Operating System Support of Azure for SAP Workloads

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



Azure VMs

SAP certified operating systems supported for SAP products on Azure VMs includes:
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 (R2), 2016 and 2019
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (SLES 12) and higher
  • SUSE SLES for SAP Applications (based on SLES 12) and higher
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) and higher
  • Red Hat RHEL for SAP (based on RHEL 7) and higher
  • Red Hat RHEL for SAP HANA (based on RHEL 7) and higher
  • Oracle Linux 7 (OL7)
While running SAP products on Linux, you should also review the following SAP notes:
  • 2243692- Linux on Microsoft Azure (Iaas) VM SAP license issues
  • 2513384- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications for Azure
  • 2694118- Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA Add-On on Azure
Note- Multi-SID cluster configurations for SAP Central Services is supported with Windows Server as guest operating system on Azure VMs, but it is not supported with any of the Linux distributions.

SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances)

SAP-certified operating systems supported for SAP products on SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances) includes:

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 for SAP Applications.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 or 7.x for SAP HANA.

Storage Support for Azure for SAP Workloads

Azure VM Disks

Storage-specific provisions for Azure VM hosting SAP workloads can be described as:
  • "To increase the total number of IOPS per volume presented to a guest operating system in the VM multiple disks can be striped using functionality operating systems offer and each disk is protected from a physical drive failure by the means of mirroring. Hence, using a software RAID level higher than RAID-0 is not necessary."

  • "DB log files should be stored on different disks than the DB data files."

  • "Azure VMs automatically offers a D:\ drive within the VM instance, which is not persisted and should not be used at all by the DBMS or any SAP files/directories."

  • The use of managed disk is recommended for SAP workloads. 

Using Azure Premium Storage for all the SAP production systems is strongly recommended in Azure VMs instead of Azure Standard Storage. Most of the performance issues of the DBMS that are deployed in Azure VMs are related to:
  • IPOS limits of Standard Storage
  • High latency with Azure Standard Storage, which slows down business processing. 

SQL Server also offers to place SQL Server data files and transaction log files directly on Azure Storage Blobs without wrapping them in VHDs as it can overcome the VHD limits in smaller Azure VMs as well as increases the IOPS using Azure Standard Storage. However, it is not recommended to directly place SQL Server data and transaction log on Azure Storage Blobs as standard deployment method because:

  • The Premium Storage Cache, which is established on the local compute node is not used in such a scenario. 
  • The data volume throughput SLA of the VM is not honored.
  • I/O traffic goes through the network channel and not through the storage I/O channel. Especially when using the Premium Storage this can lead to some disadvantages with regards to the deterministic I/O latencies. 
  • A Premium Storage Account has a current size limitation of 35 TB.
  • An Azure Standard Storage Account cannot be transferred to a Premium Storage Account. If you want to move a VHD from one storage account to another, then, you have to copy the VHDs between them. 
  • For SAP application servers, often Premium Storage is not needed from a storage workload point-of-view,
  • For Azure Standard Storage, any caching is not recommended which is offered during the creation of VHDs which is different to Azure Premium Storage. 
  • With Azure Premium Storage, allowing of read only caching is recommended for the VHDs that supports DBMS files. VHDs supporting transaction log or redo files should not use any caching with Azure Premium Storage.
  • Azure Premium Storage read/write caching should not be used for the VHDs that supports database files.  

The choice of the storage has also backup implications and Premium Storage must also be used in combination with the Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) in Azure.











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