Last week we finished the Multi SAP HANA VM and NUMA Node Sharing (CPU socket sharing) tests with vSphere 6. Due to the good results, SAP granted full production level support for multiple SAP HANA systems deployed on a single SAP HANA certified server virtualized with vSphere 6.
With this, customers can get now better TCO results by SAP HANA system consolidation and better utilizing their hardware assets.
For details please review SAP note 2315348 – SAP HANA on VMware vSphere 6 in production.
What is allowed by now with vSphere 6?
- Consolidation of multiple SAP HANA production level VMs on a single SAP HANA certified server based on Intel Xeon E7-v3 (Haswell).
- Possibility to share a NUMA node with two production level SAP HANA VMs. Example: 4 socket Haswell server is now able to support up to 8 SAP HANA VMs, and an 8 socket Haswell based server supports up to 16 SAP HANA VMs in production.
- SAP HANA sizing rules must get applied and followed.
- When sharing a NUMA node minimal 8 CPU cores (16 threads) must get assigned to the VMs, RAM must get assigned accordingly the latest SAP HANA sizing rules.
- Enough network and storage IO capacity must be available for all running production SAP HANA VMs (SAP HANA TDI storage KPIs).
- Enable VMware HA to protect the consolidated SAP HANA workload and ensure that enough failover capacity is available in the vSphere cluster.
What is not allowed as of today with vSphere 6?
- No Intel E7-v4 (Broadwell) based system and vSphere 6.5 support. Validation and tests are ongoing but not finished.
- Running more than two SAP HANA VMs on a single NUMA node (CPU socket)
- Over-subscription of CPU and RAM resources
