SAP

vSphere 6.5 – 64 TB* SAP HANA Scale-Out Support for up to 16 virtualized SAP HANA Nodes

We are pleased to announce that it is now supported to deploy SAP HANA Scale-Out systems with up to 16 2 TB large virtualized SAP HANA systems. If the SAP sizing permits, SAP HANA Business Warehouse System RAM size of 64 TB* are now possible.

End of January, SAP granted VMware vSphere 6.5 support for up to 8 SAP HANA Scale-Out nodes/VMs. Our technology partner Fujitsu re-run the benchmark with 8 SAP HANA VMs, installed on four Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 2800B3 systems, configured with 2 TB RAM and eight Intel Broadwell CPUs.

The SAP BW edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark Version 2 was performed according to the SAP benchmark rules, which required a memory utilization of minimum 65%. In our case, this where 8 datasets, with 10.400.000.000 initial data records. The CPU utilization was between 80-98% on the seven worker node VM during the query throughput phase. Details can get found in the benchmark certificate 2018007.

Overall, the 8-node benchmark, provides a 25% higher throughput by servicing a 167% larger data set as the previously benchmarked virtualized 4-node configuration!

This benchmark demonstrates, that VMware vSphere 6.5 can be used to virtualize very big SAP HANA scale-out systems. Based on this benchmark, configurations with up to 64 TB*, using 16 x 4 TB SAP HANA VMs are now supporte, if the SAPS (TDI Phase 5 sizing) sizing allows it. Now all virtualization benefits can also be leveraged with SAP HANA Scale-Out systems, like easier operation and standardization, which results in higher SLAs and lower TCO.

Below table summarizes the results and provides and overview of the two different benchmarks.

*SAP HANA TDI Phase 5 sizing required

** one of: n * 1.3 billion records (1.3, 2.6, …)

Beside the executed BWH benchmark, we executed the SAP HANA hardware check configuration utility (HWCCT), to ensure we meet the storage and network KPIs. For example, we meet the latency KPI for data log, which is 1 ms and the network KPI, which has to be better or equal as 9.0 Gbit/s per SAP HANA Scale-Out node.

Following graphic shows the virtualized 8-VM SAP HANA Scale-Out Benchmark configuration on 4 x Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 2800B3 server systems:

Details:

  • Test case 1 (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
  • Test case 2 (virtualized) – cert.no. 2018007: 4 x Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 2800B3 (Intel Xeon Processor E7-8880 v4, 8 procs, 176 cores, 352 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
  • SAP Note 2393917 (SAP user required)
  • SAP Benchmark Certificate 2018007
  • 4 Node SAP HANA Scale-Out Benchmark