At the end of last year, VMware assisted our technology partner Fujitsu with a SAP Scale-Out BWH benchmark (SAP BW edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark Version 2). The benchmark was run on Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 2800B3, 1 TB RAM configured systems, with four Intel Broadwell CPUs (Intel Xeon E7-8880 v4). As a result of the performance demonstrated by this test, SAP provided support for SAP Scale-Out deployments for up to 8 active nodes (7 Worker + 1 Master) with vSphere 6.5.
Why is this important? Previously we only had support for this deployment option on older CPU generations and vSphere 5.5, which will reach end of support in September 2018. If you have deployed SAP HANA Scale-Out on vSphere 5.5, then, please consider upgrading to vSphere 6.5 as soon as possible.
We performed the benchmark with 3.9 billion initial records on a 4 node Scale-Out native and virtual deployed configuration. The SAP HANA native and virtual tests were on the same HW using the same OS and HANA system configuration, to make the native and virtual results comparable.
The benchmark consists of 3 phases. The table below shows the test results of a physical (Test Case 1 cert 2017051) and virtual (Test Case 2 cert 2017052) deployed SAP HANA system.
1. Data load phase
2. Query throughput phase
3. Query run-time phase
For more details around the benchmark please check out https://www.sap.com/about/benchmark/appbm/netweaver.sap-bw-edition-for-sap-hana-benchmark-version-2.html
Please note, that the natively running HANA system had 176 compute threads, whereas the virtual running SAP system had only 128 vCPUs due to the vSphere 6.5 limitation available (48 threads less). This explains the around 10% longer time for data load and query execution. The query runtime phase was comparable and shows no degradation to the natively installed system.
Test case 1 (native) – cert.no. 2017051: 4 x Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 2800B3 (Intel Xeon Processor E7-8880 v4, 4 procs, 88 cores, 176 threads), BW Edition for HANA Version 2 (3900000000 records) 3-tier, SAP NetWeaver 7.50, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, SAP HANA 1.0
Test case 2 (virtualized) – cert.no. 2017052: 4 x Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 2800B3 (Intel Xeon Processor E7-8880 v4, 4 procs, 88 cores, 176 threads), BW Edition for HANA Version 2 (3900000000 records) 3-tier, SAP NetWeaver 7.50, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 on VMware vSphere 6.5, SAP HANA 1.0
As an additional test, we ran the SAP HANA Hardware Check Configuration Tool (HWCCT) on the natively running SAP HANA systems and the virtual environment to verify if we are able to maintain, the SAP defined TDI storage and network KPI’s. Both systems passed the HWCCT tests with all KPIs for HANA met for this test.
SAP is currently updating their SAP support note for SAP HANA on vSphere 6.5 and will release it shortly.
Details on the SAP HANA on vSphere support status can get found on this page: SAP Wiki VMware pages.
Details about the used Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 2800B3 systems are here: Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST Website.
