From May 17th to May 19th, SAP welcomed around 30,000 attendees to Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida to its SAPPHIRE NOW conference and provided an overview on what’s new as well as what’s upcoming from SAP in 2016. As Bill McDermott, SAP CEO states during his keynote: “Run Live, Run Simple”!
Freely adapted from this motto, I am going to provide you an overview on what’s new form VMware in the SAP area to help SAP and it customers to make this motto real and what we have prepared and presented on our booth.
The major VMware announcement during SAPPHIRE NOW 2016? That would be our vSphere 6 – 4 TB SAP HANA support statement, which got released by SAP on May 17th! Check out SAP Note 2315348 for details.
With these announcements, customers can now instantly take advantage the larger VM sizes vSphere 6 provides (128 vCPUs and 4 TB of vRAM). Now, the majority of all SAP HANA customers can virtualize SAP HANA and use the same IT processes and datacenter standards they have developed during the last years when started their SAP application virtualization journey.
But was this all what VMware had to show and announce? Definitely not! Let’s do a walkthrough of the VMware booth and learn everything else we have prepared and presented during SAPPHIRE NOW.
The first demo station I want to talk about is our Virtual SAN demo station. Here, we have prepared a real live demo of 4 hyper-converged SAP systems running on vSphere, Virtual SAN and a very dense HCI system from Dell.
The system shown in the picture had four 2-socket server systems with internal storage devices configured as an All-Flash Virtual SAN, from which we have run a IO load demo of several SAP database servers. Some benefits running SAP applications on such an environment are for instance following:
- Radically simple and cost efficient storage
- Storage polices instead of fixed storage configurations
- High performant and scalable storage that grows when new server systems get added to a Virtual SAN cluster.
Currently, Virtual SAN can get used for all classic SAP applications. As of today, SAP HANA is not supported, even if we would meet the performance storage KPIs demanded by SAP for SAP HANA TDI storage configurations.
This picture of a Virtual SAN presentation summarizes how Virtual SAN will change managing storage…
For more information on virtual SAN please refer to following SAP SCN blog, VMware blog or solution overview paper.
The next station is our “Automation” station. Here, we are demonstrating so-called “Day Zero, One and Two” scenarios to reduce TCO and to improve your IT agility to enable SAP’s vision “Run Live, Run Simple” as stated by Bill McDermott.
Beyond our vRealize Automation (vRA) workflows, we also showcased our SAP Landscape Virtualization Manager (SAP LVM) integration that allows life cycle management of a complete virtualized SAP landscape, including SAP HANA.
The picture blow shows a SAP LVM based copy operation fully leveraging a VM based E2E copy process.
The vRA workflows we demoed included a full automated SAP HANA database and S4/HANA installation from scratch and workflows to migrate a SAP HANA Scale-Up configuration automated to a Scale-Out configuration and to upgrade an existing SAP HANA instance to a new SAP HANA release.
The figure shows the vRealize Automation Services Catalog we have build as demo workflows for SAP HANA. Workflows for any other SAP based application and solution would be possible.
The next figure shows the steps needed for an automated SAP S4/HANA installation workflow.
Last, but not least, we presented our Enterprise Secure Mobility Platform and Content management solution AirWatch and how we have integrated SAP SuccessFactors Solutions into an AirWatch managed secure environment.
White board sessions that covered different aspects of SAP HANA on vSphere sizing or comparison of different flash devices got also done beside well received booth theater presentations from our partners, like shown in the picture below, from SUSE.
With this, I want to finish this short summary of our SAPPHIRE 2016 presence and hope you got a good impression what we have presented and that VMware is more then virtualizing compute. It’s all about software and digitalizing all aspects of a datacenter and beyond. From SAP Client over the Datacenter to the Cloud, as below picture illustrates.
…and as the sticker below suggests, ask as about SAP HANA on vSphere!
Below is a short video I have done during the show to give you a better impression of your booth and what we have presented. I hope you have fun watching it and that you follow me through our booth!
Additionally, we also took some other videos at the VMware booth during the conference!
The video below showcases a customer speaker at the VMware booth at SAPPHIRE NOW 2016 – here, Frank Olszewski of HD Supply talks about virtualizing SAP landscapes from a customer perspective.
In this next video, Tom Herrmann, VP of Strategic Alliance Division at VMware, overviews the VMware SDDC strategy, the Partner Ecosystem, as well as the SAP relationship with VMware and Dominic Uliano, SAP Global Technical Alliance Manager speaking about SAP HANA on vSphere 6.
For more blogs around SAP HANA and SAP on VMware:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-27384, http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-70528, http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-60470, https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/author/erik_rieger
