VMTN Blog

At VMworld, we talked about how we think you'll be managing your VMware Infrastructure in the future. Through programs like the VMware Ready Management Initiative and the APIs and services on the platform, the management vendors you're already using will be able to extend their tools you're already using to better manage your virtual resources.

SAP is already ahead of the game today by integrating their Adaptive Computing Controller with VirtualCenter. One of the benefits of this integration is you can manage (start, stop, resume, VMotion) your virtual machines from inside the application-aware SAP tool, so that you can see your VMs not as black-box compute workloads, but also by the SAP services they are running. Hmm, the future of virtual management is looking interesting.

Joachim gives us the details: Virtualization for SAP Solutions: News on the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller: Integration with VMware Infrastructure.

What does the integration entail? Let me start with a few customer questions that I frequently get. “With VMware ESX there is a new component in the stack. How do I do the monitoring then?”, “I am an SAP Basis Administrator and I need to see what else is running in my ESX servers. But I do not want to learn a new tool!”, or “My infrastructure manager does not want to give me access to VirtualCenter, so how can I see what is going on in my SAP landscape?” are some of the more common ones.

The upcoming integration addresses all of these points. The AC UI will feature a new tab called “Virtualization”, adding core virtual machine functionality to the existing AC functionality (which basically treats a virtual machine as a physical system). In the “Virtualization” tab you can see which application service is running on which virtual machine on which ESX host, and you get information about ESX hosts and virtual machine usage data. You can also execute core VMware commands like start/stop/suspend/resume for a VM, and trigger a migration using VMotion through the SAP UI. Very cool is also the following feature: If you click on “shutdown” for a VM, the AC Controller displays a pop-up window listing which SAP services are running in the VM and asks you whether it is still ok to proceed with the shutdown. This is clearly new stuff and a great interaction between virtual infrastructure and application. ...

If you click on a specific ESX host you get some usage statistics for that server as well as a list of all SAP services running on each virtual machine on that host.