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Tag Archives: Virtualized SAP

The SDDC Seems Cool … But What Do I Do with It?

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By David Gallant, VMWare Professional Services Consultant

Lately I’ve been receiving requests from customers to talk to them about the software-defined data center (SDDC). So I start to explain software-defined networking, software-defined storage, automated provisioning, and self-service portals.

And that’s when I notice the customer looking excited, but also slightly confused.

Last week at SAP TechEd 2013, I was in the middle of just such a talk when I decided to stop and I ask the customer why he looked puzzled.

His response? “That’s great, but what do I do with all that SDDC stuff?”

That’s when the light bulb came on. He was right to question me—why build a software-defined data center if you have no clue what you’re going to do with it?

To really harvest the investment in your SDDC, you need to be building toward a specific set of goals. We don’t build data centers without a purpose; and that purpose for SDDC, as it’s always been, is the application.

In most cases the best data centers have been purpose-designed and built around the organization’s business-critical applications; for instance SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft applications.

I’ll concentrate for now on SAP—if you can architect an SDDC for SAP, you can roll those concepts over to pretty much any other application. Continue reading →

Are You Optimizing your SAP Virtualization?

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If you are virtualizing an SAP environment running business-critical applications, chances are these questions will sound familiar: Am I optimizing my SAP virtualization for the maximum benefit? What measures should I take to avoid negative business impact when running SAP production workloads on the VMware virtualized platform?

Luckily, VMware Consulting Architect Girish Manmadkar recently shared his advice on this topic.

To make sure you are designing and sizing your infrastructure for optimum business benefit, Girish suggests two new questions to ask yourself, your IT organization, and your vendors.

1. How will this environment need to scale?

2. Am I sizing my environment to support 3-to-5 years of growth?

When you understand the needs outlined by these questions, you can then work with hardware vendors, as well as your VMware and SAP teams, to find the best solution.

From an operational standpoint, there are also efficiencies within the SAP environment once it is virtualized that you want to be sure to take advantage of.

1. Scaling out during the month-end and quarter-end processing is a snap compared to the hours it can take otherwise.

2. Products like vCenter Operations Manger help make sure your SAP basis admin and VMware admin are always on the same page, making it far faster and easier to troubleshoot the environment.

3. You’ll be able to provide the operations team with 24-hours monitoring of the entire SAP virtual infrastructure, allowing for a proactive approach to minimize or eliminate downtime.

Check out Girish’s video, above, for more details.

Girish Manmadkar is a veteran VMware SAP Virtualization Architect with extensive knowledge and hand-on experience with various SAP and VMware products, including various databases. He focuses on SAP migrations, architecture designs, and implementation, including disaster recovery.