VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced production support for SAP HANA on VMware vSphere 5.5 at EMC World this week during his keynote. This is the end result of a very thorough joint testing project over the past year between VMware and SAP.
HANA is an in-memory platform (including database capabilities) from SAP that has enabled huge gains in performance for customers and has been a high priority for SAP over the past few years. In order for HANA to be supported in a virtual machine on vSphere 5.5 for production workloads, we worked closely with SAP to enable, design, and measure in-depth performance tests.
In order to enable the testing and ongoing production support of SAP HANA on vSphere, two HANA appliance servers were ordered, shipped, and installed into SAP’s labs in Waldorf Germany. These systems are dedicated to running SAP HANA on vSphere onsite at SAP. Each system is an Intel Xeon E7-8870 (Westmere-EX) based four-socket server with 1TB of RAM. They are used for performance testing and also for ongoing support of HANA on vSphere. Additionally, VMware has onsite support engineering to assist with the testing and support.
SAP designed an extensive performance test suite that used a large number of test scenarios to stress all functions and capabilities of HANA running on vSphere 5.5. They included OLAP and OLTP with a wide range of data sizes and query functions. In all, over one thousand individual test cases were used in this comprehensive test suite. These same tests were run on identical native HANA systems and the difference between native and virtual tests was used as the key performance indicator.
In addition, we also tested vSphere features including vMotion, DRS, and VMware HA with virtual machines running HANA. These tests were done with the HANA virtual machine under heavy stress.
The test results have been extremely positive and are one of the key factors in the announcement of production support. The difference between virtual and native HANA across all the performance tests was on average within a few percentage points.
The vMotion, DRS, and VMware HA tests were all completed without issues. Even with the large memory sizes of HANA virtual machines, we were still able to successfully migrate them with vMotion while under load with no issues.
One of the results of the extensive testing is a best practices guide for HANA on vSphere 5.5. This document includes a performance guide for running HANA on vSphere 5.5 based on this extensive testing. The document also includes information about how to size a virtual HANA instance and how VMware HA can be used in conjunction with HANA’s own replication technology for high availability.