SAP HANA on vSphere? VMware recommends SLES.

VMware recommends deploying SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications in their best practices guide for SAP HANA on vSphere. Let’s take a quick step back and talk about what’s driving this.

The “software-defined” movement has taken over IT. In a software defined data center (SDDC), all the infrastructure is virtualized and delivered “as-a-service.”  In this hyper-competitive environment where businesses are striving to offer more services and respond faster, while at the same time reduce capital and operational expenses, the SDDC is the foundation of cloud services, which enables increased automation and flexibility, which leads to better business agility at a lower cost. Open source software is leading this evolution toward more agile service delivery and SUSE offers compute and storage solutions along with the tools to help you build an internal infrastructure that can quickly provision resources based on the unique requirements of each application. For customers invested in VMware, they can achieve similar results with vSphere and the vRealize suite of tools.

Now back to SAP. SAP software is ubiquitous in these data centers, managing business operations and customer relations. In today’s digital world, massive amounts of information are available to help businesses engage better with their customers and solve tough business challenges. SAP HANA is really good at processing massive real time data using in-memory computing, where all the data is stored in the memory and there is no time wasted in loading the data from hard-disk to RAM. Everything is in-memory all the time, which gives the CPUs quick access to data for processing. That means companies can gain new insights from advanced analytics and build intelligent applications that provide deeper insight at unprecedented speed.

So, why are VMware customers deploying SAP HANA on vSphere?  For the same reasons they’re virtualizing the rest of their IT infrastructure: SAP HANA on vSphere improves availability and business continuity, allows rapid and consistent provisioning, unifies management with the rest of the virtual data center, and enables greater utilization of existing resources and infrastructure, all while maintaining acceptable performance.

And now, with Dynamic Tiering, SAP HANA is not confined by the size of available memory since the SAP HANA warm data can be stored on disk in a columnar format and accessed transparently by applications. Thus, the 1TB virtual machine maximum in vSphere 5.5 is an artificial barrier, and SAP HANA multi-terabyte size databases can be easily virtualized with vSphere 5.5 using Dynamic Tiering, Near-Line Storage and other memory management techniques SAP has introduced to the SAP HANA platform to optimize and reduce HANA’s in-memory footprint.

SUSE, VMware and SAP are tied closely together by alliance partnerships that span over a decade. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the OS that VMware relies on for its vApp soft appliances, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP is the number one OS for SAP deployments on Linux. So it’s no surprise that SLES for SAP is the operating system recommended by VMware in their best practices guide for SAP HANA on vSphere.

Click here to get a quick overview on SAP HANA on vSphere using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP.