ESXi Host
UCS Service Profile
The ESXi host provides the platform where virtual machines are running on. The service profile contains the configuration of the hardware in a Cisco UCS environment. Service Profile Templates or vSphere Auto Deploy can be used to ease the ESXi deployment process. In this example, a standalone service profile creation is shown.
For each vSwitch, it is recommended to configure two uplink interfaces with MTU 9000 as trunk. The VLAN assignment takes place in the port group configuration of the vSwitch.
In order to get the best performance for virtualization, certain BIOS features should be enabled. The c-states can be controlled by the hypervisor and do not necessarily have to be disabled. It depends on the performance needs vs. power saving aspects how balanced this configuration should be.
VMware vSphere screenshot
Although the use of VM-FEX is optional, it is recommended to enable all Intel Direct IO features.
Network
SAP HANA has different types of network communication channels to support the different SAP HANA scenarios and setups. In a virtualized environment, HANA scale-out scenario is not supported as of today. Therefore, only network connections of single HANA instances have to be considered.
Name | Use Case | Solutions | Required Bandwidth |
Client-Zone Networks | |||
Application server network | Communication between SAP application server and database | All | 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet |
Client network | Communication between user or client application and database | All | 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet |
Data source network | Data import and external data integration | Optional for all SAP HANA systems | 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet |
Internal-Zone Networks | |||
Internode network | Node-to-node communication within a scale-out configuration | Scale-out | 10 Gigabit Ethernet |
System replication network |
| For SAP HANA Disaster Tolerance (DT) | To be defined with customer |
Storage-Zone Networks | |||
Backup network | Data backup | Optional for all SAP HANA systems | 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 8-Gbps Fibre Channel |
Storage network | Node-to-storage communication | External storage for SAP HANA TDI | 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 8-Gbps Fibre Channel network |
Infrastructure-Related Networks | |||
Administration network | Infrastructure and SAP HANA administration | Optional for all SAP HANA systems | 1 Gigabit Ethernet |
Boot network | OS boot using Preexecution Boot Environment (PXE) and Network File System (NFS) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) | Optional for all SAP HANA systems | 1 Gigabit Ethernet |
vMotion network | vMotion network between ESXi hosts | SAP HANA systems in VMware vSphere Cluster | 10 Gigabit Ethernet |
Source: SAP AG
On the basis of the listed network requirements, every server must be equipped with two 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 Gigabit Ethernet is recommended) interfaces for scale-up systems to establish communication with the application or user (client zone). If the storage for SAP HANA is external and accessed through the network, two additional 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 8-Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces are required for the storage zone. When using multiple ESXi hosts in a vSphere Cluster with enabled DRS, at least one additional 10 Gigabit Ethernet link is required for vMotion traffic.
For the storage networks and the vMotion network, it is recommended to configure jumbo frames end-to-end.
The network traffic can be consoliated by using the same vSwitch with several load-balanced uplinks.
Storage
The storage system must be listed on the SAP Product Availability Matrix (PAM), independent of the appliance vendor, or must be certified as SAP HANA TDI storage.
It is recommended to physically separate the the origin (VMFS LUN or NFS export) of the datastores providing data and log for performance reasons. However, the recommendations from the storage vendor should be obtained. Following performance classes can be distinguished:
Category | Read Performance | Write Performance |
OS boot disk | medium | low |
/hana/shared | medium | low |
/hana/data | very high | high |
/hana/log | high | very high |
backup | low | medium |
When using NFS, it is not recommended to mount the directories for data and log inside the guest, but use NFS datastores with regular vmdk disks. Shared NFS directories which are not performance critical (eg. /hana/shared) can be mounted in guest.
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