test case 5: Restart a virtual machine using Symantec ApplicationHA ... 28

Validation steps ... 29

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Conclusion ... 34

Next steps ... 34

References ... 35

Symantec ... 35

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Introduction

Events, such as the global economic crisis, virtualization, and cloud computing, have fundamentally changed the way in which IT projects are evaluated. No longer can IT just rely on building a business case purely on cost savings. Mission-critical applications such, as SAP, are under greater scrutiny in terms of demonstrating tangible business value after implementation. This phenomenon provides a quandary for system integrators, lead architects, and general managers of applications on how to plan, design, and implement business continuity.

Vblock™ Systems combine industry-leading compute, network, storage, virtualization, and

management technologies into prepackaged units of infrastructure, which enables you to accelerate value add by focusing on business outcomes such as high availability capabilities and organizational efficiency rather than just products.

About this document

This paper describes the methodology used to install, configure, operate, and test a high-availability Vblock System solution for SAP systems using Symantec ApplicationHA. This document:

§_{Describes the technologies, hardware and software components, and architecture used in the} solution.

§_{Provides design considerations and best practice recommendations for implementation.}

Solution overview

Vblock Systems deliver leading-edge technology, while minimizing SAP operational and deployment risk. Vblock Systems include built-in high-availability capabilities, such as Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) service platform to restore any failed blade and VMware vSphere High Availability to automatically restart a virtual machine (VM) on other production servers with spare capacity in case of ESXi host failover. This solution uses the infrastructure high availability capabilities in a SAP

application environment, VMware High Availability, and Symantec ApplicationHA on Vblock Systems. Symantec ApplicationHA provides monitoring capabilities for applications running inside the virtual machines hosted on ESXi hosts managed by a VMware vCenter Server. Symantec ApplicationHA adds a layer of application awareness to the core high-availability functionality offered by VMware virtualization technology. Symantec ApplicationHA is based on Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) and internally uses similar concepts, such as agents, resources, and service groups.

The solution decreases the number of manual actions that SAP administrators and IT operations must perform for their organization to maintain a high degree of operational excellence as required by SAP best practices.

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Objectives

The objective of this paper is to validate the following use cases in a real-life scenario on a Vblock System 700 (valid for Vblock System 300 as well):

§_{Demonstrate deployment and enablement of the Vblock Solution™ for SAP Application High} Availability in a virtualized environment.

§_{Use VMware High Availability with SAP to provide easy-to-use and cost-effective high availability} for SAP.

§_{Validate the Vblock Solution for SAP Application High Availability for mission critical SAP} applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), supplier relationship management (SRM), Enterprise Portal, Process Integration, and Business Information Warehouse (BW).

§_{Show the overall cost saving due to server cost reduction to provide high availability, because no} cluster needs to be set up.

The combination of VMware High Availability and other high-availability features of the Vblock System 720 provides SAP organizations with a powerful (yet cost-effective) high-availability solution to increase application uptime. This is accomplished by minimizing unplanned downtime and service interruption while eliminating dedicated (or standby) hardware, and additional installation software. This improves business continuity without increasing total cost of ownership (TCO).

Audience

This paper is intended for system administrators, network administrators, and architects, as well as technical engineering staff, IT managers, IT planners and other IT professionals who are evaluating, acquiring, managing, operating, or deploying SAP in a virtualized data center environment. All Vblock System existing and potential customers with a current or future SAP implementation will also benefit from the information in this paper.

Feedback

To suggest documentation changes and provide feedback on this paper, send email to

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Technology overview

The solution uses the following hardware and software components and technologies: §_{Vblock Systems}

§_SAP

§_{VMware High Availability} §_{Symantec ApplicationHA}

Vblock

™

_Systems

The Vblock System from VCE is the world's most advanced converged infrastructure—one that optimizes infrastructure, lowers costs, secures the environment, simplifies management, speeds deployment, and promotes innovation. The Vblock System is designed as one architecture that spans the entire portfolio, includes best-in-class components, offers a single point of contact from initiation through support, and provides the industry's most robust range of configurations.

