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Best Practices - SAP On Nutanix
Best Practices - SAP On Nutanix
Nutanix
Nutanix Best Practices
Copyright
Copyright 2017 Nutanix, Inc.
Nutanix, Inc.
1740 Technology Drive, Suite 150
San Jose, CA 95110
All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual
property laws.
Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other
marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.
Copyright | 2
Running SAP on Nutanix
Contents
1. Executive Summary................................................................................ 4
2. Introduction..............................................................................................5
2.1. Audience........................................................................................................................ 5
2.2. Purpose..........................................................................................................................5
4. Solution Overview................................................................................. 15
4.1. Invisible Infrastructure..................................................................................................15
4.2. Support for Running SAP on Nutanix......................................................................... 16
4.3. Why Run SAP on AHV?............................................................................................. 16
Appendix......................................................................................................................... 28
References.......................................................................................................................... 28
About the Authors............................................................................................................... 28
About Nutanix......................................................................................................................29
List of Figures................................................................................................................30
List of Tables................................................................................................................. 31
3
Running SAP on Nutanix
1. Executive Summary
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform is a highly resilient hyperconverged platform that brings
the benefits of web-scale infrastructure to the enterprise. This document highlights why it is ideal
for virtualized instances of SAP systems and describes the best practices for getting the most
out of running SAP on Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V on Nutanix. For
business-critical transactional and analytical workloads, Nutanix, an SAP Global Technology
Partner, delivers the performance, scalability, and availability that your basis and database
administrators require, while reducing management and operational complexity. The Nutanix
Enterprise Cloud Platform offers SAP users a range of advantages, including:
• Localized I/O and flash for index and key database files, enabling low-latency operations.
• Infrastructure consolidation that eliminates underutilized application silos and consolidates
multiple workloads onto a single, dense platform, using up to 80 percent less space and 50
percent lower CapEx.
• Nondisruptive upgrades and scalability, including one-click node addition without system
downtime.
• Nutanix VM-level data protection and disaster recovery to automate backups.
• Unrivaled operational simplicity; no complicated configuration, provisioning, and mapping with
disks, RAID, and LUNs.
• Rapid one-click cloning of SAP VMs with no wasted storage capacity from the operation.
• One-click hypervisor conversion for greater flexibility and lower TCO.
1. Executive Summary | 4
Running SAP on Nutanix
2. Introduction
2.1. Audience
This best practices guide is part of the Nutanix Solutions Library. It is intended for architects,
basis administrators, database administrators, and system engineers responsible for designing,
managing, and supporting Nutanix infrastructures running SAP. Readers should already be
familiar with SAP Basis, database administration, and Nutanix.
2.2. Purpose
In this document, we cover the following subject areas:
• Overview of the Nutanix solution for delivering SAP on the Nutanix hypervisor, AHV, VMware
vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V.
• The benefits of SAP on Nutanix, and AHV in particular.
• Sizing guidance for scaling SAP deployments on Nutanix.
• Design and configuration considerations when architecting SAP on the Acropolis Distributed
Storage Fabric (DSF).
Version
Published Notes
Number
1.0 September 2017 Original publication.
2. Introduction | 5
Running SAP on Nutanix
3.4. AHV
Nutanix ships with AHV, a built-in enterprise-ready hypervisor based on a hardened version of
proven open source technology. AHV is managed with the Prism interface, a robust REST API,
and an interactive command-line interface called aCLI (Acropolis CLI). These tools combine to
eliminate the management complexity typically associated with open source environments and
allow out-of-the-box virtualization on Nutanix—all without the licensing fees associated with other
hypervisors.
The figure below shows an overview of the Nutanix architecture, including the hypervisor of
your choice (AHV, ESXi, Hyper-V, or XenServer), user VMs, the Nutanix storage CVM, and its
local disk devices. Each CVM connects directly to the local storage controller and its associated
disks. Using local storage controllers on each host localizes access to data through the DSF,
thereby reducing storage I/O latency. Moreover, having a local storage controller on each
node ensures that storage performance as well as storage capacity increase linearly with node
addition. The DSF replicates writes synchronously to at least one other Nutanix node in the
system, distributing data throughout the cluster for resiliency and availability. Replication factor
2 creates two identical data copies in the cluster, and replication factor 3 creates three identical
data copies.
Local storage for each Nutanix node in the architecture appears to the hypervisor as one large
pool of shared storage. This allows the DSF to support all key virtualization features. Data
localization maintains performance and quality of service (QoS) on each host, minimizing the
effect noisy VMs have on their neighbors’ performance. This functionality allows for large, mixed-
workload clusters that are more efficient and more resilient to failure than traditional architectures
with standalone, shared, and dual-controller storage arrays.
