2023-05-02 1400911

1400911 - Linux: SAP NetWeaver on Red Hat KVM -

Kernel-based Virtual Machine
Version 31 Type SAP Note
Language English Master Language English
Priority Recommendations / Additional Info Category FAQ
Release Status Released for Customer Released On 08.02.2021
Component BC-OP-LNX-RH ( Red Hat Linux )

Please find the original document at https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/ 1400911

Symptom

You want to run SAP NetWeaver virtualized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on KVM virtual machines or
Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)

Other Terms

Linux, Red Hat, RHEL, KVM, RHEV, RHV

Reason and Prerequisites

You want to configure your Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or Red Hat Enterprise Linux KVM virtualization
environment to fit perfectly to SAP NetWeaver

Solution

This Note documents the supported configurations for running SAP NetWeaver applications virtualized on
RHV or RHEL with KVM. For information about running SAP HANA virtualized on RHV please have a look at
SAP Note 2599726.

Red Hat offers two separate products that include KVM virtualization technology:

• Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Support for running SAP NetWeaver on Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)

With RHV running SAP production environments on virtual machines running RHEL 5 and later is supported.
The following RHEV/RHV releases are currently supported:

• RHEV 3.X on x86_64

• RHV 4.x on x86_64
• RHV 4.2 and newer on IBM POWER8 Little Endian (ppc64le) and on IBM POWER9 Little Endian
(ppc64le)

A Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions subscription
is required for each RHEL guest running SAP NetWeaver.

Support for running SAP NetWeaver on RHEL with KVM (x86_64 and s390x only / without RHV)

© 2023 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved 1 of 6

2023-05-02 1400911

KVM has been included into RHEL since release 5.4. SAP NetWeaver supports using standalone RHEL with
KVM with the following RHEL releases:

• RHEL 5.4 and later minor releases on x86_64

• RHEL 6.1 and later minor releases on x86_64
• RHEL 7.0 and later minor releases on x86_64
• RHEL 8.2 and later minor releases on s390x

Please follow the Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization guides available at
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/ for instructions on how to
configure the virtualization environment.

When using RHEL as the hypervisor you need to have an active Red Hat subscription for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux for SAP Applications or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions to be able to install the vhostmd
monitoring package.

In order to be able to use vhostmd-1.1-4.el8 (or higher) on RHEL8, the SELinux policies provided by package
selinux-policy-3.14.3-41.el8 (or higher) must be installed.

All RHEL guest systems running SAP NetWeaver need Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications or
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions subscriptions as well.

Virtualization Method

KVM only works on servers with x86_64 Processors that offer hardware support for virtualization (Intel VT-X
or AMD-V), selected IBM POWER models that support KVM virtualization, and IBM z models that support
Start Interpretive Execution (SIE). It is not possible to run para-virtualized guests with KVM on systems
without processors that don't provide hardware virtualization support.

Since most hardware vendors disable the hardware virtualization features of their servers per default for
security reasons, please make sure that those hardware virtualization features are enabled in the BIOS
before you begin to set up the KVM host system.

Supported Guest Operating Systems

For x86_64 only RHEL 5.x and later are supported as guest Operating Systems for running SAP NetWeaver
servers on RHEL with KVM or RHEV/RHV.

For IBM POWER only RHEL 7.4 and later are supported as guest Operating Systems for running SAP
NetWeaver servers on RHV for IBM POWER. Installation details about SAP NetWeaver solutions on RHEL
running on IBM POWER systems can be found in the SAP Note 2378874 - Install SAP Solutions on Linux on
IBM Power Systems (little endian)

For IBM z only RHEL 8.0 and later are supported as guest Operating Systems for running SAP NetWeaver
servers on RHEL with KVM.

Setting up the SAP Host monitoring on RHEV 3.x or RHV 4.x

SAP NetWeaver requires that some metrics of the host system running the virtual machines can be
monitored from the guest system, which requires the installation of the 'vhostmd' daemon on the RHV
hypervisors and each VM running SAP NetWeaver must have the 'vm-dump-metrics' package installed.

Please follow the instructions in the following Red Hat Customer Portal KnowledgeBase to set up the SAP
host monitoring for virtual machines running SAP NetWeaver on RHEV 3.x or RHV 4.x: How to configure
SAP Monitoring by using 'vhostmd' in RHV?

© 2023 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved 2 of 6

2023-05-02 1400911

Setting up the SAP Host Monitoring with KVM (x86_64 and s390x only / without RHV)

In order to provide this functionality you need to install the "vhostmd" package in the host and the "vm-dump-
metrics" package in all your guest systems running SAP NetWeaver. To be able to install those packages the
host and guest need to have Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for
SAP Solutions subscriptions.

"vhostmd" uses libvirt to gather the host metrics. Therefore it is necessary that all guests running SAP
NetWeaver are managed via the standard libvirt tools (virsh, virt-manager, ...). Using "qemu-kvm" directly to
manage guests is not supported.

On the host please install the vhostmd daemon with the following command:
$ yum install vhostmd

For RHEL 7 please make sure that you have at least vhostmd-0.5.11.el7_0 installed on the host.

For RHEL 8 on s390x and x86_64 please make sure that you have at least vhostmd-1.1-4.el8 installed on the
host and vm-dump-metrics-1.1-4.el8 on the guest systems.

