Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Abstract

This white paper describes technical and business considerations for planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP
landscapes. This paper addresses a variety of key considerations for SAP infrastructure. Specifically, the paper
addresses example deployment options for the major layers of the infrastructure, including the host or compute
layer, the connectivity layer, and the storage or information layer.
December 2009

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Part Number: H6661

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Table of Contents
Executive summary........................................................................................................................... 4
Introduction........................................................................................................................................ 5
Transforming IT data center and operations for SAP ....................................................................... 6
Data center model........................................................................................................................... 10
IT service and operations management.......................................................................................... 19
Performance and high availability of an SAP virtual infrastructure ................................................. 21
Building a virtual infrastructure for SAP .......................................................................................... 23
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................... 26
References ...................................................................................................................................... 27

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Executive summary
Business case

SAP and non-SAP applications support mission-critical business processes in

todays world. Maintaining continuity of operations and consistency of information
across SAP landscapes is an ongoing priority that EMC continues to deliver.
SAP landscapes have been expanding from a client /server single instance to
federated landscapes that include multiple applications and database instances. It
is common for a company to support eight to ten SAP landscapes, each including
multiple instances for production, disaster recovery, operational backup and
recovery, quality assurance, development, test, and training. These SAP
landscapes, sprawling with servers and storage, tend to be highly federated with
stringent performance and availability requirements. While supporting the
expanding SAP landscapes is a requirement, the expenditure on people, power,
cooling, and floor space drives up the capital and operating costs, putting pressure
on already strained data center resources.

Business
environment

Today, organizations are under increased pressure to reduce capital expenditure,

operating costs, and carbon footprint for sprawling SAP and non-SAP application
landscapes. This pressure comes with the requirement to maintain or improve
existing SLAs for business continuity, performance and availability for this missioncritical landscape. EMC and VMware are working together to help customers build
a robust virtual infrastructure to support their SAP deployments.
The following figure illustrates the evolvement of SAP landscapes.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Introduction
Purpose

The purpose of this white paper is to review business and technical considerations
when planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP landscapes. This paper will address a
variety of key considerations for an SAP infrastructure; specifically the major layers
of the infrastructure, including desktop, server, network, and storage domains that
are critical to a virtual infrastructure. The readers will gain further insights from this
paper when considering a virtual infrastructure for SAP IT.

Audience

This white paper is intended for individuals interested in data center alternatives for
SAP IT when considering a virtual infrastructure including applied technologies,
design concepts, and planning considerations. Senior managers, applications and
data center managers, SAP Basis administrators, DBAs, and system and storage
architects will benefit from reading this paper.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Transforming IT data center and operations for SAP

Introduction

Embracing a virtual infrastructure strategy for SAP will impact the business by delivering
the most efficient IT for SAP with reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including
smaller data center facilities and carbon footprints. The transformation ushers in new
data center models, management policies, and operation practices for addressing SAP
performance and capacity issues, managing SAP IT, and ensuring business continuity.
In addition, SAP Basis and application administrators are looking for better ways to
manage the SAP landscapes throughout the application lifecycle implementation,
migrations, consolidations, upgrades, and ongoing maintenance.
A survey sponsored by the SAPs user group revealed the following three most difficult
tasks:
Moving production data to non-production systems,
reorganizing the database, and
monitoring the system performance.
The most time-consuming tasks also include copying data to a non-production system,
managing complex landscapes for performance monitoring, rehearsing disaster
recovery, and managing application changes.
In addition, with the growing of SAP landscapes, performance issues are taking place
more frequently than before.