Vblock System 720

The Vblock System 720 is an enterprise, service provider class mission-critical system in the Vblock System 700 family, for the most demanding IT environments—supporting enterprise workloads and SLAs that run thousands of virtual machines and virtual desktops. It is architecturally designed to be modular, providing flexibility and choice of configurations based on demanding workloads. These workloads include business-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and database, messaging, and collaboration services. The Vblock System 720 leverages the industry’s best director-class fabric switch, the most advanced fabric based blade server, and the most trusted storage platform. The Vblock System 720 delivers greater configuration choices, 2X performance and scale from prior generations, flexible storage options, denser compute, five 9s of availability, and converged network and support for a new virtualization platform that accelerates time to service and reduces operations costs.

Vblock System 320

The Vblock System 320 is an enterprise and service provider ready system in the Vblock System 300 family, designed to address a wide spectrum of virtual machines, users, and applications. It is ideally suited to achieve the scale required in both private and public cloud environments. The Vblock System 320 has been engineered for greater scalability and performance to support large enterprise deployments of mission-critical applications, cloud services, VDI, mixed workloads and application development and testing. The Vblock System 320 delivers greater configuration choices, 2X performance and scale from prior generations, flexible storage options, denser compute, five 9s of availability, and converged network and support for a new virtualization platform that accelerates time to service and reduces operations costs. Every Vblock System 320 is available with the market-leading EMC VNX storage arrays.

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SAP ERP Central Component

SAP NetWeaver ERP Central Component (ECC) 6.0 was used to validate the solution. The SAP ERP application is integrated ERP software. It targets business software requirements of mid-size and large organizations in most industries and sectors. ECC 6.0 allows for open communication within and between all company functions, as well as with other businesses outside the firewall due to its

services oriented architecture (SOA).

VMware High Availability

VMware High Availability provides easy-to-use, cost-effective high availability for applications running in virtual machines. In the event of physical server failure, affected virtual machines are restarted automatically on other production servers with spare capacity. In the case of operating system failure, VMware High Availability restarts the affected virtual machine on the same physical server.

Symantec ApplicationHA

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Architecture overview

In this solution, Symantec ApplicationHA is installed on SAP systems using the following options: §_{Central System}

SAP Central Instance and Database Instance run on the same host/virtual machine.

§_{The operating system used is RHEL 5.5 and the database used is Oracle 10.2. Because it is a} central system, the SAP central instance and Oracle database instances are installed on the same host/virtual machine.

§_{Two other options exist for installing Symantec ApplicationHA on SAP systems, but these are} beyond the scope of this paper:

§_{Distributed system: SAP Central instance and Database instance run on separate hosts/Virtual} Machines.

§_{High-availability system}

Central Instance, Database Instance, and additional instances that are required for a high-availability system, such as Central Services Instance for ABAP (ASCS Instance) and Enqueue Replication Server Instance (ERS Instance) for ASCS Instance, run on separate hosts/virtual machines.

Architecture diagram

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Figure 1 shows the overall architecture of the solution validation environment.

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Install the SAP Central System, the Symantec ApplicationHA Console, the VMware vCenter, and the Symantec ApplicationHA plug-in on a virtual machine.

N

Noottee:: Refer to the vSphere administrator guide for detailed information on how to perform the following steps. 1. Create the VMware cluster with three ESXi servers.

2. Turn on the VMware High Availability for the VMware cluster.

The Symantec ApplicationHA agents for SAP and Oracle are installed on the virtual machine on which the SAP Central system (Central Instance and Database Instance) is running.

Hardware components

The following table describes the hardware used to validate this solution.

Category Components

Compute Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS):

§ 4 x UCS 5108 chassis

§ 3 x UCS blade B200 Series M2 blades Each blade: 8 x CPU core and 96 GB memory § 2 x 6140 XP fabric-interconnects

Network § 2 x Nexus 7010 Ethernet switch

§ 2 x Cisco MDS 9506 FC switch

Storage § EMC Symmetrix VMAX with 2-engines

Software components

The following table lists the software resources used in testing this solution.

