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Soeren Schmidt
Soeren Schmidt
June 25, 2019 2 minute read

sapconf versus saptune – in more detail

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Last year I published a small post to compare sapconf and saptune: sapconf versus saptune

It would seem that there is still some confusion about it, so let me go a little bit deeper into the rabbit hole today.

What is the difference between both?

If you are running “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server” you will only have sapconf in your arsenal.
It is meant only to do the most important changes and neither distinguishes between SAP applications nor implements entire SAP notes. This is often not known.

If you are running “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications” also saptune is available to you.
It can apply entire SAP notes, offers prepared combinations (solutions) of notes and – to make your live easier – also allows you to simulate and verify changes made to the system. It is much more elaborated and one of the benefits of “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications”

So, only with “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications” you can choose between both tools.

Both tools use tuned to do their work, which means, that they cannot be used at the same time! You have do decide which one is your favorite.

Here a little table to summarize the important facts:

 sapconf   saptune 
Available on SLES? yes1 no
Available on SLES for SAP Applications? yes yes2
Does it implements entire SAP notes? no yes
Can I configure everything? yes yes3
Do I have a verify option? no yes

1 The reworked version is only available from SLES 12 SP2 onwards.
2 Saptune was introduced with SLES 12 for SAP Applications SP2.
3 This applies only to saptune version 2.

How to check what is running?

If you are not sure, which tool is doing the work for you or if everything is set up as it should be, here some commands to check:

  1. Verify the status of the sapconf service (saptune does not have one). 
    systemctl status sapconf.service

    If the service is inactive/disabled you do not run sapconf. But if it is active/enabled you do.
    But to be really sure about, let’s check further!

  2. Check the status of the ‘tuned’ service as well. 
    systemctl status tuned.service

    It should be active in any case or you do not have tuning at the moment. For sapconf it should be disabled for saptune it must be enabled!

  3. Check the active tuned profile. 
    tuned-adm active
saptune  →  Your system is running saptune
sap-* (SLES 12), sapconf (SLES 15)  →  Your system is running sapconf


All other profiles you might see are from the tuned package itself and are not optimized for SAP workload!

For saptune you should check the selected solutions or notes with saptune solution list and saptune note list too.

Again, here a table to summarize it:

 sapconf   saptune 
systemd service file sapconf.service none
Recommended status of tuned service active/disabled active/enabled
Used tuned profile sapconf/sap-* saptune

I have written a small shell script which will do the tests above and give some hints how to solve a misconfiguration.
You can download it here: https://github.com/scmschmidt/sapconf_saptune_check

If you want to go even deeper, here are the links to technical blog posts:

sapconf: sapconf – A way to prepare a SLES system for SAP workload

saptune: (Will be added as soon ‘saptune’ version 2 is released.)

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