When VMs move from one hypervisor to another, such as during live migration or a high
availability (HA) event, the now local CVM serves a newly migrated VM’s data. While all write I/
O occurs locally, when the local CVM reads old data stored on the now remote CVM, the local
CVM forwards the I/O request to the remote CVM. The DSF detects that I/O is occurring from a
different node and migrates the data to the local node in the background, ensuring that all read I/
O is served locally as well.
The next figure shows how data follows the VM as it moves between hypervisor nodes.
3.7. Compression
The Nutanix Capacity Optimization Engine (COE) transforms data to increase data efficiency on
disk, using compression as one of its key techniques. The DSF provides both inline and post-
process compression to suit the customer’s needs and the types of data involved.
Inline compression condenses sequential streams of data or large I/O sizes in memory before
writing them to disk, while post-process compression initially writes the data as usual (in an
uncompressed state), then uses the Nutanix MapReduce framework to compress the data
cluster-wide. When using inline compression with random I/O, the system writes data to the
oplog uncompressed, coalesces it, and then compresses it in memory before writing it to the
extent store. From the AOS 5.0 release onward, Nutanix has used LZ4 and LZ4HC for data
compression. Releases prior to AOS 5.0 use the Google Snappy compression library. Nutanix
data transformation provides good compression ratios with minimal computational overhead and
extremely fast compression and decompression rates.
The following figure shows an example of how inline compression interacts with the DSF write I/
O path.
parity to decode any missing data blocks. In the DSF, the data block is an extent group, and each
data block must be on a different node and belong to a different vDisk.
You can configure the number of data and parity blocks in a strip based on how many failures
you need to tolerate. In most cases, we can think of the configuration as the number of <data
blocks>/<number of parity blocks>.
EC-X is a post-process framework that does not affect the traditional write I/O path. The
encoding uses the Curator MapReduce framework for task distribution.
The figure below depicts a normal environment using replication factors.
In this scenario, we have a mix of both replication factor 2 and replication factor 3 data with
primary copies stored locally and replicas distributed to other nodes throughout the cluster. When
a Curator full scan runs, it finds eligible extent groups available for EC-X. Eligible extent groups
must be "write-cold," meaning that they haven't been written to for at least one hour.
The following figure shows an example 4/1 and 3/2 strip.
Once the strips and parity have been successfully calculated, the system removes the replica
extent groups. The following figure shows the storage savings in the environment after EC-X has
run.
4. Solution Overview
Deploy any application mix at any scale, all on a single platform. You can run both SAP
application servers and database VM workloads simultaneously, while isolating databases
on dedicated hosts for licensing purposes. Nutanix offers high IOPS and low latency, which
means that database computing and storage requirements drive deployment density, rather than
concerns about I/O or resource bottlenecks. The Acropolis DSF can easily handle the throughput
and transaction requirements of the most demanding transactional and analytical databases. Our
testing shows that it is better to increase the number of database VMs on the Nutanix platform, to
4. Solution Overview | 15
Running SAP on Nutanix
take full advantage of its performance capabilities, rather than scaling large numbers of database
instances or schemas within a single VM.
Simplicity
Nutanix AHV reflects the intersection of web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design.
Every Nutanix node includes Nutanix Prism, an elegant and intuitive management interface.
Built-in guidance and self-healing remove the burden of constantly tuning the environment.
With a few clicks, customers can upgrade their entire virtualization environment—including OS,
firmware, and hypervisor—regardless of geography.
Deploying SAP on AHV is easy and fast, saving countless hours otherwise wasted on
complicated performance management policies or storage and VM design. AHV is an enterprise-
grade hypervisor that is high performing, consistent, and simple to use.
4. Solution Overview | 16
Running SAP on Nutanix
Scalability
Standalone hypervisor management solutions mimic the three-tier environments for which they
were designed by requiring a scale-up architecture. Disparate scale-up management methods
also require considerable design effort to eliminate single points of failure and to minimize
downtime risk, while still allowing for maximum agility. This approach contrasts with the scale-out
capability that virtualization natively enables for the compute layer.
Nutanix consumer-grade design means that users can deploy applications within hours
of receiving Nutanix nodes. Adding nodes to the cluster is quick and intuitive as well, with
automated self-discovery and one-click automatic host configuration that uses existing policies.
Moreover, unlike other hypervisors, AHV has no cluster size limits from a compute or storage
perspective—you can start with as few as three nodes and then scale to thousands without ever
creating compute and storage silos.