Benefits

Transforming to a virtual infrastructure for SAP can provide value to applications and
data center teams, including:
Increased operational flexibility and efficiency Rapid SAP software application
and services deployment, and shortened time to productivity.
Minimized risk and enhanced IT service levels Zero-downtime maintenance
capabilities and rapid recovery times for high availability and streamlined disaster
recovery scenarios across the data center.
Optimized SAP IT environments Compliant provisioning, monitoring, and change
management for SAP governed by agreed upon service catalogs between
business and IT management.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Cloud
computing

A key foundation for an SAP virtual infrastructure is the adoption of virtualization

technologies to enable delivery of SAP IT as a service to different customers or
groups in an enterprise. Key attributes of a virtual computing environment include:
an automated technical workflow for asset management and provisioning, and
a business workflow enabling the positioning of service catalogs for SAP
customers to plan and order services and IT to complete the approval tasks and
billing tasks.
The following figure illustrates the way to plan a virtual infrastructure for SAP.

Considerations

Make sure to perform the following steps when transforming to an virtual

infrastructure strategy:
Prioritize business and application drivers for transforming changes to SAP
application based on upgrades, new modules, instance consolidation, and legacy
retirements.
Develop phased transition strategy through looking at consolidation, virtualization,
IT operations, and data center management.
Develop a project-based roadmap prioritized on the impact to the business and
ROI.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

SOA and SOI

Two computing paradigms are merging to bring business agility with improved time
to value for application development and deployment, along with financial
efficiencies both capital and operational in providing SAP IT as a service.
Enterprise Service Orient Applications (SOA) platforms, such as SAP NetWeaver,
are driving new application IT paradigms for developing and adopting process-driven
applications. The goal is to deploy adaptive business processes based on reusable
application services with secure access to any device from any location.
With a virtual infrastructure, the Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) enables the
data center to provision SAP IT as a service, as against physical assets, for
customers including SAP business users and applications IT.
The following figure illustrates the SOA and data center platforms.

Note: A virtual infrastructure for SAP must align IT service levels to support
federated application landscapes based on the SOA platforms and virtual IT assets.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Efficiency and
responsiveness
through end-toend management

SAP landscapes are heavily distributed and interfaced.

An effective IT
management framework requires a top-to-bottom view of SAP virtual hosts,
including SAP components, dependent software, and underlying component
infrastructure. In addition, an end-to-end mapping of SAP and non-SAP virtual
hosts is required to manage the external interfaces dependencies.
The key to reducing cost and risk for SAP IT is the ability to know what exists, what
has changed, and if configurations are compliant with the regulatory or internal IT
best practices for SAP. The problem, even if can be solved manually, is often a
labor-intensive, costly, and risk-prone proposition. A solution that focuses on
automation and integrated IT management can greatly reduce risk and maximize
your operating expense investment.
The following figure illustrates the end-to-end IT management for SAP.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

Data center model

Introduction

This section covers some of the alternatives for each of the IT domains: SAP
application, OS, network, storage, and desktop. The IT management requirements
for monitoring and managing the cloud data center for SAP will also be addressed.

Foundation
platforms

Virtualization makes it possible to pool common infrastructure resources and break

the legacy one application to one server model. By virtualizing your SAP
application and infrastructure, the hardware costs in the data center will be highly
reduced, which leads to reductions in real estate, power, and cooling requirements,
and results in significantly lowered IT costs.
Virtualization also offers a new way of managing your SAP application and
infrastructure, which can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks,
such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and maintenance.
Application versus Hypervisor virtualization
When looking at virtualization for SAP applications, it is important to distinguish
between the application and hypervisor virtualizations. The following figure compares
the two types of virtualizations.

As part of SAP NetWeaver, the SAP Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC) provides
the ability to virtualize the SAP landscape on top of the OS by separating the
application layer form OS dependencies whether they are UNIX or x86 platforms.
SAPs strategy for ACC is to integrate with UNIX, Hypervisor, and storage vendors
for platforms to capitalize on partners domain expertise.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

10

The Hypervisor Virtualization takes place at the hardware level of the server by
separating the OS and its dependent services from the server platform. VMware
vSphere allows a data center to implement an OS cloud, supporting SAP and nonSAP applications.
Note: SAP ACC and Hypervisors are complementary in SAP deployments. SAP
ACC with VMware vSphere 4 and EMC virtual storage can enhance SAP landscapes
in realizing the capital and operating savings of a virtual infrastructure.

