TA3212

Virtualizing Resource Intensive Applications, a Case Study with SAP

Virtualization of enterprise data center applications using hypervisors is proceeding at a very fast pace. It started with the consolidation of the simplest, least performance-sensitive, and applications, and is gradually moving towards consolidation of performance, latency sensitive applications with large memory & I/O requirements, like SAP applications. For many organizations SAP applications are critical to running their business successfully. A stable infrastructure underpins all successful SAP deployments. They are very demanding of the hardware resources; therefore it is challenging to virtualize them while retaining the desired performance. For instance with current technology, SAP customers often find performance overhead of 15-30% when virtualizing SAP applications. This hit to performance causes some customers to stay with dedicated, non- virtualized servers.
This end-user case study focuses on reducing this performance overhead and examining the impact of new features for improving overall virtualization deployments in Intel?s latest generation Intel® Xeon® processor 5500-based DP servers (?Nehalem? architecture with the latest VMWare ESX . This proof of concept testing provides benchmarking of robust enterprise SAP ERP applications which challenge system resources, in both native (=bare metal) and virtualized scenarios. Results would show a material reduction of the virtualization overhead with the latest Intel based products and VMWare Virtual Infrastructure. The combination of Intel Xeon 5500 (with features like EPT, VPID, Turbo and SMT,), with the latest VMware?s ESX provides a compelling value proposition for virtualizing resource intensive applications, like SAP with out any compromises in performance.

Technology & Architecture

Breakout Session

Resource Intensive Applications, Case Study, SAP

1 Hour

Joachim Rahmfeld, Business Development Manager, VMware, Inc.
Shuuji Watanabe, Director of Co-Innovation Lab Tokyo, SAP
Raghu Yeluri, Sr. Architect, Intel Corporation