SAP Benchmark Performance - Linux vs. Windows
Performance can be measured using very different tools and techniques. There are the well known hardware and software providers delivering a tools or toolsets which shows the performance of a certain product or technology. The same counts for SAP providing a benchmark tool kit to benchmark different core enterprise scenarios of an SAP system. Such standard application benchmarks are Sales&Distribution (SD), Financials (FI), Human Resources (HR), Portal and many more. Out of these the SAP SD-Benchmark became a de facto industry standard for enterprise business benchmarks. Therefore I'd like to choose the SD-Benchmark as reference for the performance measurement described in this SDN blog. SD-Benchmark
Taken from the SD-Benchmark documentation: The Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark consists of the following transactions: - Create an order with five line items. (VA01)
- Create a delivery for this order. (VL01N)
- Display the customer order. (VA03)
- Change the delivery (VL02N) and post goods issue.
- List 40 orders for one sold-to party. (VA05)
- Create an invoice. (VF01)
Note: Each benchmark user has his or her own master data, such as material, vendor, or customer master data to avoid data-locking situations. DB/OS Platforms?
SAP software runs on several hardware architectures like Sparc, Power, Itanium and commodity x86_64 from different hardware vendors, on several operating systems like HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Windows and Linux and on several databases like Oracle, DB2 or MaxDB, the amount of combinations is very huge. I'd like to choose Linux on commodity hardware as platform to show you the performance of such an SAP Linux SD-Benchmark and compare it to other benchmarks on other platforms like Windows on the same hardware. Round 1 - Fight!
The first round of Linux versus Windows was fought on an HP ProLiant DL380 G5. The machine specs are as follows: 2 Processors / 8 Cores / 8 Threads, Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5355, 2.66 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache per core and 4 MB L2 cache per 2 cores.
| Operating System | SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 | Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition |
| Database | Oracle 10g | SQL Server 2005 |
| Benchmark Certificate | 2007028 | 2006079 |
| Number of SD-Users | 1795 | 1790 |
| ERP Release | 6.0 (SAP ERP 2005) | 6.0 (SAP ERP 2005) |
| Dialog Response times | 1.96 sec | 1.98 sec |
The Linux SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark got five more users. What a tense victory. Let's see what the second round with actual hardware says
Round 2 - Fight!
The second round of Linux versus Windows was fought on an HP ProLiant DL380 G5. The machine specs are as follows: 2 Processors / 8 Cores / 8 Threads, Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5460, 3.16 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache per core and 6 MB L2 cache per 2 cores. The software configuration, the amount of SD-Users and the official SAP SD-Benchmark certificate number are:
| Operating System | SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 | Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition |
| Database | MaxDB 7.7 | SQL Server 2005 |
| Benchmark Certificate | 2008025 | 2007064 |
| Number of SD-Users | 2275 | 2436 |
| ERP Release | 6.0 (SAP ERP 2005) | 6.0 (SAP ERP 2005) |
| Dialog Response times | 1.98 sec | 1.99 sec |
| Database Request time (dia/upd) | 0.005 sec / 0.023 sec | 0.030 sec / 0.016 sec |
Wow, Microsoft did some really nice performance improvements since the last benchmark. Comparing the database request times (dia), MaxDB is more then 6 times faster than SQL Server 2005! But as the number of users shows, there is still room for improvement.
The SAP LinuxLab is currently evaluating and considering several performance options which are going to push the Linux benchmark up to the level of the Windows one. Such investigations won't finish in a matter of weeks, so it may take some time to get the full performance potential incl. a certified SAP SD-Benchmark. Stay tuned...
