Planning for Implementing SAP Solutions on Azure (Part 1 of 5)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 


To read part 2 please click here
To read part 3 please click here
To read part 4 please click here
To read part 5 please click here



Azure VM Compute Considerations

The major criteria for determining if a VM size offers throughput requirement needed for the given SAP workload is constituted by the SAPS metric which also represents one of the primary factors considered by Microsoft and SAP while certifying Azure VMs for SAP NetWeaver as well as SAP HANA.

Hyperthreading on bare-metal server can improve the overall throughput but , the increase is not directly proportional to to the number of CPU threads of the host which results in the delivery of 130-140% of the throughput more by a single core with two hyperthreaded CPU threads in comparision to the same processor core without hyperthreading. D(S)v3, E(S)v3, M-series are some of the NetWeaver and/or SAP HANA certified Azure VM families running on Intel Hyperthreading enabled  host hardware.

It is recommended to apply additional factors and considerations after conducting a SAP sizing analysis for better performance. Some approaches to sizing SAP systems are:

  • Reference based sizing in which ST03 and EarlyWatch data is analyzed as well as compared to another known customer with similar workload and a known hardware configuration.
  • SAP Quicksizer is a SAP tool that can calculate SAPS, DB size, and RAM based on may inputs including the business document volumes and number of users. 
  • T-Shirt sizing is based on the anticipated number of SAP users where precise information is unavailable.   

You can also easily evaluate the performance of your existing Azure deployments by simply leveraging load testing tools.

Azure VM Networking Considerations

The throughput is unaffected by the following factors:
  • Number of network interfaces in which the bandwidth limit is cumulative of all the outbound traffic from the VM.
  • Accelerated networking can help in achieving the published limit, but cannot change the limit. 
  • Traffic destination can count all the destinations towards the outbound limit.
  • Protocol count all outbound traffic towards the limit.

Accelerated Networking and Proximity Placement Groups can help Azure VMs while deploying Azure VMs for a SAP workload, SAP application layer, and SAP DBMS layer. Following points to be noted about Accelerated Networking:

  • It is impossible to switch on Accelerated Networking for existing VMs as it should be enabled when a VM is created but you can easily delete a VM and create a new VM using the same disks.

  • SQL server running with datafiles is stored directly on blob storage, can benefit from Accelerated Networking.

  • You can have one or more Accelerated Network NICs and a traditional non-accelerated network card on the same VM.

  • SAP application server to database server latency can be tested with ABAP report/SSA/CAT -> ABAPMeter.

  • Inefficient "chatty" ABAP code or particularly intensive operations such as large Payroll jobs or IS-Utilities Billing jobs have shown very significant improvement after enabling Accelerated Networking.

  • You should use Standard Azure Load Balancer instead of the Basic one to take advantage of the Accelerated Networking in load balancing scenarios.   




To read part 2 please click here
To read part 3 please click here
To read part 4 please click here
To read part 5 please click here






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Query, Visualize, & Monitor Data in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Azure Sentinel Workbooks Several ready for use templates are provided by the Azure Sentinel that can be used to create your own workbook and then modify them as needed for Contoso. Most of the data connectors it uses to ingest data come with their own workbooks, but better insight can be obtained by simply looking into the data that is being ingested by using tables and visualizations, including bar and pie charts. You can also make your own workbook easily by using this data from the beginning instead of using the predefined templates. Workbook Page You can easily access the workbook page from the Azure Sentinel from the navigation pane which consists of the: Workbook header- You can add a new workbook and review the saved workbooks as well as templates that are available on the workbook page. Templates section- You can access existing workbook templates on the Templates tab. You can save some of the workbooks for quick access and they will appear on the My Workbooks tab.  From the
Read more

Planning for Implementing SAP Solutions on Azure (Part 2 of 5)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 1 please click  here To read part 3 please click  here To read part 4 please click  here To read part 5 please click  here Load Balancing The load balancer uses probe ports to determine as well as route the traffic to an active DBMS node, but of there's any failover then the most common SAP application architecture can automatically reconnect against the private virtual IP address without the need for the SAP application to reconfigure it, while the load balancer redirect the traffic against the private virtual IP address without any need for the SAP application to reconfigure. The loaf balancer also offers an option of DirectServerReturn which if configured, can help in directing the traffic from the DBMS VM to the SAP application layer directly to the application layer without routing through the load balancer. But, if it isn't configured, then the return traffic to the SAP application layer is routed through the load balancer. You can also use Azure Load Balan
Read more

Work with String Data Using KQL Statements

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Extract Data from Unstructured String Fields Unstructured string fields often contains the Security log data and requires parsing to extract data. There are multiple ways of pulling information from string fields in KQL and the two primary operators used are extract and parse.  Extract It gets a match for a regular expression from a text string. You can convert the extracted substring to the indicated type.  Arguments regex- A regular expression. captureGroup- A positive int constant indicating the capture group to extract. 0 stands for the entire match, 1 for the value matched by the first '('parenthesis')' in the regular expression, 2 or more for subsequent parenthesis.  text- A string to search. typeLiteral- An optional type literal. If provided, the extracted substring is converted to this type.  Returns If regex finds a match in text- the substring matched against the indicated capture group captureGroup, optionally converted to typeLiteral. If there's no mat
Read more