EA2247

SAP Performance Best Practices

This session describes the tuning and optimization best practices for SAP in an ESX virtualized environment. Topics include: the benefit of hardware-assisted MMU virtualization, ESX 3.5 support for large pages, choosing an appropriate SAP memory model, tuning database parameters, and more.
In addition, we will present performance and scalability data for both the scale up (with number of vCPUs) and scale out (with increasing number of VMs) scenarios. We shall compare native and virtual environments in this regard. The workload used to perform these comparisons is the Two-Tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark running on the latest SAP platform: Windows Server 2008, MS SQL Server 2005 SP2, and an AMD Third-Generation Opteron with Rapid Virtualization Indexing.
Based on our results we will briefly discuss some small / medium / large configuration examples.

Technical Overview Session

Networking; Storage / Backup; VMware Infrastructure; Virtualization Platform / Hypervisor

1 Hour

Ken Barr( VMware,Inc. ), Vas Mitra( VMware, Inc. )

Ken Barr works in the Core Performance group at VMware, Inc. in Cambridge, MA. He studies the performance of the monitor and the vmkernel. Ken received his Ph.D. from MIT CSAIL's Computer Architecture Group in 2006.
At MIT, Ken performed research on Energy-Aware Lossless Data Compression and on techniques to accelerate simulation-based microprocessor design.
Prior to coming to Cambridge, Ken received his BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. He and his wife sit on the Board of Directors of the U-M Alumni Club of Greater Boston.

Vas Mitra is a SAP Solutions Architect in the VMware Alliances organization. He has spent the last year working with VMware partners to develop SAP on VMware solutions and best practice guidelines for deploying SAP software on VMware Infrastructure. He also works with the VMware sales organization on pre-sales architecture design of customer implementations of SAP on ESX.
Prior to joining VMware Vas has worked on numerous SAP projects since 1993 as a SAP Pre-sales Architect, Basis Administrator and ABAP programmer with various organizations including a hardware vendor, consulting and end-user companies.