Data center
logical view

A logical view of the data center serves as a guide in reviewing deployment options
for an SAP virtual infrastructure based on the EMC and VMware platforms.
The primary IT domains include the OS cloud for the servers, shared storage for the
datastore, SAP desktops, and a unified network approach. It is important to
implement a virtual infrastructure based on the platforms that will scale out to
provide the performance and availability for growth in SAP.
Once the computers, storage, and network platforms are set, an integrated IT
management framework must be in place for IT operations and service management
for the SAP landscape.
The following figure illustrates the logical view of an SAP data center.

Notes:
The virtual infrastructure for SAP must be able to scale out for landscape
growth.
Management abstraction and integration between the IT domains are critical to
reducing operating expenses and delivering IT services for SAP.
Automated discovery and mapping for SAP virtual hosts are critical for
application-aware IT operations and service management in a virtual
infrastructure.

OS cloud

SAP deployments can generate significant server sprawl due to its tiered
architecture and the need to provision separate systems for development, quality
assurance/test, and production environments. As a result, SAP implementations can

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

11

span 50, 100, or more servers, and even smaller implementations can have a
relatively large IT footprint.
Virtualization enjoys fast-growing adoption among SAP customers who are already
reaping significant benefits in optimizing data center resources; easing SAP
upgrades, new implementations, and platform migrations; and better managing SLAs
to provide support services to the business for SAP.
The VMware vSphere cloud operating system leverages the power of virtualization to
transform the data center into cloud computing infrastructures. This is an extension
of the VMware Infrastructure platform that customers adopted in support of server
consolidation strategies for improved server utilization. A VMware vSphere cloud
operating system is comprised of the following two service groups for supporting
the cloud computing infrastructure:
Application services The set of components that provide built-in service level
controls to all applications running on VMware vSphere, regardless of application
type or operating system.
Infrastructure services The set of components that are provided for server,
storage, and network resources and are aggregated and allocated precisely on
demand to applications based on business priority.
Administration of infrastructure and application services, and automation of day-today operational tasks with visibility into every aspect of VMware vSphere
environments are provided by VMware vCenter Server.

The VMware vSphere cloud operating system provides the following benefits:
Enhances SAP upgrades / maintenance by increasing the number of testing cycles
without impacting project plans
Meets SAP SLAs for availability, application performance, and disaster recovery.
Provides data center resources pooling during mergers and acquisitions, driving
application consolidation and retirement of legacy systems.
Optimizes data center resources for SAP landscapes with reduced physical
servers, carbon footprint, and energy requirements, and with increased CPU
utilization.
Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP
Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

12

Datastores

SAP landscapes typically generate significant storage footprints driven by the size of
production instances and the number of copies maintained for QAS, DEV, TST,
TRN, and backup. This is compounded as organizations typically have multiple
landscapes including ERP, CRM, and BI which ultimately drive multi-terabyte SAP
storage footprints.
The key for an SAP datastore in a virtual infrastructure is to reduce capital and
operating expenses for SAP storage. EMCs storage platforms deliver this reduction
with scale-out and tiering capabilities within a single frame and management
abstraction by virtualizing storage resources in the array.
Scale-out and storage tiering in a single frame
The figure below depicts the EMC advanced functionality to optimize storage tiering
through a suite of software-based tiering capabilities, including areas such as qualityof-service management and optimization tools that offer the right levels of
performance to meet specific application service levels.

