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Author's profile photo Arnold Beilmann
Arnold Beilmann
May 6, 2021 3 minute read

SAP Landscape Management on IBM Power Systems

Simplification, automation and quick response to business needs is a requirement for most of our clients. Typically, customers run a number of SAP systems. Each system consists of one or more database instances (SAP HANA, IBM Db2, Oracle) and several SAP NetWeaver application servers.

By using SAP Landscape Management software in combination with IBM PowerVC, clients gain full visibility and control over their SAP and non-SAP systems, including the underlying physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. With SAP Landscape Management, you can automate repetitive tasks to manage critical applications across complex, hybrid IT landscapes so that you can better control IT costs and increase business agility, for example, by freeing staff to focus on more strategic work rather than manual, error-prone tasks.

IBM PowerVC is an advanced virtualization and cloud management offering. Built on OpenStack, it provides simplified virtualization management and cloud deployments for IBM AIX, IBM i, and Linux virtual machines running on IBM Power Systems. You can use the offer to build a private cloud on the Power Systems and improve administrator productivity. It can further integrate with multi-cloud environments through higher-level cloud orchestrators.

SAP Landscape Management provides a built-in integration with IBM PowerVC so that the SAP Basis administrator can holistically manage critical SAP applications. The SAP Basis administrator gets a complete overview of the full landscape of storage, servers, logical partitions (LPARs), and SAP application server and database instances, and they can efficiently manage and operate those components.

The use cases address the needs of an SAP Basis Administrator covering basically three areas:

  1. Visibility – centralized monitoring, visualization, alerts
  2. Centralized, automated operations – starting, stopping, moving of virtual servers and SAP instances
  3. Provisioning – copy, clone, refresh of SAP systems and provisioning of virtual servers

The product is quite extensible; it allows to add custom operations, custom hooks before/after standard tasks, custom links, custom workflows etc.

Usage scenarios

This section describes how IBM servers, storage systems, virtualization technology and operating systems can be used with SAP Landscape Management. 

Virtualization scenarios:

Use Case Description Dependencies
End-to-end monitoring and visualization Show virtualization topology, server and virtualization configuration, and utilization metrics IBM PowerVC
OS and SAP monitoring SAP host agent
Operations Activate/ Deactivate, shutdown virtual system (logical partition) IBM PowerVC
Relocate virtual system (live partition mobility) IBM PowerVC
Provisioning Provision new virtual system from image IBM PowerVC

Supported environments:

  • Operating systems: AIX, Linux on Power
  • Databases: Any database
  • Storage type: Any type of storage and storage attachment

Storage scenarios:

Use Case Description Dependencies
SAP Relocate Relocate SAP instance or database including storage attachment IBM PowerVC with
IBM FlashSystem or
IBM Spectrum Virtualize
or:
NetApp storage with
NetApp Storage Services Connector for SAP LaMa
System Clone/Copy/Refresh Fast online/offline cloning of database or entire SAP system
System Rename Rename SAP system and database including user authorization

Supported environments:

  • Operating systems: AIX, Linux on Power
  • Database on Linux: HANA
  • Databases on AIX: IBM Db2, Oracle

IBM Spectrum Virtualize software provides storage virtualization and allows to combine storage systems from multiple vendors. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is built in IBM Storage Systems like IBM FlashSystem, IBM Storwize, and IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC). Storage management is done via IBM PowerVC. The storage must be attached to the server using NPIV or as direct attached SAN.

For NetApp Storage Services Connector a separate Linux/x86 system is needed.

The storage scenarios System Clone/Copy/Refresh rely on specific infrastructure requirements – e.g. storage type needs to be supported, source and target systems reside within the same storage system. For SAP HANA, SAP Landscape Management introduced the integrated functionality to refresh the content using a database backup. This removes the dependencies on specific storage configurations. Please refer to the documentation links below.

Platform-independent scenarios:

Monitoring and management of SAP instances and SAP systems has been implemented across platforms. Among others, the following scenarios are fully supported on IBM Power Systems:

  • Gain full visibility of SAP systems, both on premise and in the cloud
  • Coordinate systems management tasks across cloud-based and on-premise environments
  • SAP Clone/Copy/Refresh using a database backup
  • Automatic Capacity Management including provisioning of additional dialog instances
  • Post-Copy Automation
  • Landscape Management for HANA
    • Automation of HA/DR operations such as takeover and failback
    • Near-zero downtime maintenance procedures
    • SAP HANA system and tenant rename

Documentation:

Service and support:

IBM offers technical services to architecture, install and configure a private cloud landscape for SAP. Please contact your IBM representative or send a mail to the IBM SAP International Competence Center (enable.sap@de.ibm.com)

The solution is supported jointly by IBM and SAP. Solutions for the most of the technical problems may be found at https://answers.sap.com/tags/73554900100700001039. For more community updates, help and resources please see https://community.sap.com/topics/landscape-management.

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