saptune – a deep dive

Saptune version 2 has been released a few days ago and as promised, I start my technical blog post series. Over the next few weeks I will add the links to the articles here.

Let me answer the most important questions you might have first:

What shall I do? Update now or wait?

To answer this, we need to know how saptune version 1 is configured.

# saptune note list
All notes (+ denotes manually enabled notes, * denotes notes enabled by solutions):
1275776 Linux: Preparing SLES for SAP environments
1557506 Linux paging improvements
1984787 SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 12: Installation notes
...

If no notes are applied, saptune will switch to version 2 after the package update.

In case you have reverted the notes only temporarily and you want to continue to use version 1 for now, please enable at least one note during the package update to prevent the switch.

# saptune note list
All notes (+ denotes manually enabled notes, * denotes notes enabled by solutions):
* 1275776 Linux: Preparing SLES for SAP environments
* 1557506 Linux paging improvements
* 1984787 SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 12: Installation notes
...

If notes are enabled, saptune will keep running as version 1 after the package update, so the update will not change the behaviour of your system. This was a very important requirement!

But this also means, that you have to migrate to version 2 manually. This is described in detail in the man page saptune-migrate(5) and will also be a topic in the blog series.

As an alternative, you can revert all notes or solutions before the update of the package to get version 2 and re-apply them afterwards.

If you choose this, please make yourself familiar with the changes of saptune version 2 first! The solutions and SAP notes have changed. The tuning – even with the same notes or solution – will be different most certainly! Also do not forget manually changes, you might have done!

I hope this helps you to decide, when to update the saptune package.

More about saptune in the next article.

Further documentation:

• https://documentation.suse.com/sles-sap/12-SP5/html/SLES4SAP-guide/cha-tune.html
• https://documentation.suse.com/sles-sap/15-SP1/html/SLES4SAP-guide/cha-s4s-tune.html#sec-saptune
• SAP Note 1275776
• man pages of the saptune package