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Author's profile photo Soeren Schmidt
Soeren Schmidt
June 25, 2019 2 minute read

sapconf versus saptune – in more detail

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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      4 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Renan Ceguinato
      Renan Ceguinato

      Exactly, you exemplified with perfection!

      Author's profile photo Rainer Lutz
      Rainer Lutz

      Hi Soeren,

      we have saptune with solution netweaver active on our productive application server. Now it seems that saptune is activating less parameter than sapconf.

      For example in SAP Note: 1275776 - Linux: Preparing SLES for SAP environments, there is a suggestion for /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count. With saptune the parameter  is at 65530 versus 2147483647 (sapconf )

      The following error occur in our system log:

      *** WARNING => ab_pbinit: Protection deactivated due to insufficient vm mappings. [abload3.c    1693]

      *** WARNING => ab_pbinit: Please increase vm.max_map_count (see note 900929). [abload3.c    1694]

       

      We are running against a HANA DB. From the documentation it is not clear if we should activate the soltuion NETWEAVER+HANA for the dedicated app server. what would be the correct approach?

       

      Kind regards

      Author's profile photo Soeren Schmidt
      Soeren Schmidt
      Blog Post Author

      For some reason this post escaped my notice. Sorry for that. It might not be relevant anymore, but for completion, let me answer it.

      saptune is not activating less, it just enables SAP Notes that are selected.In your case sapconf has changed vm.max_map_count because we have it in there for SAP HANA.

      We learned recently, that there is a similar SAP Note for SAP NetWeaver: 900929
      The upcoming saptune 3 include this one and it is part of the NETWEAVER and S4HANA-APPSERVER solution.

      But what can you do now with saptune 2. Well you have several possibilities.

      1. You can do as you suggests and using NETWEAVER+HANA. Cheap and simple. But keep in mind, that the HANA part is doing much more. Check if you are ok with that!
      2. You can apply Note 1980196 because you know that it does pretty much the same. Works, but you have a SAP HANA Note on a NetWeaver system. This could bother your sense for correctness.
      3.  You could create your own custom Note setting the parameter. Cleaner, but more work. 😉

       

       

       

      Author's profile photo Sean Beasley
      Sean Beasley

      Good information thanks Soeren