The next figure explores how the tiered storage can lower cost with optimized
service levels. Compared to an all-Fibre Channel configuration, a tiered storage
configuration not only provides a 17 percent cost savings, but delivers 38 percent
more IOPS, and requires 32 percent less power and cooling and 384 fewer drives.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

13

Management abstraction enables ease, speed, and automation

When deploying VMware for SAP, all VMware ESX services in a cluster must be
mapped to the storage to leverage mobility features such as VMware vMotion. As
stated earlier, SAP landscapes are expanding and scaling out, thus storage
management in a virtual infrastructure requires:
Automated discovery, reporting, and alerting that provide end-to-end visibility and
control for virtual server environments.
Simplified and automated storage provisioning allowing administrators to create
host groups, port groups, and device groups, and automate the process for
mapping storage to servers.
Just-in-time capacity allocation with virtual provisioning by presenting a large
amount of capacity to a host, and then consume space only as needed from a
shared pool.
Non-disruptive mobility of SAP data between any drives or RAID types with no
disruption to the availability of the application.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

14

Integrating OS
cloud with the
datastore

EMC and VMware have invested heavily to achieve benefits related to simplified
management of virtual environments in order to lower cost and enable higher levels
of service.
The following figure highlights the integration of VMware vSphere and EMC virtual
storage. This integration provides management abstraction that enables ease,
speed, and automation for provisioning resources, centralized reporting and control,
and ensures performance and minimized disruption for SAP landscapes.

Integrating the OS cloud with the storage datastore provides the following benefits:
Reduces operating expenses with management abstraction and automation for
SAP landscapes.
Quickly provision resources on demand
Centralized, automated management, reporting, and control
Ensures SAP performance and high availability.
QoS - Policy-based load balancing across physical resources
Non-disruptive mobility of applications and data

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

15

Desktop

Managing traditional desktops has become increasingly more complex. This is due
to the increasing number of users, remote and mobile, and the demand for high
levels of performance and quality while access multiple applications including SAP.
In addition, costs associated with IT administrative activities, including PC
maintenance, repairs, and upgrades, are also rising. This results in the
transformation of desktop management toward virtualization. VMware View
(formerly VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI) lets organizations streamline
desktop management and control, providing SAP users a virtual desktop that
behaves like a normal PC.
The figure below illustrates the centralized SAP desktop management.

The centralized SAP desktop management reduces capital and operating costs for
desktop applications including SAP through:
migrating users and intelligence from standalone machines to centralized data
center, and
unifying data centers to serve SAP business users requirements across different
geographies.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

16

Network

Unified networks
Typical SAP performance and availability require the data center to have two
separate but interdependent physical networks the Ethernet LAN and the Fibre
Channel SAN. Each network has its own terminology, protocols, management tools,
and physical components. This requires unique equipment and creates a
tremendous amount of redundancy, especially when it comes to administration. IT
administrators with different skill sets are needed to manage and support the two
networks.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet enables consolidation of server cables and adapters by
allowing LAN and SAN traffic to travel on a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet link. It also
seamlessly integrates with existing Fibre Channel networks, management
processes, and workflows, offering a smooth migration path for existing Fibre
Channel customers.

Virtual switches
Until recently, data center networks were designed under the safe assumption that
each end node was connected to the access port of an end-of-row switch in the
network and corresponded to one server running a single image that is, a single
instance of an OS and a single instance of a given application. Another safe
assumption was that the application and its associated OS would be persistently
bound to that specific physical server and would rarely, if ever, move onto another
physical server.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

17

Server virtualization modifies both of the previously mentioned assumptions of data

center network design by allowing multiple OS images to transparently share the
same physical server and I/O devices. As a consequence, it introduces the need to
support local switching between different SAP virtual machines within the same or
between physical servers to keep consistent with the current network operation
models.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

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IT service and operations management

Introduction

With the adoption of SAP NetWeaver, an end-to-end IT management framework and

tools for data center operations are now becoming a high priority.
Failing to properly configure, monitor, and manage server, network, and storage
systems sprawls in expanded SAP and non-SAP landscapes leads to inefficiency,
cost escalation, availability and compliance concerns, and reduces the mean time to
repair (MTTR).
Automated discovery and mapping of an SAP IT landscape is the getting started
point to provide a clear documentation required for planning and managing an SAP
upgrade, consolidation, or migration to virtualization in deploying a virtual
infrastructure.
Discovery and IT blueprinting unify SAP landscape information with infrastructure
configuration information from multiple sources into one single solution for CMDB
population from which IT can automate effective management of SAP IT.

