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






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