Minimizing downtime and designing to withstand failure are among the top considerations when setting up mission critical SAP systems on AWS. An AWS Well-Architected design principle includes Reliability, that is used to discuss the availability of your solution. There are several design patterns that lower the chance of unplanned downtime thus limit the negative business consequences such as delayed production, loss of productivity, loss of revenue, or even loss of business reputation.

SUSE and AWS collaborate to provide AWS Well-Architected high availability solutions for SAP landscapes that follow Architecture guidance for availability and reliability of SAP on AWS:

• Increase the availability and reliability of the infrastructure

Tremendous efforts have been made by AWS to eliminate single points of failure and increase the resilience of the cloud infrastructure. For example, EC2 Instance Recovery for protection against hardware failure within availability zone and designing for multi-AZs for protection against availability zone failure. However, the AWS reliability and availability features don’t guarantee application-level availability, thus 3^rd party high availability solutions are needed to address the application and infrastructure layers.

• Extensive monitoring

In many cases, a major outage is the result of cumulative minor issues. That’s why increasing insights into the SAP landscape, discovering minor issues, and remediating in a timely manner is critical for preventing a major outage.

AWS provides CloudWatch Application Insights to enable monitoring for your SAP HANA databases. It identifies and sets up key metrics, logs, and alarms across your application resources. It continuously monitors metrics and logs to detect and correlate anomalies and errors. When errors and anomalies are detected, Application Insights generates CloudWatch Events that you can use to set up notifications or take actions.

SUSE Project Trento, part of SLES for SAP Applications, discovers, monitors, and proactively fixes SAP system problems, especially in High Availability clusters, in AWS infrastructure. It provides powerful pre-go-live validation to avoid last minute surprise or even outage before putting the system into production. In day 2 operations it continuously monitors the production system and detects drifts that could lead to outage. Details can be found on Project Trento landing page.

• • Reliable automated failover

SUSE is the leader in high availability solutions for SAP, supporting automated failover of SAP HANA, S/4HANA and NetWeaver applications. In this blog we will discuss the HA scenarios in detail.

HA Solutions for SAP HANA on AWS

HANA System Replication (HSR) is a native HANA HA feature; however, its failover is not automated without the help of a 3^rd party solution. SUSE has developed solutions to reliably identify the issue and start the failover in a timely manner.

HA Solutions for S/4HANA and NetWeaver on AWS

For SAP S/4HANA and NetWeaver, the HA solutions are based on ASCS/ERS enqueue replication.

SAP HA-Interface Certification

SUSE’s HA solutions for ENSA1 and ENSA2 are both certified by SAP HA-Interface certification, that’s critical to prevent split-brain situation when performing maintenance to the SAP applications running in the cluster. The details and an example can be found in this blog. The certification tests of NW-HA-CLU_750 are conducted on Amazon EC2 instances, and special thanks to AWS for providing the infrastructure.

Enforce Security Compliance by Using Live Patching

Having no impact during patching is another critical high availability principal. SUSE provides Live Patching to both Linux Kernel and User Space. In User Space, upgrade key libraries such as glibc and OpenSSL requires reboot and these two are dependencies of SAP HANA. With Linux Kernel and User Space Live Patching, customers can avoid expensive reboot (for up to 1 year) to mission critical in-memory HANA databases.

SLES for SAP Applications

SLES for SAP Applications is the leading Linux platform for SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver and SAP S/4HANA solutions and is endorsed by SAP. Two of the key components of SLES for SAP Applications are the High Availability Extension and resource agents. The High Availability Extension provides Pacemaker, an open-source cluster framework. The resource agents manage automated failover of SAP HANA System Replication, S/4HANA ASCS/ERS ENSA2, and NetWeaver ASCS/ERS ENSA1. On AWS marketplace, the PAYG image of SLES for SAP Applications includes Live Patching.

SUSE Premium Support Services

Premium Support Services is an optimization offering for those enterprises that want a direct relationship with named technical professionals, who provide in-depth and custom support services for business-critical production environments. The premium services team is backed by SUSE technical support, product management, and engineering. Since SUSE Premium Support engineers are also experts in HA solutions, the service is highly recommended to any SAP customers running HA solutions. The SUSE Premium Support Services is listed in the AWS Marketplace.

Conclusion

SUSE collaborates with AWS to support mission critical SAP customers, who can confidently realize the benefit of running mission-critical SAP workloads by building reliable and highly available systems in the AWS Cloud and safeguarding SAP landscape using SUSE’s Open-Source High Availability solutions.

To Learn More

SUSECon Session: Deploy a SUSE HANA Scale-up Cluster using AWS Launch Wizard for SAP [DEMO-1374]

SUSECon Session: Protecting workloads on AWS with SLE HA – A Deep dive