Name and version Configuration

VMware vSphere 4.1 According to vCard

VMware vSphere 4.1 Managing all the VMware virtual machine s

VMware View Client 4.5 VDI client

Oracle Enterprise Server 10.2.0.4 Installed with SAP installation

Microsoft Windows 2008 Symantec ApplicationHA Console + vCenter

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Configured according to SAP documentation

EMC SMC Standard

SAP ERP 6.0 IDES Install on the virtual machine with Central System

option

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Name and version Configuration

Symantec ApplicationHA 5.1 SP2 for Windows Configure Symantec ApplicationHA Console

Symantec ApplicationHA licenses For Symantec ApplicationHA Console and Agent

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Design considerations

This section contains the design considerations and sizing requirements for implementing SAP high availability on Vblock Systems.

ApplicationHA configuration

The Symantec ApplicationHA Console:

§_{Integrates with vSphere Client, which integrates with Symantec ApplicationHA View} §_{Has vCenter privileges to provide discretionary access control (DAC)}

§_{Offers single sign-on to virtual machines under Symantec ApplicationHA control} §_{Can be installed on a virtual machine or a physical machine}

The Symantec ApplicationHA installation is a three-step process:

1. Install the Symantec ApplicationHA Console and configure the vCenter plug-in on the vCenter server.

2. Install the Symantec ApplicationHA guest components inside each virtual machine where application monitoring will be enabled. The guest component includes Heartbeat components integrated with VMware High Availability, as well as components for monitoring application status. 3. Configure application monitoring from the vCenter GUI.

Refer to the product information for installation details. Figure 2 provides an overview of the Symantec ApplicationHA installation.

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Storage and layout

Storage on the Vblock System 700 used in this solution validation is provided by the Symmetrix VMAX Series architecture featuring the scalable Virtual Matrix interconnect design. The Virtual Matrix is redundant and dual active, and supports all global memory references, messaging, and

management operations, including internal discovery and initialization, path management, load balancing, failover, and fault isolation within the array. The Symmetrix VMAX array contains from one to eight VMAX engines. Each VMAX engine contains two integrated directors. Each director has two connections to the VMAX Matrix Interface Board Enclosure (MIBE) through the system interface board (SIB) ports. Because every director has two separate physical paths to every other director through the Virtual Matrix, this is a highly available interconnect with no single point of failure. This design eliminates the need for separate interconnects for data, control, messaging,

environmental, and system test. A single highly available interconnect suffices for all communications between the directors, which reduces complexity.

The Symmetrix VMAX design is based on an individual Symmetrix VMAX engine with redundant CPU, memory, and connectivity on two directors for fault tolerance. Symmetrix VMAX engines connect to and scale out linearly through the Virtual Matrix Architecture, which allows resources to be shared within and across VMAX engines.

Disk/file systems layout

The following table provides the storage configuration details for this solution:

Size (GB) RAID

type VMAX VP pool Purpose Disk type to host Disk type on VMAX

20 5 N/A ESXi boot/OS physical Thick

1024 5 sap_R5 VM boot/OS/Bin vmdk Thin

VM boot/OS/Bin vmdk Thin

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Solution validation

This section describes the testing performed to validate the SAP high availability use cases. Each testing scenario is explained, followed by the test results and conclusions.

Five test cases are validated for this solution. The following table lists the test cases and the objective for each.

Test Description Objective

1 During a hardware failure, test the ability of VMware High Availability to migrate a virtual machine from the failed ESXi server to another available ESXi in the cluster, and the ability of ApplicationHA to start the SAP and Oracle instances.

Demonstrate the ability of VMware High Availability to migrate a virtual machine from the failed ESXi server to another available ESXi in the cluster, and the ability of

Symantec ApplicationHA to start the SAP and Oracle instances.

2 Test the operational ability of starting and stopping SAP using Symantec

ApplicationHA from vCenter.

Demonstrate the operational ability of the Symantec ApplicationHA in the vCenter to start and stop the SAP application.

3 Restart a failed SAP instance using

Symantec ApplicationHA. Demonstrate high availability for SAP applications. In case of an application failure, one can maintain availability by using Symantec ApplicationHA to restart a failed SAP application instance.

