SAP, Linux, Virtualization and Itanium h. Introduction I have made thisarticle based mainly on proposal I have created last summer afterfinished tests on prototype systems detailed document available on my Linked. In profile, and additional tests and unofficial benchmarking data will follow later in new posts. This text is is mainly intended for those who own SAP on Itanium and Windows, andor for those interested in SAP, Itanium and virtualization. Many things happened in themean time, one of which is the Red Hats decision by the end of last. Enable Virtualization Patch' title='Enable Virtualization Patch' />December to discontinue support for Itanium or IPF, Intels Itanium. Processor Family in the announced future release RHEL 6. This wasnot so unexpected, and RH states that this decision is made becauseof the small number of Itanium systems sold in the recent period, andwhich doesnt tend to grow. But this story is not likely to end thatfast RH is fully supporting Itanium on RHEL 5 to the end of itslife in March 2. OEMs, Oracle bought Sun who has SPARC architecture and otherhardware there was a failed attempt to port Solaris to Itanium,enters the Xen advisory board http xenbits. Open Source contributions, Oracle Enterprise Linuxand Xen IA6. Itanium ports. RH6 is to be supported on IBMs POWERarchitecture, and so are other traditional RISCCISC CPUarchitectures, x. DOC 2. 34. 03. There are no clear indications from other software and hardwarevendors about Itaniums future at least not the ones I deal withhere having their support HP, SAP and Microsoft, but there arecurrent benchmarking results and research studies with predictions. Back in 2. 00. 3 mycompany bought HP EVA 5. Open. VMS cluster with two Alpha. ES4. 7 nodes to support Oracle 9i RAC database for our legacyapplication, along with a rack of Xeon based Proliants its a kindof tradition, before them we had Alpha and VAX systems. A year afteror more, it was decided that we should migrate to SAP. It was anambitious project we had 9 1. BW3. 5, ERP 2. 00. MM, WM having MFC automatedwarehouse, FICO, SD, PP, QM, PM, TM, logistics and procurement, etcmaybe I have omitted something, everything that we had in thelegacy Oracle application but HR, CRM and some remote locationswhich were covered in later roll out and optimization projects. Wealso implemented Solution Manager as project base and maintenancebase, having all the necessary strict Q A and GMP procedures. Allthis had to be supported with appropriate hardware andinfrastructure. The first choice was among others was HPs offerwith 1. Integrity Itanium based servers and HP UX. Somewhere in theearly beginnings, our project management decided to change OSplatform to Windows Today, five years later, we have at leasttwice larger system 1. TB database in size in production, number ofusers up to 8. RAM up to 1. 6 2. G inproduction, same number of CPUS 2x mx. GHz per node, and someinfrastructure improvements. In computing, virtualization refers to the act of creating a virtual rather than actual version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage. We never had any serious unplanneddowntime or system failures, performance, reliability, availabilityand stability was predictable apart from some OS problems with. Microsoft MSCS and one short storage outage. But, in the pastyear we had a large roll out and optimization project involving ERPupgrade from ECC5. ECC6. 0, and it showed that project members,developers, IT staff and key users always needed and still needadditional sandbox systems, IDES demo systems, system copies andsimilar for different purposes from experimenting and unofficialtesting, to training and Q A, project preparation and operation,etc. This is showing the need for new level of flexibility whichcould be only obtained with virtualization. There were many options,from buying new physcial machines very expensive even for lessexpensive architectures, manual consolidation MCOS and MCOD, withor without Microsoft WSRM Windows System Resource Manager, thin OSsingle kernel virtualization like VZ, Parallels Virtuozzo, but aswe have strict security standards and procedures which conflict with. OS patch level for VZ, this wasnt convenient even for testing, tofull virtualization platforms. It turns out that with Itanium you canonly have HP UX VSE Itanium VM or RHEL if you want official SAPsupport as explained later. The Sims 2 Bon Voyage Iso more. There is also a very interesting andsophisticated SAP solution Adaptive Controller, but for now, Xen on. Businesses that fail to apply scheduled updates to their Microsoft Windows workstations put their organization at risk Windows Update, when enabled, automatically. VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure digital workspace technology, accelerates digital transformation for evolving IT environments. Learn More Now. RHEL is doing a very good job. I have two HP BL8. ERP development, Q Aand production, BISEM IDES with Java instance, ERP IDES, etc andthey all work properly and very stable. Bitdefender Gravity Zone Security for Virtualized Environments SVE is the platformneutral solution designed for todays complex datacenters. Learn more about update KB4013429, including improvement and fixes, any known issues, and how to get the update. Midi File Converter Smf 15 on this page. From pefromance standpoint,HP UX with Windows guests doesnt offer more at all without AVIOdrivers, similar to PV guest drivers on Xen which dont exist onlyfor Itanium, the only thing I miss at the moment is Live Migrationon RHELXen which Integrity VM supports, as it also has some othernice to have features. But I am able to move virtual machines todifferent hosts manually without a problem multipathing and sharedstorage does its work. SAP supportsvirtual guests, without responsibility about their performance, anddatabase on production systems should be on physical servers ifmaximum performance is needed otherwise, there arent importantreasons not to do it even with database. We use Oracle 1. 0g at themoment 1. Windows, which works fine on guest systems butbecause of Windows, it has to be HVM, full virtualization. Foroptimum performance and many other good reasons, the best optionwould be migration to RHEL, including production systems all thetests show that it would be a smooth transition. There is a generaltrend about migration of SAP systems from Unix to Linux for all thegood reasons, while migration from Windows is less popular. Thing isthat 6. 0 of all recently sold Itanium servers are Unix read HP UX,3. Linux RHEL and SLES, and only 5 are Windowsfirst link among references. Microsoft has no intention to introduce Hyper V on Itanium as Citrixalso doesnt currently, because the Xen code branch they boughtdidnt cover ia. Windows Server 2. Migration to a different hardware platform isnot an option, just as migration to HP UX at the moment currentnumber of Itanium servers does not justify that risk and expense. But, the old aging hardware should be either upgraded but it costs additional CPU costs almost as one BL8. RHELXen paravirtualization is available for old. Madison cores, but HVM isnt. There are better reasons to migrate to. RHEL beside this money saving driver decision makers can decideto change CPU architecture at one point, but with RHEL we can alreadyhave the level of flexibility we need far better than in anyother option HP UX is too expensive, and Windows doesnt offer it. One important aspect is coming from GMP and other compliance issues,so we need same platform both on test Q A systems and inproduction, and this justifies even more migration to RHEL5. So,the starting point was SAP ERP and BI systems on Windows Server 2. HP Integrity servers and HP EVA storage virtualization solution, and the current stop is some of thosesystems working on Xen fully virtualized guest machines on Windows. Server 2. 00. 3 and on HP Integrity blade servers, and some working onparavirtualized guest machines on RHEL5. Next stop would be moresystems involved, and finally everything migrated to RHEL, eitheron Xen virtual machines or bare metal.