IT operations

IT operations should provide automated service and perform infrastructure

monitoring, analyzing, and reporting, including the following:
Tracking SAP performance and identifying network bottlenecks before they impact
service levels.
Managing the performance of SAP critical applications and identifying problems
before end users call.
Isolating rapidly the root cause and remedy of an SAP application performance
problem.

IT service
management
process

IT service management process frameworks and best practices should incorporate:

a fully integrated service catalog for SAP landscapes,
the integration of SAP landscape and infrastructure configuration information into
a purpose-driven CMDB supporting service desk management, and
tightly governed processes to ensure that virtualization configuration policies are
enforced and risk of interruption is minimized for SAP.

Governance,
risk, and
compliance

IT governance, risk, and compliance need to provide continuous compliance analysis

with real-time violation alerting for internal governance and regulatory compliance
initiatives across the complete data center infrastructure, including:
the visibility of SAP IT infrastructure and how its components interact with each
other,
the ability to monitor, manage, and report on IT GRC for an SAP systems
landscape,

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

19

 an efficient and accurate process for managing data center configurations for SAP
IT, and
the consolidated view and control of physical and virtual infrastructure.
EMC Ionix

EMC Ionix provides an IT management framework and tools for end-to-end SAPaware operations and service desk management.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

20

Performance and high availability of an SAP virtual infrastructure

QoS

Quality of service (QoS) provides the ability to guarantee the SAP landscapes
priority in a shared virtual infrastructure environment, ensuring a defined level of
performance for SAP users. It is critical to provide QoS at every level of the IT
infrastructure:
Server - guarantee sufficient server-side resources (CPU, memory) to specific
virtual machines, establishing priority control and time sharing of resources.
Network - guarantee sufficient network resources (queuing, scheduling, traffic
shaping)
Storage - guarantee sufficient storage-side resources (response time, bandwidth,
throughput) to specific LUNs, establishing priority control and performance
(minimum/maximum) on a LUN-by-LUN basis
Organizations need to effectively guarantee the performance across the IT stack for
SAP transactions responding to potential problems diagnosed as soon as they start
occurring with a self-adjusting, self-optimizing services.

Archiving

Data management in SAP environments has become progressively more

challenging due to the fast-growing production databases for SAP Business Suite
applications data and reports. The impact of the growing database includes
performance degradation for end users, increased tier 1 storage footprint costs, and
longer backup and recovery windows, which can impact availability.
Today, there are additional drivers and influencers on archiving such as availability,
security, compliance, and record retention. Supporting these needs requires secure
data and document archiving with the ability of SAP end users to view data that has
been archived.
SAP data archiving provides the following benefits:
Ensures compliant storage and online access to SAP archived data by SAP and
non-SAP users.
Enforces ILM policies from SAP applications to data at rest in storage.
Extends business value and availability of SAP archived information for non-SAP
users to intelligently browse, search, and view archived print list reports and
business documents.
Reduces risk, training, and support costs with EMC certification for SAP
NetWeaver archiving APIs.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

21

Backup and
recovery

As an organization embraces virtualization for SAP, backup and recovery strategies

will be required for the desktop, applications, and database instances. Traditional
challenges for large SAP databases will continue, including insufficient backup
capabilities to handle growth and inability to meet backup and recovery windows. In
addition, backup and recovery strategies will be required for SAP application VMs
and centralized desktops. The design and planning considerations should include:
The size of the production database and the downtime window available for
backup.
The performance impact to SAP virtual servers, such as VMware ESX in managing
backups.
The performance impact on the LANs and SAN.
The size of the storage footprint required to maintain backup.
EMC with VMware can provide the following benefits:
Reduced impact to SAP virtual servers with array-based clones and snapshots to a
proxy server.
Enabling backup of SAP VMs with minimal impact to network resources leveraging
EMC source-based de-duplication.
Achieving backup windows for production SAP databases with reduced storage
with EMC target-based de-duplication.

