HA in a virtualised SAP environment

Now, several years later, EGGER was ready to move to a virtualised environment. Recently, the company moved all their SAP landscapes to a virtualised environment and another decision had to be made. Now that EGGER was using SAP in a VMWare environment, was SPS still required to deliver their SAP availability profile? Or could they settle for packaged availability extensions from VMWare or SUSE?

A clear winner
EGGER had used SIOS SPS to continually monitor system and application health and to automatically and transparently fail over applications to other cluster servers; they needed the same outstanding performance in a virtualised space.

EGGER acquired and maintained SIOS SPS through a partnership with Computer Concept (CC), home to the SIOS Competence and Support Center for Central and Eastern Europe. When EGGER approached CC about the upcoming virtualisation project, Thomas Jorczik, CC Sales and Marketing Manager, and Gerd Jelinek, CC Managing Partner, knew that SIOS SPS was the best solution. “SIOS is a customer-focused company,” says Jelinek. “Requests from customers bring the next level of innovation. SIOS is always looking to adapt to customer requirements. For this virtualisation project, SIOS worked with us to offer the customer a customized solution.”

The project involved new hardware combined with a VMWare virtualisation platform. When it came to the HA solution decision, says Jorczik, “SIOS SPS won the race because of its superior application protection. EGGER had a demanding requirement for SAP protection and high availability for its central IT environment. They also value vendor independence and reliability.” VMware alone simply could not provide the level of protection required for a business-critical application such as SAP. By leveraging SIOS SPS, EGGER would be able to extend the VMWare environment. Because SIOS SPS provides an application-level view of the environment, it provides better recovery time objectives (RTOs) and broader protection than VMwareHA, which can protect against hardware failures but cannot understand or manage what’s happening inside a virtual machine.

Ready, set, go
Best practices for SAP environments demand tightly integrated clustering, continuous monitoring, data replication, and configurable recovery. But native support for these functions is limited in SAP, which leaves a gap in EGGER’s HA coverage.

SIOS fills that gap. SPS addresses all levels of uptime requirements — simply, reliably, and affordably, with solutions that deploy in half the time and at half the cost of conventional point products.

After an initial meeting with EGGER to discuss needs, CC worked with SIOS and the client to develop a proof of concept. “We wanted to demonstrate that SPS provides extended protection and benefits for virtualised SAP environments,” says Jelinek. “We discussed how to configure the product and find the best way to protect their dynamic environment. EGGER appreciated the SIOS product in a physical situation, but not yet in a virtual one. They wanted assurance SPS would still add value and understand how including SPS would impact the migration.”

The evaluation process was smooth. CC’s SIOS SAP Competence and Support Center provided technical advice during the proof of concept. The final solution combines SAP NetWeaver, Oracle, SIOS SPS, SUSE Linux, VMware ESX 5, Cisco UCS servers, and NetApp storage. A small internal team at the EGGER site migrated 12 SAP clusters and kept everything running smoothly.

Certified seal of approval
The fact that SIOS SPS has been certified by SAP as a high availability extension was also important for EGGER (as it is for most SAP installations). “It was extremely important for the customer to work with a product that would receive certification by SAP,” explains Jorczik. “Only three companies have this certification worldwide. Many products and technologies call themselves HA, but in such a business-critical environment, it’s extremely important to work with a product that is truly connected with the application provider — in this case, SAP.”

The SAP Integration and Certification Center has certified the integration of SIOS SPS for SAP Business Suite software customers. This means that SIOS SPS is proven to integrate with SAP solutions, protecting SAP servers and data with HA clustering, multisite disaster recovery, and continuous data replication. The certification also assures SAP customers that SAP and SIOS support organizations collaborate to quickly respond to any questions or issues. Thanks to SPS’s smooth integration with SAP, EGGER enjoys extended protection, improved availability, and reduced operating costs. EGGER is pleased with its flexible, virtualised, and reliable SAP landscape. “We are delighted that SIOS SPS delivers superior protection for our business-critical SAP applications in a virtual environment — and that the solution is certified by SAP,” says Oliver Widhoelzl, Expert Data Center Operations Team Leader at EGGER.

Provisioning new SAP workloads and seats is easy and allows EGGER to reduce unplanned downtime. Ultimately, the SAP migration project went so well, EGGER is evaluating SPS for additional HA requirements and projects in their virtualised environments.