By Leon Davis
SAP Virtualization Week 2012 was held in the SAP Palo Alto Office from the 17th to the 19th of April. Being my first SAP Virtualization Week I really didn’t know what to expect. The event sold out and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it had a great community feel of like minded individuals. Basically everyone had their heads in the clouds and the topics were diverse.
With three streams of content it was hard to choose between presentations. It was handy to keep an eye on twitter as big announcements and key core information was being rebroadcast over the social media giant by the #sapvweek hashtag.
I managed to attend some diverse and interesting topics. Some of the standout presentations from my side;
• Microsoft are finally making inroads with Hyper-V with 32 Core VM’s and integration into LVM they are going to be able to become contenders for the large enterprise virtual solution.
• EMC put together a nice run through of their integration of EMC Storage with LVM. This presentation went into the technical grit. This presentation will be my first point of call the next time I have to setup LVM with any EMC storage solution.
• Hosting providers were keen to show their offerings. The common consensus is that they are ready for Non-Production however Production still seems to be a tough ask, this hurdle is will be overcome and it is only a matter of time.
• SAP put on a show with Project Titanium, a cloud based management and deployment solution and was demonstrated by deploying Training SAP servers directly into Amazon. SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM) was also on display with V1.0 reaching General Availability very soon and an announcement that V2.0 will out next year with lots of improvements and greater supportability. Finally SAP’s On-Demand solutions were also a key topic and what was interesting to note was the BI on Demand solution that offers free cloud based BI services. Check out all the on-demand cloud based services here: www.ondemand.com
• Amazon demonstrated an interesting scenario with one SAP Customer using Amazon WS as a Disaster Recovery site. They are log shipping their DB to Amazon. What is interesting is by doing this they can then replicate that DB as many times as they want to stand up Sandboxes on demand. A very cool and cost effective solution which may make the transition to the public cloud a smooth and easy option, when the ability to host production becomes a viable offering. I was also interested to hear Amazon mentioning that Australia is a tough location as different ISP’s route via different countries which means latency can be hard to predict.
Midday Thursday saw Sven Bedorf and myself ran through a presentation on the offerings from SAP Services in the realm of Cloud and Virtualization. I was surprised by the audience number for at the same time, we had some tough competition with VMware demonstrating Best Practice for hosting SAP NetWeaver and Business Objects on their virtualization solution. I was a bit nervous presenting to peers, colleagues, partners and customers however I am proud of the services that Sven and the team have put together.
Finally the week finished off on the Friday with Dieter Krieger and Marcus Erler putting together a workshop on a technical deep dive into LVM which was also sold out. I am sure value was realised by all who attended as Dieter and Marcus are highly knowledgeable and experienced in training LVM to the masses.
I had a great week in Palo Alto. The content was great, networking opportunities galore and catching up with the SAP Virtualization and Cloud Management team over a beer or two made for a memorable experience. Check out some favorite tweets and pictures from Greg Chase on Storify.
For more information and to download all the material from the presentations please visit http://sapteched.com/sapvweek/
Leon Davis is a SAP NetWeaver Consultant.
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