Hello everyone,
We are happy to announce the availability of a new joint IBM/VMware whitepaper .
The IBM SAP International Competence Center (ISICC), the SAP Center of
Excellence / Value Prototyping and VMware carried out a Proof of Concept. to
show our experiences and recommendations running a so called “Blue Stack” of IBM
hardware and software components which deliver that dynamic infrastructure for a
typical SAP Business Suite landscape. This Proof of Concept shows that the IBM
Blue Stack offers a uniquely integrated, easy to manage and cost-effective way
to deliver mission-critical SAP applications, matched closely to business
needs.
The whitepaper targets "mainstream, average" SAP customer situations,
neither particularly small nor particularly large.
It is available here:
http://www.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP101749
SAP
Application components in a real-world scenario:
SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver BW,
SAP NetWeaver Portal, SAP NetWeaver Process Integration and SAP Solution
Manager.
Infrastructure components:
IBM DB2
SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server
VMware vSphere components
IBM System x platform
IBM XIV Storage
technologies
The PoC demonstrates that an integrated solution from IBM
enables:
• Greater CPU and memory utilization offers better SAP performance
for the same hardware investment
• Integrated XIV storage delivers faster
data transfer, improved performance and higher productivity
• Automated
failover, non-disruptive testing and faster disaster recovery reduces total
business risk
The specific use cases covered in this whitepaper show
various aspects IT departments use in their day to day business activities.
We show the benefits of using virtualization to run several SAP
applications in separate virtual machines (VMs) across one or two physical
servers. We simulate realistic business process workloads with the IBM Rational
Performance Tester. The ability to monitor the system behavior of Linux and DB2,
CPU- and memory utilization as well as storage I/O rates was accomplished using
standard tools from VMware and SAP.
To demonstrate business resiliency, we used VMware Site Recovery Manager
and the IBM XIV storage system to address high availability and disaster
recovery scenarios. We used IBM FlashCopy Manager in
order to create FlashCopy-based backups of the SAP production database.
We test cloning functionality using the IBM XIV storage system and describe the
proper set up and use of cloning scenarios.
Michael