Disaster
recovery

The most visible and, in some ways, most critical part of business continuity planning
is taking care of mission-critical applications such as SAP. The SAP Business Suite
manages business processes, such as order processing, shipping, and supply chain
management, that trigger updates to several applications in the landscape prior to
completion of the business event. Application services and data from multiple
sources or federated groups must be managed and protected for businessconsistent recovery.
Since an average company incurs over $1 million of revenue loss per hour of
downtime, data is required to be protected across the entire infrastructure -- the
network, server, and application layers. The continuity across local production
environment and remote environment should be established for planned and
unplanned downtime, including disaster recovery.
EMC products integrated with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
provide the ability to reduce risk and cost for SAP landscapes with automated
failover testing with no impact to the production.

System refresh

SAP Basis administrators and DBAs are challenged with the time and risk
associated with managing upgrades, new modules, maintenance, QA refreshes, and
migrations. Cloning SAP data is important to the lifecycle management of SAP
applications.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

22

For pre-go-live environments, procedures must be documented and tested

repeatedly from an established base to prepare for upgrades or migrations.
For post-go-live environments, copies of SAP data are required for patch testing,
feeding a data warehouse or an SAP Business Intelligence initial load, and
configuration and customization for enhanced functionality or new modules including
training.
To reduce the operating expense, risk and time for an SAP system refresh, consider
the following:
Integrating EMC with VMware enables array-based replication in support of large
SAP instances.
Empowering SAP Basis administrators and database administrators to create
second-instance copieswhere and when needed.
Automation walks users through the steps needed to create and manage replicas.

Building a virtual infrastructure for SAP

Introduction

Transformation to a virtual infrastructure is multi-faceted with significant impact

across infrastructure and applications with the journey representing a foundational
change in how IT organizations architect, operate, and deliver services to their
customers.
The last thing CIOs want to do is to introduce risks as they transfer their current data
center to a virtual infrastructure. Developing a strategy is critical to achieve
enterprise-scale virtualization of mission-critical SAP applications. Removing risk
from the equation, and delivering predictable results and faster ROI should be
primary objectives when planning a virtual infrastructure for SAP applications.

Planning the
move to virtual
infrastructure

As previously mentioned, IT drivers for moving to virtualization and cloud computing

are well understood rising costs due to sprawling SAP and non-SAP application
landscapes, decreasing data center floor space, cost of cooling and energy, and
others.
A disciplined approach is required to achieve the goals with minimal disruption to the
business. You may look at the following phases when planning the move to the
virtual infrastructure.
Consolidation Look for areas to consolidate SAP and non-SAP landscapes
including application consolidation influenced by planned mergers, acquisitions,
retiring legacy applications, or SAP upgrades. And then look for opportunities to
consolidate infrastructure, including desktops, servers, networks, and/ or storage.
Virtualization Consider virtualizing components of the SAP landscape, including
the SAP desktop, the application Dialogue Instance (DI), and the database Central
Instance (CI). For the infrastructure, look for virtualization within the IT domains
(servers, networks and storage). For mission-critical applications such as SAP, start
with the non-production environment.
Supporting IT Services With the adoption of virtualization for SAP landscapes, a
unified IT framework and tools for providing support services needs to be in place to

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

23

protect and ensure landscape availability for SAP users. The services include
backup and recovery, data replications for SAP system refresh, business continuity,
and automated IT resource management.
Policy-based automation for provisioning SAP IT In order to realize the value of
a virtual infrastructure for SAP, data center management needs to be able to
provision IT infrastructure as a service. Components for policy-based automation
include Service Catalogs for SAP; business workflow for reviewing, ordering and
chargeback of services; and automated IT best practices such as ITIL, for service
management, problem resolution, root cause analysis, configuration and change
management.
The figure below illustrates the process or phases that an organization will move
through on the journey to realizing the vision of the virtual infrastructure for SAP.
Note that the phases may overlap.

