Manage & Organize your MS Azure Resource Groups or...

former_member687842 · ‎08-02-2022

Overview

Today, the most important thing to consider is to opt for professional landscape management services. Leaving the job to inexperienced management can bring down the sap systems or cloud services and can cause immense damage to your business.

SAP LaMa 3.0 Enterprise Edition is useful for a wide range of SAP customers and use cases, but it's especially important to large enterprises that manage very large, diverse, and often geographically dispersed SAP landscapes.

SAP Landscape Management is an orchestration solution that can help you simplify, automate, and centralize the management and operations of your SAP landscapes running on premise, in the public or private cloud, and in hybrid environments. Even now we have SAP Landscape Management Cloud, a new software as a service (SaaS) product that helps reduce costs in IaaS cloud environments.

SAP LaMa is used by many customers to operate and monitor their SAP landscape and Cloud Technologies as well. Since SAP LaMa 3.0 SP23, it ships with a connector to Azure by default. You can use this connector to Resize, deallocate and start virtual machines, copy and relocate managed disks, and delete managed disks. With these basic operations, you can relocate, copy, clone, and refresh SAP systems using SAP LaMa.

Scope & Benefits

Digital transformation is much more than a business catchphrase. To stay competitive, companies of all sizes need to drive business innovations instead of just keeping the lights on. Reducing the resources on routine repetitive management operations, increasing the focus on the new high-value business tasks becomes more critical.

A fragmented approach can limit your view of what’s happening, which can lead to hidden inefficiencies and downtime. Managing modern hybrid landscapes not only requires unified management with a clear view, it requires simplification, standardization, and automation for operational efficiency.

Get ready to make your digital transformation through standardization and automation with SAP Landscape Management and grab the below benefits such as to:

Automate repetitive, time-consuming administration tasks and tailor processes to your specific needs.

Increase operational efficiency to drive business innovations.

Help you centralize landscape operations and gain landscape-wide visibility through a single user interface.

Reduce the complexity of extensive cloud infrastructures and save a significant amount in related cloud infrastructure costs.

Visualize and reduce your energy consumption for IaaS through automated scaling routines for SAP solutions.

Reduced TCO by systematically and automatically scaling systems and deactivating unused systems.

Controlled IaaS budget to enable real-time analytics and system insights for spend monitoring, comparing, and forecasting.

Integrated, holistic view into run operations for productivity to avoid multiple tools and multiple experts.

Manage your Microsoft Azure Resources with inbuilt LaMa Adapter for Azure

SAP LaMa can be combined with Azure to extend the SAP instance and landscape management capabilities by leveraging the Azure features. Some of the functions includes:

It helps you visualize your Azure Virtual Machines in a single user interface as shown below.

It can help you to Resize your Machines as well.
3. You can simply Power on & off your virtual machines along with SAP Instances with the help of a scheduler.
4. You can destroy or deallocate your Machines as well.

The real advantage is to manage & organize all your MS Azure subscriptions under a Single Platform.

Configuration Steps for SAP LAMA and MS Azure Integration

The Azure connector is shipped as of SAP LaMa 3.0 SP05. We recommend always installing the latest support package and patch for SAP LaMa 3.0. Currently SP23 is the latest one. The Azure connector uses the Azure Resource Manager API to manage your Azure resources. SAP LaMa can use a Service Principal or a Managed Identity to authenticate against this API. If your SAP LaMa is running on an Azure VM, you can either use Managed Identity or Service Principal. Below are the steps if you are using a service principal.

Use a Service Principal to get access to the Azure API

Go to https://portal.azure.com

Open the Azure Active Directory blade

Click on App registrations

Click on New registration

Enter a name and click on Register

Select the new App and click on Certificates & secrets in the Settings tab

Create a new client secret, enter a description for a new key, select when the secret should expire and click on Save.

Write down the Value. It is used as the password for the Service Principal

Write down the Application ID. It is used as the username of the Service Principal

The Service Principal does not have permissions to access your Azure resources by default. Assign the Contributor role to the Service Principal at resource group scope for all resource groups that contain SAP systems that should be managed by SAP LaMa.

Create a new connector in SAP LaMa

Open the SAP LaMa website and navigate to Infrastructure. Go to tab Cloud Managers and click on Add.

Select the Microsoft Azure Cloud Adapter and click Next. Enter the following information:

Label: Choose a name for the connector instance

User Name: Service Principal Application ID or ID of the user assigned identity of the virtual machine.

Password: Service Principal key/password. You can leave this field empty if you use a system or user assigned identity.

URL: Keep default https://management.azure.com/

Monitoring Interval (Seconds): Should be at least 300

Use Managed Identity: SAP LaMa can use a system or user assigned identity to authenticate against the Azure API.

Subscription ID: Azure subscription ID

Azure Active Directory Tenant ID: ID of the Active Directory tenant

Note: Change Storage Type to save costs: Enable this setting if the Azure Adapter should change the storage type of the Managed Disks to save costs when 

the disks are not in use. For data disks that are referenced in an SAP instance configuration, the adapter will change the disk type to Standard 

Storage during an instance unprepare and back to the original storage type during an instance prepare. If you stop a virtual machine in SAP LaMa, 

the adapter will change the storage type of all attached disks, including the OS disk to Standard Storage. If you start a virtual machine in SAP LaMa, 

the adapter will change the storage type back to the original storage type.

Click on Test Configuration to validate your input. You should see below message at the bottom of the screen

Connection successful: Connection to Microsoft cloud was successful. "n" resource groups found.

Once the setup is finished. Navigate to Cloud Tab in Operations. You can now see all your resources- Resource Group wise as maintained in Azure Portal.

Conclusion

I conclude that In today's world, IT Landscape management is a necessary requirement. Effective landscape management practices ensure that your IT systems function at their maximum potential. They provide you assurance of server's security, up-time, and prompt resolutions in case of any issue. Thus, effective landscape management can help you address all server performance inefficiencies.

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