Security
Conventional hypervisors must interact with hardware and software products from many
manufacturers, and security vulnerabilities emerge where the products intersect. In contrast,
we tuned, tested, and hardened AHV exclusively for Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure.
This approach yields a product with a dramatically reduced security area. The security baseline
covers the full stack, and comprehensive Nutanix analytics capabilities keep the entire platform
baseline compliant. With Nutanix, your SAP applications are fully protected under an industry-
leading secure platform ecosystem.
Resiliency
AHV virtualization, like the Nutanix hyperconverged data plane, is scale-out, self-healing,
and highly available out of the box. Because Prism is part of every node, the management
capabilities are highly redundant; they continue unabated even if a node fails. Because Nutanix
has a fully integrated stack, there are no incompatibility failures, which in turn reduces the risk of
downtime. Non-disruptive, rolling, one-click upgrades also ensure continuous uptime.
4. Solution Overview | 17
Running SAP on Nutanix
Economic Benefits
For most businesses, achieving optimal IT infrastructure is not a goal in and of itself—the
purpose of infrastructure is to enable the business. Nutanix invisible infrastructure, which
includes AHV, elevates IT staff from infrastructure work, enabling them to use their talents
and creativity to make the business more competitive, efficient, and profitable. AHV also
reduces legacy hypervisor costs, such as those associated with software licensing, ongoing
administration, business disruption, and hardware. To learn more about the economic benefits of
the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, visit www.nutanix.com/tco.
4. Solution Overview | 18
Running SAP on Nutanix
Note: Hyperthreading might provide a reduced benefit for CPU-intensive batch jobs
compared to OLTP workloads. For more information on this topic, refer to SAP Note
1612283: Hardware Configuration Standards and Guidance.
• Be sure to assign a minimum of 8 GB per provisioned vCPU, 100 percent reserved. This
minimum assignment applies to both database and application servers. However, database
servers typically need more RAM, depending on requirements and testing results.
• Configure virtual NUMA (vNUMA) sockets for wide VMs that must cross NUMA nodes (for
example, database VMs). A VM is “wide” when it has more vCPUs than the NUMA node.
• If workload monitoring shows that the SAP application is not utilizing all the virtual CPUs, the
extra vCPUs may cause scheduling constraints, especially under high workload. Accordingly,
minimize the number of vCPUs in the VM.
• It is usually not critical to set CPU reservations. SAP tests on vCPU overcommit show graceful
degradation in performance, which can be overcome by rebalancing the workloads across an
ESXi cluster (using VMware vSphere vMotion). This solution assumes spare CPU capacity in
the cluster.
• Consider NUMA boundaries before hot adding vCPUs, as this action can disable vNUMA. For
more information, see the VMware KB article vNUMA is disabled if VCPU hotplug is enabled.
⁃ The effect of hot adding vCPUs is particularly relevant to database VMs, which can be
NUMA-wide. Generally, databases are sized using vCPUs capable of handling peak
workloads with an additional buffer, so hot add might not be an urgent use case. However,
if you need to hot add vCPUs beyond a NUMA boundary, the loss in vNUMA benefits
depends on the workload and NUMA optimization algorithms specific to the database
vendor and version of VMware vSphere. VMware recommends determining the NUMA
optimization benefits based on your own workload before setting the hot add vCPU function
—this analysis allows you to decide if the performance tradeoff is warranted.
• Follow SAP guidelines for using large pages. Some SAP applications do not support large
pages, whether those applications are running inside a VM or natively.
⁃ Not supported for the ABAP stack (see SAP Note 1312995: Enabling Large Page Support
for the View Memory Model).
⁃ Supported for NetWeaver Java on Linux (see SAP Note 1681501: Configure a SAP JVM to
use large pages on Linux).
⁃ Not supported for Java in Business Objects.
• Follow the same SAP Notes as you would for a physical deployment to configure the size of
the OS swap space inside the VM. This guideline is independent of VMware. SAP or SAP
Support should address recommendations on OS swap sizing for SAP.
• If you do not set memory reservations, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler
(DRS) load balancing recommendations could be suboptimal for SAP systems with large
memory requirements.
• When deleting a VMware snapshot (for example, during backup operations for a VM running
a database in a three-tier setup), the VM may be stunned for a period. The stun can cause
application server disconnections, but SAP application servers are configured to automatically
reconnect.
⁃ See SAP Note 98051: Database Reconnect: Architecture and function. VMware
recommends not performing a VMware snapshot delete operation while a batch job is
running. The delete operation could cause the batch job to cancel.
• Use a single Nutanix container, which is represented as a VMware datastore.
• Choose the hardware model based on compute, storage, and licensing requirements.