Building a
virtual
infrastructure
for SAP

As stated earlier, building a virtual infrastructure for SAP begins with a strategy that
considers the SAP application lifecycle and data center directions impacting the SAP
landscapes providing value to the business. Focus on the value to the business
creates consensus for project requirements, resources, and management support.
Second, a documented blueprint of the SAP and non-SAP landscapes, including
dependency mapping for IT components, will be critical for planning projects and
facilitating implementation.
Third, a project roadmap that supports business and data center management
objectives for the SAP landscape should be developed. The key in developing a
project-based roadmap is the prioritization based on the projects business impact,
including ROI and the complexity to implement.
Employing a project-based taxonomy, EMC works with customers to bring together
senior management, SAP teams, and IT to drive discovery and business impact
workshops to identify and prioritize projects enabling management to plan and
commit based on value and return to the business.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

24

The following figure provides a framework for project-based discovery and business
impact assessment for SAP IT transformation.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

25

Conclusion
Summary

SAP project teams are looking for better ways to manage their SAP landscapes
throughout the application lifecycle implementation, migrations, consolidations,
upgrades and ongoing maintenance. In addition, the teams need to continually
ensure optimal performance and high availability for SAP.
For IT, with growing SAP landscapes, infrastructure challenges are compounded
by constraints for power, cooling, and floor space within data centers and the
continual corporate acquisitions that introduce heterogeneous platforms into the
corporate architecture.

Recommendations

When transforming to virtual infrastructure for SAP where reusable applications

and IT services for SAP landscapes represent a key factor, you should consider
the following recommendations:
Understand the business and IT drivers for change including challenges and
objectives.
From a business and application perspective, drivers may include mergers
and acquisitions, new company offerings, plans for SAP upgrades, or new
modules or DBMS/ OS migrations for SAP.
From a data center management and IT operating standpoint, drivers may
include addressing deteriorating service levels for SAP IT, rising cost due to
a growing storage footprint for the SAP landscape (QAS/ DEV/ TRN), or
space limitations as the data center cannot support an expanded SAP IT
footprint due to physical limitations of data center size.
Have a current, documented IT Blueprint of the SAP systems landscape
Ideally, it is optimal to have an IT management framework and tools that can
automatically discover and map SAP IT dependencies. Not only will it help
planning and implementing new projects, but also subsequently the
configuration information can support ongoing IT operations and service
desk management.
Focus on collaboration
Commitment to change requires investment by the business and IT that is
based on value to the business.
The SAP application landscape is mission-critical to the business. For many
organizations, it is the largest single consumer of IT services. Working with
a vendor like EMC can help bring IT and business together to assess the
business impact for IT projects, leading to the virtual infrastructure
deployment for SAP.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

26

References
Related
documentation

For additional information, see the following documents:

Cisco technical primer - Cisco VN-Link: Virtualization-Aware Networking
EMC white paper Introduction to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
EMC white paper - EMC Symmetrix V-Max and VMware Virtual Infrastructure
VMware white paper - Best Practice Guidelines for SAP Solutions on VMware
Infrastructure

Next steps

EMC can help accelerate assessment, design, implementation, and management

while lowering the implementation risks and cost of building a virtual infrastructure for
SAP.
To learn more about this white paper, contact an EMC representative or visit
http://www.EMC.com/solutions/sap.

Planning a Virtual Infrastructure for SAP

Technology Concepts and Business Considerations

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