4 Restart a failed Oracle database instance

using Symantec ApplicationHA. Demonstrate high availability for Oracle applications. In case of an application failure, maintain availability by using Symantec ApplicationHA to restart a failed Oracle database instance.

5 Using Symantec ApplicationHA, restart

the virtual machine when the application restart attempts have reached the configured maximum.

Demonstrate a restart Symantec

ApplicationHA of the Virtual Machine and the SAP application.

Test case 1: High availability during a hardware failure

This test case demonstrates that high availability is provided by VMware High Availability and Symantec ApplicationHA during a hardware failure. This scenario tests the abilities of:

§ Symantec ApplicationHA to migrate a virtual machine from the failed ESXi server to the other available ESXi in the cluster

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Test procedure

1. Navigate to the SAP HA Summary tab. Verify the SAP system’s Host current status. It is hosted

on the ESXi server: hugo222.mordor.vce.

2. Right-click the SAP_Source listing and click Settings to open the SAP HA Settings window.

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3. Navigate to the Cisco UCS Manager to verify the ESXi server status.

4. Click Service Profile to verify the ESXi server profile on which the SAP system virtual machine

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5. Click Shutdown Server in the service profile window to simulate the hardware failure. Confirm

the shutdown by clicking OK in the confirmation window.

6. The server starts the shutdown process. Click OK to continue.

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8. Verify that the virtual machine operating system has started and comes up on the new ESXi.

9. Verify that when the guest operating system is up, then Symantec ApplicationHA starts the Oracle and SAP processes according to the dependency list.

10. Visually confirm that the SAP application, along with all of its processes, is available again on the new ESXi host.

Test results

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Test case 2: Operational ability

In this scenario, the operational ability of Symantec ApplicationHA from the vCenter is tested to demonstrate the operational ability of the Symantec ApplicationHA in the vCenter to start and stop the SAP application.

Test procedure

This scenario involves two stages:

§ Stage 1: Verify application status and then stop the application. § Stage 2: Start the SAP application.

Verify application status and stop the application

1. In the vCenter-vSphere Client, access SAP HA.

2. Click the Symantec ApplicationHA tab and verify the application status is online. In the Cluster,

click the Symantec ApplicationHA tab to verify the SAP application is online and is running in

the SAP_Source virtual machine.

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4. Choose the Component Dependency tab to view the component dependency relationship.

5. From the Symantec ApplicationHA tab in the vCenter, click Stop Application.

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7. The SAP and Oracle instances are stopped and can be viewed in the Symantec ApplicationHA

tab.

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Start the SAP application

1. Navigate to the Symantec ApplicationHA tab and click Start Application.

A task status dialog appears indicating the application is starting.

2. View the Component List tab to verify the running application components.

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Validation results

Validation testing confirms that Symantec ApplicationHA in the vCenter can be used to start and stop the SAP application.

Test case 3: Restart a failed SAP instance using Symantec

ApplicationHA

This test is performed to demonstrate the ability to maintain high availability in the case of an application failure by using Symantec ApplicationHA to restart a failed SAP application instance.

Validation steps

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2. The SAP instance failure scenario is simulated by terminating the SAP message server process. The message server process ID is 26944. Navigate to the Shell window and provide the

command, kill -9 26944. Visually confirm that the message server process is no longer there.

3. Verify that the application is no longer available in the SAP GUI. Click Yes to read the detailed

error description.

4. From vCenter, navigate to the Symantec ApplicationHA tab. You can verify that the SAP

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5. In the Symantec ApplicationHA tab, verify that the Status is changed to online, indicating that

the application successfully restarted.

6. On the RHEL Host, verify that the SAP Message Server process is active with a new process ID. In this case, the ID is 29690.

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Validation results

The test results show that by using Symantec ApplicationHA, you can successfully restart a failed SAP application.

Test case 4: Restart a failed Oracle database instance using

Symantec ApplicationHA

This test is performed to demonstrate you can maintain high availability by using Symantec ApplicationHA to restart a failed Oracle database instance in case of an application failure.

Test case 4 is similar to test case 3, except it tests high availability for the Oracle database instance rather than the SAP application instance.

Validation steps

The following steps show how the test was performed.

