Since 2011, SUSE and SAP have been constantly working on improving the scalability and high availability of SAP HANA so that customers can grow their deployments to include multiple nodes and true big data environments.

SAP recommends several ways to ensure the high availability and disaster recovery of SAP HANA and one of these is through System Replication.

SUSE supports SAP HANA System Replication by including components of SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, the recommended and supported operating system for SAP HANA, together with 2 specific resource agents; SAP HANA and SAP HANATopology, to ensure disaster tolerance of a SAP HANA System.

SUSE has implemented the scale-up scenario with the SAP HANA resource agent (RA), which performs the actual check of the SAP HANA database instances and is configured as a master/slave resource. In the scale-up scenario, the master assumes responsibility for the SAP HANA databases running in primary mode, and the slave is responsible for instances that are operated in synchronous (secondary) status.

To make configuring the cluster as simple as possible, SUSE also developed its SAP HANATopology resource agent. This runs on all nodes of an SLE 11 HAE cluster and gathers information about the statuses and configurations of SAP HANA system replications. It is designed as a normal (stateless) clone.

With both the SAP HANA and SAP HANATopology resource agents, customers will be able to integrate SAP HANA System Replications into their cluster. This has the advantage of enabling companies to use not only their business–critical SAP systems but also their SAP HANA databases without interruption while noticeably reducing their budgets. SUSE provides the extended solution together with best practices documentation.

This document describes in a short way how to set up the cluster to control SAP HANA in System Replication Scenarios. The document focuses only on the steps which need to be done to integrate an already installed and working SAP HANA with System Replication.