Introduction
I'll start by saying - I love my job! Never before, have I had such opportunity to experiment with building and tearing down landscapes without having to get approval or budget from anyone. I work for Microsoft as an SAP Cloud Solution Architect. Whilst Virtualization technologies has vastly improved agility over recent years, Cloud computing has revolutionized this.
When meeting with customer's, one of the first questions I'm asked is "How can i automate more efficiently in Cloud than I can on premises?". Of course, the real question is "How can I save money and be more agile, by moving my workloads to Cloud". The perception that migrating to cloud is going to realize significant cost savings over on premises, simply by "lifting and shifting" resources to the cloud, is not necessarily true.
"How can i automate more efficiently in Cloud than I can on premises?". Of course, the real question is "How can I save money and be more agile, by moving my workloads to Cloud".
Let me clarify. If you need to run your entire landscape 24x7 and select a PAYG plan, there's a fair chance you won't be saving anything with a migration to cloud.There are options such as Reserved Instances, that afford you significant cost savings, but even so, it's possible that your infrastructure bill remains similar.
So what is the answer
In many organisations, SAP often occupies the largest infrastructure footprint. The storage and compute capacity required for systems like S/4HANA and BW/4HANA can be significant, as these systems can require 100's of CPU's and Terabytes of memory. Extrapolate this across multiple environments and the numbers add up quickly. In addition, there are often requirements for project landscapes and system refreshes, in order to maintain the currency of data in the test systems. This adds both infrastructure and administrative overhead.
One solution is to script the process, but this raises questions with regards to maintainability and re-usability. In addition, this IP is often retained by one person.
Enter SAP Landscape Management, SAP LaMa for short - as we all know, SAP loves a good acronym!
Finally, to the point!
I have been very keen to get my hands on a LaMa system and now, with the resources at my disposal, have been able to build a LaMa system on Microsoft Azure, leveraging the SAP LaMa Connector for Azure.
What I plan to do through this blog series, is to provide you with my experience in building and deploying an SAP LaMa environment, so that I can share what I believe are key features that could be leveraged with SAP LaMa 3.0 Enterprise Edition. This will focus on SAP LaMa, together with Microsoft Azure, including:
- The Lama build and initial configuration.
- LaMa functionality:
- Stopping and (re)starting SAP, as well as the underlying VM's.
- SAP Kernel upgrades.
- Diagnostic agent installation
- Installation of an additional Application Server instance (to an existing system)
- System Copy, Clone and refresh
- SAP HANA replication
- SAP HANA processes
The installation process
- Install SAP Java 7.50
- Patch SAP Java 7.50 to SPS14
- Deploy SAP LaMa components:
- VCM
- VCM_ENT
- VCMCR4E
- Run SAP LaMa Initial Configuration Wizard
- Patch SAP LaMa Components
- Apply note 2350235 - SAP Landscape Management 3.0 - Enterprise edition
- Configure Azure Connector for SAP LaMa
The test environment
- Microsoft Azure - designed on Hub and spoke reference architecture.
- 2 VNet's - Hub and spoke with VNet Peering between them.
- Hub for Jumpbox
- Spoke VNet with 4 subnet's:
- Web (for Web Dispatchers),
- SAP Application Servers & SAP Central Services
- Database
- Additional subnet for Gateway
Reference: Deploy SAP NetWeaver (Windows) for AnyDB on Azure virtual machines
LaMa environment details
- SAP Java 750, SPS14
- SAP LaMa Enterprise Edition 3.00 SP11
- Distributed installation: SCS, AS and DB installed on separate hosts
- Operating System: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition
- Database Microsoft: SQL Server 2017
Managed systems (more to come)
- S/4HANA system
- SAP HANA 2.0 SP4
- DB Operating System: Azure Marketplace image -SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 SP1 for SAP
- CI: Windows Server 2019 Datacenter
Preparation
As with any SAP installation, some reading is required, but as a minimum, the list below should be reviewed:
Installation Guide: SAP Systems Based on the Application Server Java of SAP NetWeaver on Windows: MS...
Sum Update Guide
2350235 - SAP Landscape Management 3.0 - Enterprise edition
SAP LaMa connector for Azure
Azure Virtual Machines deployment for SAP NetWeaver
That's all for now folks! In my next blog post, I will walk you through the installation process.
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