On the guest install the vm-dump-metrics tool with the following command:
$ yum install vm-dump-metrics

vhostmd with a Virtual Disk

The vhostmd daemon provides the required metrics from the host to the guest via a virtual disk device. You
need to add this virtual disk device as an additional storage device to the configuration of all your guest VMs.
This can either be done through the "virt-manager" graphical management tool, or by adding the following
entry to the XML-configuration files of your VMs:

For x86_64:

<disk type='file' device='cdrom'>

<driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>
<source file='/dev/shm/vhostmd0'/>
<target dev='hdX' bus='ide'/>
<readonly/>
</disk>

(Please choose an available device name instead of "hdX" for the storage device)

For s390x:

<disk type='file' device='disk'>

<driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>
<source file='/dev/shm/vhostmd0'/>
<target dev='vdX' bus='virtio'/>
<readonly/>
</disk>

(Please choose an available device name instead of "vdX" for the storage device)

You need to restart the VM after the new storage device has been added.

vhostmd with Virtio-Serial

© 2023 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved 3 of 6

2023-05-02 1400911

The virtio transport is another method that can be utilized to get the metrics data. This method is also more
secure and does not share data from other systems.
It uses a virtio-serial device to transport metric data between the host and VMs. Basically for a virtio serial
device, QEMU creates a unix domain socket on the Host, a serial port on the VM and connects both to a
communication channel. You need to add a new channel device configuration to all your guest VMs. This can
either be done through the "virt-manager" graphical management tool, or by adding the following entry to the
XML-configuration files of your VMs.

Sample VM config:

<channel type='unix'>
<source mode='bind'>
<target type='virtio' name='org.github.vhostmd.1'/>
<address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>
</channel>

The target name of a channel in a QEMU VM configuration must be

'org.github.vhostmd.1'

Please install and run the "vm-dump-metrics" (available via the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP
Applications or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions subscription) tool in the guest to verify that the
metrics can be read successfully.

To verify Virtual Disk output, execute:

#vm-dump-metrics --vbd

To verify Virtio-Serial output, execute:

#vm-dump-metrics --virtio

Storage configuration

For RHEL KVM hosts it is recommended to place the storage for KVM virtual machines on raw partitions or
LVM devices. Do not use a file as a virtual device for a virtual machine. If you run an SAP database instance
on such a file based virtual machine the I/O performance will drop dramatically compared to a raw setup.

For RHV please follow the storage configuration guidelines in the RHV documentation:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_virtualization/4.4/

We also advise you to use an external storage for the virtual machines when using a SAP database instance
performance wise. For SAP NetWeaver application servers, local disks are sufficient.

Performance Tuning Guidelines

To achieve the best performance on the virtual machines please use the following guidelines:

• change the I/O scheduler to "deadline" on the host; on the guests, please use the "noop" scheduler; to
change the I/O scheduler add "elevator=deadline" to the kernel boot options on the host and
"elevator=noop" to the kernel boot options on the guests

• use the "virtio" driver when configuring the storage and network devices for the guests

• on RHEL5 make sure that the disk caching mechanism of the hypervisor is turned off. To do this you
need to edit the XML-configuration file of the KVM guest and add the following line to all disk-device

© 2023 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved 4 of 6

2023-05-02 1400911

entries except the one you added for the monitoring above:

<driver name='qemu' cache='none'/>

The entries for the disk-devices should then look similar to the following:
< disk type='block' device='disk'>
<driver name='qemu' cache='none'/>
< source dev='/dev/sde1'/>
< target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
</disk>

On RHEL6 the caching is turned off by default, so this change is no longer necessary.

• on RHEL6 do not change the processor model for the virtual machines from the default setting
• make sure that memory ballooning (overcommit) is disabled

Certified Hardware

You may only run your host system on hardware which is certified for Linux KVM environments. Please have
a look at the release notes of the LinuxLab Hardware Partners and check which servers are certified for KVM
explicitly. A list of notes of the released and certified hardware of the LinuxLab Hardware Partners is available
in the "Related Notes" section of SAP Note 2369910.

IBM POWER models that support KVM virtualization are documented on the IBM page:
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/linuxonibm/liaam/liaamdistros.htm

Other Components

Component Description

BC-OP-LNX Linux

This document refers to

SAP Note/KBA Title

2599726 SAP HANA on Red Hat Virtualization

2378874 Install SAP Solutions on Linux on IBM Power Systems (little endian)

2369910 SAP Software on Linux: General information

171356 SAP Software on Linux: General information

1706801 SYB: SAP ASE released for virtual systems

1631106 Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications

1496410 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x: Installation and Upgrade

© 2023 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved 5 of 6

2023-05-02 1400911
1426182 Support of Oracle Database for XEN and KVM

1403020 Linux: Certified Cisco Hardware

1379130 Linux: Released NEC hardware

1130801 DB6: Virtualization of IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows

1122387 Linux: SAP Support in virtualized environments

1102124 SAPOSCOL on Linux: Enhanced function

1048303 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x: Installation and upgrade

This document is referenced by

SAP Note/KBA Title

2097317 Linux on Power: SAP on PowerKVM - Kernel-Based Virtual Machine

2378874 Install SAP Solutions on Linux on IBM Power Systems (little endian)

1492000 General Support Statement for Virtual Environments

2369910 SAP Software on Linux: General information

1496410 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x: Installation and Upgrade

1102124 SAPOSCOL on Linux: Enhanced function

1048303 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x: Installation and upgrade

1122387 Linux: SAP Support in virtualized environments

1379130 Linux: Released NEC hardware

1130801 DB6: Virtualization of IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows

1706801 SYB: SAP ASE released for virtual systems

1403020 Linux: Certified Cisco Hardware

1631106 Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications

1426182 Support of Oracle Database for XEN and KVM

Terms of use | Copyright | Trademark | Legal Disclosure | Privacy

© 2023 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved 6 of 6