⁃ Ideally, keep the working set in SSD and the database size within node capacity.
⁃ Select a model that can fit all of the database on a single node. For databases too large to
fit on a single node, ensure that there is ample bandwidth between nodes.
⁃ Use higher-memory node models for I/O-heavy workloads.
⁃ Use a node twice the memory size of the largest single VM.
⁃ Use a node that fits your organization’s licensing constraints.
• Nutanix CVMs should always be in the vSphere Cluster Root and not in a child resource pool.
• Consider using a Nutanix all-flash node for your DB workloads if requirements make the data-
tiering model unsuitable.
Network
• On VMware, use the VMXNET family of paravirtualized network adapters. The paravirtualized
network adapters in the VMXNET family implement an optimized network interface that
passes network traffic between the VMe and the physical network interface cards with minimal
overhead.
• On Windows, enable RSS (Receive Side Scaling) if available.
• On VMware, use E1000E for legacy SAP applications on older operating systems only.
and generates less overhead. It is also preferable to have one VM per application server to
manage workload distribution and resiliency.
• Add an extra 16 percent to the SAPS calculations for virtualization and hypervisor overhead.
This buffer ensures that there is room available for compute resources to compensate for any
virtualization overhead.
• Contact Nutanix or your hardware OEM for support with sizing services.
5.2. Databases
General Database Licensing
Database VMs can be wide, depending on the sizing requirements.
• If the SAP user license covers the database license at runtime, you can run application server
and database server machines in the same cluster without any database licensing impact.
• If the database license is obtained separately from the database vendor (OEM), depending
on the database vendor virtual licensing policies, you can maximize ROI on database
licensing costs with a dedicated cluster for database VMs, or you can restrict database VMs to
dedicated hosts using anti-affinity policies. Contact your Nutanix account manager for further
details on how to utilize effective database licensing using Nutanix.
• If the database license is purchased from the vendor (such as Oracle), all cores of hosts
running Oracle must be licensed, after which you can run an unlimited number of Oracle VMs
on those hosts. Oracle does not support partially licensed hosts. A best practice is to have a
separate cluster dedicated to Oracle for licensing and workload segregation, depending on the
size of your Oracle database environment.
Sybase ASE
• See SAP Note 170680: SYB: Sybase ASE released for virtual systems.
• Follow the guidelines in SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise on VMware vSphere:
Essential Deployment Tips. Also refer to the guidelines for Sybase ASE in Architectural
Guidelines and Best Practices for Deployments of SAP HANA on VMware vSphere.
Oracle on SAP
• Nutanix supports Oracle Database. See SAP Note 1173954: Support of Oracle for VMware.
For an overview of Oracle support and licensing on VMware, see Understanding Oracle
Certification, Support and Licensing for VMware Environments.
• The VMware Oracle Support Policy states that “VMware Support will accept accountability
for any Oracle-related issue reported by a customer. By being accountable, VMware Support
will drive the issue to resolution regardless of which vendor (VMware, Oracle, or others) is
responsible for the resolution.”
• See SAP Note 793113: FAQ: Oracle I/O configuration for recommendations concerning
maximizing I/O performance, which also apply to virtual environments.
• SAP supports Oracle Data Guard. See SAP Note 105047: Support for Oracle functions in the
SAP environment.
• For information on Oracle performance on SAP, see SAP Note 618868: FAQ: Oracle
performance. If you suspect slow I/O performance, check the vSphere I/O latency metrics.
• Set huge pages, following the guidelines from SAP Note 1672954.
• SAP supports Oracle RAC. See SAP Note 527843: Oracle RAC support in the SAP
environment. RAC configurations are also supported on VMware. See the Virtualizing Oracle
Databases on Nutanix Best Practice Guide.
• For a consistent online backup of the Oracle database, the following options are available:
⁃ Use Oracle utility RMAN (this option does not require a storage-based snapshot).
⁃ Place the Oracle database in backup mode, then take a snapshot (VMware or storage
array level).
• For Oracle on Windows, you can use Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to
perform online database backup, which is database consistent. See Performing Database
Backup and Recovery with VSS. This process is not supported with Oracle ASM (Automatic
Storage Management).
⁃ AlwaysOn minimizes RTO and RPO in case of primary SQL Server failure. For more
information, see Running SAP Applications on the Microsoft Platform. The process for
configuring AlwaysOn in VMs is comparable to the process for physical deployments.
• Place data and log files in separate vDisks, preferably connected through separate SCSI
adapters.
⁃ See SAP with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005: Best Practices for High
Availability, Maximum Performance, and Scalability.
