SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



High-Level Architecture

The overall architecture of SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances) readily offers ability and flexibility of Azure to scale resources for the SAP application layer to meet your needs.




The Azure Large Instance stamp composed of the following resources:

  • Compute- Servers that are based on one of the several generations of  Intel Xeon processors that provide the necessary compute capability and are SAP HANA certified.
  • Network- A unified high-speed network fabric that interconnects the compute and storage.
  • Storage- It can be easily accessed through a unified network fabric and its storage capacity depends upon the specific SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances) configuration specified by each customer but more storage capacity can be added at an additional monthly.

SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instance) are offered in multiple Azure regions which facilitates the disaster recovery capabilities that customers can easily choose to implement as different Large Instance stamps within one geo-political region are connected to each other, for example, HANA Large Instance Stamps in US West and US East are connected through a dedicated network link for disaster recovery replication. 

Architectural Components

  • Virtual network- This service can securely connect various Azure resources to each other and is also subdivided into separate subnets for each layer which can readily deployed on Azure VMs to connect to the HANA database layer residing on large instances.

  • Virtual machines- They are extensively used in the SAP application layer as well as shared services layer which includes a jumpbox used by administrators to set up HANA Large Instances also to offer access to other VMs.

  • HANA Large Instances- It is a physical server certified to meet SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) standards runs SAP HANA which uses two HANA Large Instances i.e. a primary and a secondary compute unit. High availability at the data layer is provided through HANA System Replication (HSR).

  • High availability pair- It is a group of HANA Large Instances blades that are managed together to provide application redundancy and reliability.

  • MSEE (Microsoft Enterprise Edge)- It is a connection point from a connectivity provider or your network edge through an ExpressRoute circuit.

  • Network Interface Cards (NICs)- HANA Large Instance server offers four virtual NICs by default in which one NIC is required for client communication, second for the node-to-node connectivity needed by HSR, third for HANA Large Instance storage, and fourth for iSCSI used in high availability clustering.

  • Network File System (NFS) storage- This server supports the network file share that provides the secure data persistence for HANA Large Instance.

  • ExpressRoute- It is widely recommended for creating the private connections between an on-premises as well as Azure virtual networks that do not go over the public internet. This connection is setup as a part of Microsoft offering.

  • Gateway- The ExpressRoute Gateway is generally used to connect the Azure virtual network used for the SAP application layer to the HANA large Instance network and use the High Performance or Ultra Performance SKU.

  • Disaster Recovery (DR)- Storage replication is supported and will be configured from the primary to the DR site located in another region, upon request.








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