saptune 3.1 on the Horizon

In a few weeks saptune 3.1 will reach the public repositories of SLES for SAP Applications. Time to talk about the changes and new features.

As always saptune 3.1 will be released for all Service Packs still in support, namely:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 12 SP5
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP1
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP4
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP5

Run SAP on VMware in IBM Cloud

VMware as a leader in the virtualization industry is obviously the first choice when it comes to running SAP on an elastic, agile, complete (top to bottom) and certified virtualized platform.

Most likely when we look at a running SAP workload on VMware, we will intuitively think of running workload on-premise or private data center … Well, it makes sense, but it is not the only option for VMware.

Thanks to the strong partnership between VMware, IBM and SAP, customers can operate their SAP workload in IBM Cloud on VMware in a fully certified environment !! which is a unique offer in the cloud industry.

DMO: BWoH: From SAP Netweaver BI 7.0 to SAP Netweaver 7.5 BI on HANA {Technical preparation and execution}

Summary of what we achieved: We have recently migrated and upgraded the BW/BI system from Netweaver 7.0 to Netweaver 7.5 using the SAP’s robust tool SUM 2.0’s DMO feature for one of our customer. The database size was nearly 3 terabyte and the resultant HANA database was around 250 Gigabyte.

The existing infrastructure was having database as Oracle 11.2.0.2.0 and Operating System HPUX ia64.

So if anyone is going to work on a similar assignment, can refer to this blog post for insight.

Optimizing BDLS For HANA Large Scale Instances (HLIs)

Introduction:

The purpose of this blog post is to give the audience an overview of how I handled BDLS process in the refreshes of HANA Large Scale Instances. I will try to give as much information as possible (which is already publicly available and maybe not all be in a single place) and try to depict how I used it to build a solution.

The Motivation: 

All SAP Basis consultants had to deal with BDLS process in their careers at some point or the other, but it becomes a challenge and a pain when the size of the DB is in several TBs. The process then needs many hours or even days to run.

Develop UI5 / Fiori App Using VS code.

Step 1:

1. Install Node.js  – Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine.

2. Install VS Code – Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications Link.

Step 2:

Create a folder and open it in VS code.

In VS code go to Extensions(cntrl +shift+ X).

High Availability and DR for SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Central Services

As SAP application touches many critical parts of a company such as its’ ERP, manufacturing, business processes, customer service etc. it has become the lifeline of many enterprises that depends on it for their business to operate properly. As such, high-availability has became one of the top concerns of company managements when it comes to their SAP systems.

In this article, we will discuss at a high-level what is HANA system replication, how it works, what are the limitations when it comes to high-availability, and how we can overcome them. We will also discuss about the options for SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA and SAP Central Services’s high-availability and what are the key differences, so that you can choose the right tool for the right job.

Dynamic tiering and Extended tables

What is dynamic tiering?

Let me begin by telling you what is dynamic tiering.

SAP HANA dynamic tiering is a native big data solution for SAP HANA. Dynamic tiering adds smart, disk-based extended storage to your SAP HANA database. Dynamic tiering enhances SAP HANA with large volume, warm data management capability. When you use SAP HANA to place hot data in SAP HANA in-memory tables, and warm data in extended tables, highest value data remains in memory, and cooler less-valuable data is saved to the extended store. The extended store can reduce the size of your in-memory database.

SUSE – Let’s migrate “saptune” to version 2

In May, 2019 SUSE made an announcement on new saptune version, which looked promising as they eliminated the hard-coding of parameters and instead, they have listed in a configuration file. Also more SAP Notes will be included in saptune which results in less headache during system configuration. I got excited to use this new version of saptune but it was not generally available until July, 2019.

Myth and truth about cluster & pool tables on HANA

In general nearly everyone knows that with new installations based on NW750 there are no cluster tables anymore. When you migrate to HANA one prerequisite is that all cluster and pool tables have to be declustered/depooled.

But is this really correct? In my last projects there were a lot of issues regarding cluster and pool tables. SUM and SWPM have not worked as expected and so some data was not migrated / depooled / declustered automatically in cause of bugs.

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 Installation – Preparation for HANA Migration using DMO

A lot of SAP customers have been migrating their existing SAP landscapes from traditional database platforms to SAP HANA. OS/DB migration using SAPinst (SWPM) has been in place since long, however the migration to SAP HANA database requires certain minimum SAP release/SPS level as a prerequisite for the existing SAP systems in the customer landscape.

Your SAP on Azure – Part 4 – High Availability for SAP HANA using System Replication

In the today’s post, I would like to present you a solution for protecting the HANA database server.

SAP HANA database offers two solutions that are designed for High Availability:

a) Host Auto-failover – in this solution you need to deploy additional host to the current HANA database and configure it to work in standby mode. In case the active node failures, the standby host can automatically switch operations to the secondary node. This solution requires a shared storage, which we already know is a small problem for Azure

Basis Engineers’ Ultimate Guide for SAP Debugging

I think that every Basis engineer and SAP developer will agree with me when I say:

It can be REALLY painful to find the root cause of an issue in a complex SAP system.

Orchestrated nZDM for SAP HANA with a single TakeOver

Using the powerful Custom Process engine, SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) delivers a lot of pre-built processes to automate operations for SAP HANA. One of the best examples is the “near Zero Downtime Maintenance for SAP HANA” operation which helps you perform maintenance or upgrade activities for your SAP HANA setup while taking care of the System Replication, as well as of users and applications.

Supported SAP Product versions on HANA 2.0

“SAP has released SAP HANA Database 2.0 for SAP Kernel 7.49 64-Bit unicode and higher for certain operating system platforms. Therefore, SAP products that use these kernel versions, and are still in SAP Extended Maintenance after 2016 will be operated on SAP HANA Database 2.0.”

Above statement is from Note 2420699 – Release of SAP HANA Database 2.0 for older SAP Versions. Since Kernel version 7.49 is download compatible to SAP NetWeaver 7.4, Hence, we can assume below products are eligible to run on SAP HANA Database 2.0, with minimum version SPS0 Revision 001.