• For SQL Server configuration parameters, follow the SAP Notes as per physical instances:
1237682: Configuration Parameters for SQL Server 2008 and 1702408: Configuration
Parameters for SQL Server 2012.
⁃ These notes indicate how much extra memory the OS requires beyond SQL Server. For
memory sizing, treat the VM as if it were a physical server and calculate memory allocation
within the VM accordingly.
• To investigate SQL Server I/O performance within the guest OS, see SAP Note 987961: FAQ:
SQL Server I/O performance.
• If you suspect slow I/O performance, check the vSphere I/O latency metrics.
• Backup considerations for SAP SQL Server databases are described in SAP Note 1878886:
Backup Strategies for SQL Server. SIMPLE recovery mode is not acceptable for SAP
databases.
• We recommend Nutanix solutions that integrate with Microsoft VSS (for database consistency)
for environments requiring high restore SLAs—these solutions work on VMware much like
they do on physical infrastructure.
• Also refer to the Nutanix best practices guide for Microsoft SQL Server.
SAP on DB2
• IBM supports DB2 on VMware. See also SAP Note 1130801: DB6: Virtualization of IBM DB2
for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.
• IBM supports subcapacity licensing on VMware. For details, see IBM’s subcapacity licensing
FAQs, item 13.
• IBM uses the PVU metric for licensing. For VMware, the IBM policy is: “Each vCPU is equal
to one processor core for PVU licensing. We license to the lower of the sum of vCPUs or full
(physical) capacity of the server.” Here are some licensing examples:
⁃ 1x 8 vCPU VM running a DB2 on a 16-core ESXi host: 8 cores for PVU licensing.
⁃ 3x 8 vCPUs VMs or 1x 32 vCPU VM on a 16-core ESXi host (that is, vCPU overcommit):
16 cores for PVU licensing.
⁃ 1x 16 vCPU VM (running DB2) on an ESXi cluster with 2x 16 core ESXi hosts (extra host
added for vSphere High Availability failover): 16 cores for PVU licensing.
Appendix
References
Nutanix AHV References
1. AHV Best Practices Guide
2. Oracle on AHV Best Practices Guide
3. AHV: Manage Hypervisor ID
Appendix | 28
Running SAP on Nutanix
technical leadership for organizations and mentored teams. He has extensive experience with
analysis, design, and development of Enterprise systems; he has been a part of and lead
Enterprise Architecture teams and knows how to articulate solutions based on a customer’s
strategic business or technical requirements.
Prior to working in Nutanix, Kasim was a Solution Architect in VMware's Center of Excellence
APJ for Business Critical apps where he worked closely with Technical Marketing, Alliances,
and PSO to create service offerings and GTM strategies. He also handled the technical portfolio
from the vBCA perspective, delivering complex projects on SAP and Oracle and growing the
business, where COE APJ turned from a value and support center to a profit center. Prior to that,
he was a Senior Manager in Accenture, performing a role of SAP Practice Lead and managing
the technical team where he has led and delivered award-winning SAP projects on VMware.
Alexander Thoma is an experienced Enterprise Infrastructure Architect and a Senior Solutions
and Performance Engineer in Nutanix. At VMware PSO, he focused on driving sound enterprise
architectures based on customer requirements and constraints. For the last 2.5 years, he
focused on presales with the Global Center of Excellence, where he was responsible for
designing, creating, and running highly technical enablement classes for the complete SDDC
portfolio of VMware.
At Nutanix, Alexander’s main focus is on Business Critical Applications with SAP, Microsoft SQL,
and Oracle DB.
When it comes to Infrastructure design and implementation, he has done a large variety of
projects across all sorts of industries, including large-scale file and print solutions for top-five
chemical companies, virtualization and consolidation solutions for large consumer banks, and
enterprise Public and Private cloud solutions for SAP Cloud itself.
During his tenure at VMware, Alexander played an instrumental part in the VMware Certified
Design Expert program by advising the program manager and providing content, such as design
and troubleshooting scenarios. One of his main functions was his role as an active panel member
during the defense sessions (attending more than 100 panels); he has seen more than half of all
successful VMware Certified Design Expert holders in the world as a panelist.
About Nutanix
Nutanix makes infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that
power their business. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform leverages web-scale engineering
and consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtualization, and storage into
a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The result is predictable
performance, cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security, and seamless application
mobility for a broad range of enterprise applications. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow up
on Twitter @nutanix.
Appendix | 29
Running SAP on Nutanix
List of Figures
Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.....................................................................7
30
Running SAP on Nutanix
List of Tables
Table 1: Document Version History.................................................................................. 5
31