1. Stop the running Oracle database instance by killing the process in the message server.

2. The message server process ID is 28794. Navigate to the shell window and provide the

command, kill -9 28794. The message server process is no longer there.

3. Navigate to the Symantec ApplicationHA tab. You can visually verify that Oracle database is

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4. Verify that Symantec ApplicationHA has successfully started the Oracle instance and the status is changed to “Accessible.”

5. On the RHEL Host, the Oracle pmon server process is active with a new process ID.

This confirms that high availability has been maintained for Oracle applications.

Validation results

The test results show that high availability is provided. By using Symantec ApplicationHA, you can successfully restart a failed Oracle database application.

Test case 5: Restart a virtual machine using Symantec ApplicationHA

The test demonstrates a restart of the Virtual Machine and SAP application by Symantec

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Validation steps

1. Navigate to the Symantec ApplicationHA Settings window. In the Settings list, you can see that

App.RestartAttempts is a configurable parameter. Click OK.

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3. Verify that Symantec ApplicationHA restarts the application. This is followed by the failure of the SAP instance.

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5. Symantec ApplicationHA sends a signal to VMware to gracefully restart the virtual machine. a. The screen shows that the system is shutting down.

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c. Verify the system is restarting.

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7. Verify that Symantec ApplicationHA has started the SAP and Oracle instances, and that the virtual machine has been restarted.

This confirms that Symantec ApplicationHA has successfully restarted the virtual machine after the maximum restart attempts.

Validation results

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Conclusion

The Vblock Solution for SAP Application High Availability enables IT organizations to maintain high availability of SAP applications, providing business continuity. It decreases the number of manual actions that SAP administrators and IT operations must perform in their organization to maintain a high degree of operational excellence as required by SAP best practices. This solution demonstrates high availability and organizational efficiency without increasing TCO.

The validations performed for the Vblock Solution for SAP Application High Availability demonstrate the following results:

§_{Confirmation of the Symantec ApplicationHA operational ability in the vCenter to start and stop} the SAP application.

§_{Demonstrated high availability for SAP applications. In case of an application failure, maintain} availability by using Symantec ApplicationHA to restart a failed SAP application instance. §_{Demonstrated high availability for Oracle applications. During an application failure, high}

availability is maintained by using Symantec ApplicationHA to restart a failed Oracle database instance.

§_{Demonstrated restart of the virtual machine and SAP application by Symantec ApplicationHA that} successfully restarted the virtual machine when the application restart attempts have reached the allowable maximum.

§_{Demonstrated high availability provided by VMware High Availability and Symantec}

ApplicationHA during a hardware failure. Confirmed ability of VMware High Availability to migrate a virtual machine from the failed ESXi server to the other available ESXi in the cluster, and confirmed ability of Symantec ApplicationHA to start the SAP and Oracle instances.

§_{Validated high availability for mission-critical SAP applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM, SRM,} Enterprise Portal, and Process Integration. These business modules are included in the SAP ECC that was in the validation architecture. The modules are installed in the NetWeaver stack that is part of ECC.

§_{Demonstrated implementation of VMware High Availability and Symantec ApplicationHA on} Vblock Systems results in a reduction in the number of physical servers, licensing, setup, training, and management, thereby reducing TCO overall while improving availability and business continuity.

Next steps

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References

Symantec

Refer to the following links for the Symantec documentation. §_{Symantec ApplicationHA information}

www.symantec.com/application-ha §_{Symantec Connect}

www.symantec.com/connect/videos/virtualize-tier1-applications-confidence-vmware-environments

SAP

To read the SAP documentation on SAP Service Marketplace, type

service.sap.com/instguides into your browser and press Enter. When the Windows Security dialog appears, enter your user name and password then, click OK.

N

Noottee:: To access this documentation SAP requires that you have registered and have a user id and password.

Contact SAP to set up your user id.

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ABOUT VCE

VCE, formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through the Vblock Systems, delivers the industry's only fully integrated and fully virtualized cloud infrastructure system. VCE

solutions are available through an extensive partner network, and cover horizontal applications, vertical industry offerings, and application development environments, allowing customers to focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating, and managing IT infrastructure.