Release Notes #

Support requires an appropriate subscription from SUSE. For more information, see https://www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap.

General Support Statement

The following definitions apply:

SUSE will only support the usage of original (unchanged or not recompiled) packages.

Automatically adjust system parameters to allow running SAP applications at satisfactory performance.

SLES for SAP Applications 12 SP2 now ships with the system tuning utility saptune. It can be used to replace sapconf (which is still available, however). The utility unleashes the full potential of system hardware for all SAP workloads by optimizing the CPU scheduler, memory management, disk/network I/O and more. saptune can also tune for the following scenarios:

For information about the usage of saptune, see the saptune documentation.

Optimize the operating system configuration for running SAP HANA benchmarks.

The new program saptune can automate system optimization to unleash the full potential of your SAP HANA deployment. Explore all tuning options of the program and find the best combination for your system with SAP HANA benchmarks. For information about the usage of saptune, see the saptune documentation.

In SLES for SAP 12 SP2, the desktop includes a shortcut Product Registration which allows starting YaST's SCC Registration module. This enables you to easily discover software and services that support SAP solutions.

You can now monitor and control the SAP Network Interface Router via systemd with the new service saprouter.service (contained in the software package saprouter-systemd).

Make sure to install the SAP Network Interface Router first, then install the package saprouter-systemd. You can then control the SAP router daemon via standard systemd mechanisms and commands.

The revamped HANA Firewall configuration editor in YaST offers a simplified user interface and enhanced configuration capabilities:

The SAP Installation Wizard now follows SAP's recommendation for partitioning and creates the following setup:

The new disk encryption utility cryptctl helps set up LUKS-based disk encryption using randomly generated keys and safely keeps them on a dedicated key server.

cryptctl comprehensively and transparently protects application data including configuration files, logs, and databases. It does so fulfilling many encryption compliance requirements. The encryption mechanism takes full advantage of hardware acceleration to improve speeds, incurring only negligible overhead to applications such as SAP NetWeaver.

The SAPHanaSR resource agents now also support SAP HANA System Replication for scale-out in the performance optimized scenario (package SAPHanaSR-ScaleOut).

Before installing HANA SPS 12 on SLES for SAP 12 SP2, make sure that your hardware meets all prerequisites. The root partition must have a size of at least 25 GB to fit the operating system and a copy of the SAP HANA installer. Ideally, use a size of 50 GB for the root partition.

For more information, see SAP Note 1944799 (http://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/1944799) and the Configuration Guide attached to it.

When a SAP HANA database is installed on SLES for SAP, the database administrator user is not able to log in to the graphical interface. This issue also occurs when installing with the newest available release of the SAP HANA installer.

There are currently no workarounds available.

You can configure a SLES computer to become a member in Microsoft Active Directory to leverage its user account and group management. In previous versions of SLES, enrolling a computer in a Microsoft Active Directory was a lengthy and error-prone procedure.

In SLES 12 SP2, YaST ships with the new configuration tool User Logon Management (previously Authentication Client) which offers a powerful yet simple user interface for joining an Active Directory domain and allows authenticating users using those domain accounts. In addition to Active Directory, the editor can also set up authentication against a generic Kerberos or LDAP service.

Write access to MSRs (model-specific registers) allows userspace applications to modify the running kernel which runs counter to the goals of UEFI Secure Boot. Therefore, MSRs cannot be written to by tools like cpupower to control processor performance when UEFI Secure Boot is enabled on a system.

This also prevents tuning tools, such as saptune and sapconf from working correctly.

The only current workaround is disabling Secure Boot.