sap on linux - erp software meets open source · sap on linux - erp software meets open source -...

© 2009 IBM Corporation

SAP on Linux- ERP Software meets Open Source -

IBM Deutschland EBS GmbH - Global Business Services – SAP Service Line

Timo Krisch – IT Specialist – December 2011

© 2009 IBM Corporation2 2. Dezember 2011

Table of contents

Introduction

History of SAP/Linux platform porting and development

Strategic positioning

SAP/Linux platform technical overview

SAP/Linux Product Availability Matrix

Specific SAP/Linux solutions

Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software

Remarks about benchmarking & SD benchmarks

Q & A


SAP on Linux – does this mean an alternative?

Central question e.g. in an article at Computerwoche in January 2006 → http://www.computerwoche.de/software/erp/570717/

Main reason for such questions: uncertainty and lack of information or insufficient information

http://www.computerwoche.de/software/erp/570717/


History of SAP/Linux platform porting and development 1/4The beginnings & early years

1997– first Linux Application Server (based on Adabas)

1998– first Linux Central System installation

1999– CeBIT demo & press release– foundation of SAP LinuxLab– first productive customer = FCS (First Customer Shipment)

2000– SAP/Linux GA (General Availability)– Integration in official release cycle as of R/3 release 4.0B– first record SD benchmark (based on R/3 4.6B): 23000 SD users

2002– Linux Application Server on IBM Mainframe (S/390 resp. zSeries)

2003– High Availability options: Steeleye Lifekeeper, Multipathing


History of SAP/Linux platform porting and development 2/4The story continues with 64 bit porting, virtualization etc.

2003– FCS SAP/Linux Intel Itanium (IA64 resp. IPF)

2004– High Availability: Tivoli System Automation– Extension of FCS SAP/Linux IA64*– Porting/Development for AMD Opteron & Intel Xeon 64 (x86_64 resp. x64) started– Porting/Development for IBM Power PC (RS/6000 resp. pSeries) started

2005– FCS AMD Opteron & Intel Xeon 64– SAP/Linux 64 Bit GA

2006– Integration & test of SAP systems on virtualized servers (x86_64)

2007– GA for productive SAP systems on virtualized servers (x86_64)

2008– first workshop for SAP Virtualization Scaling & Performance– first Intel Xeon 64 Hexacore SD Benchmark (Windows native, Linux native, Linux virtualized

comparable standard)

* IBM decided to not continue with IA64 by the end of 2004


History of SAP/Linux platform porting and development 3/4IBM Founding Member of SAP LinuxLab

The SAP LinuxLAB is located at Walldorf - Germany SAP Headquarters

IBM in the SAP LinuxLabIBM technical experts fully dedicatedIBM hardware testingTechnical support to First Customer Shipment customersTeach to Teachers education sessions for IBM and Business Partners

SAP LinuxLabResponsible for SAP application components on Linux rolloutPorting of SAP on LinuxCoordination of First Customer Shipment programSAP technical support for SAP components ported on LinuxCoordination of relationship with hardware business partners


History of SAP/Linux platform porting and development 2/4Marketshare

© Graph by RAAD Research, 2009Remark: IBM OS includes OS/400, i5/OS, OS/390, z/OS; AIX is assigned to other UNIX


Strategic positioning 1/2IBM and Linux

1998 IBM strategic announcements with Linux

Linux became since optional Operating System on IBM ^ xSeries/System x, zSeries/System z, iSeries/System i and pSeries/System p* to the point of becoming a strategic platform for an open, reliant and secure IT environment

Support of various distributions (Red Hat®, SuSE®, Asianux®, Citrix XenServer®, Oracle® Linux, Ubuntu®, TurboLinux®, Caldera®)

Linux versions of IBM softwareDB2® UDB, Lotus® Domino Notes Server & Desktop Project, IBM Websphere®, Tivoli®

Systems management

IBM's own Cluster File System: GPFS (under GPL since 2007 - i.e. version 3.1)

IBM Linux Technology CenterContribution to Open SourceWorlwide over 250 developersMore than 100 Open-Source-Projects

Among which many in Enterprise-related areas

* formerly also known as Netfinity, S/390, AS/400 and RS/6000


Strategic positioning 2/2SAP and Linux

Linux meets the high quality standards of SAP

Fast growing market share makes Linux attractive

Linux is seen as an opportunity for platform consolidation (potential to reduce the number of supported UNIX® Operating Systems platforms) – however there are heterogeneous UNIX environments supported by SAP, too (e.g. Linux/Intel Application Servers vs. AIX/p DB Server)

On Intel platform practicable alternative to the prevailing Microsoft Operating Systems

Easy Porting because SAP code was mostly developed under UNIX

Linux has become a strategic platform for SAP

Since 2002 alternative Developer Workstation Desktop at SAP


Linux platforms 1/3Hardware using the example of IBM~

S/390,zSeries,System z I/O intensive application Application needs "mainframe features" Large number of parallel servers (horizontal) Most advanced workload management

RS/6000,pSeries,System p 64-bit performance (e.g. Floating point, large memory) Single server multiple applications Linux and AIX configurations

Netfinity,xSeries,System x Starting with 32-bit, but emerging to 64-bit performance Leading low- to mid-range price/performance Cluster scalability Linux and Windows environments

AS/400,iSeries,System i Small or medium business Fully integrated solution (hardware, software, networking) Infrastructure consolidation Easy administration / operation

BladeCenter Scale out and clustered solutions Shared infrastructure with no single point of failure Flexible architecture supports range of servers - Intel, PowerPC■ Integrated management


Linux platforms 2/332 & 64 bit platforms & technology

"2GB or 3GB limitations of 32bit architecture. Process-related limitations. This limitation will be abolished when you upgrade to a 64-bit operating system architecture"

Benefit to customers using SAP liveCache (SAP SCM and other offerings)Benefit to customers using very large transaction requiring more than 2GB of adressable

memory (not frequent)More generally greater performance and manageability perspectives

Progressive shift from 32bit to 64bit – SAP declared they will protect customer investment

First porting was done on Intel Itanium® 2 - based servers in the SAP LinuxLab (IA64) IBM was offering xSeries 455 (scalable to 16-way) as last Intel Itanium® 2 - based server AMD64 (AMD Opteron ®) respectively EM64T (Intel Xeon® 64-bit extension) became

dedicated Server Platform in 2004/2005 (x86_64) IBM and SAP Linux Lab did the porting, SAP official support statement was given in

2004/2005

SAP and IBM: customer pilot on xSeries 346 SLES9 64-bit with SAP DB


Linux platforms 3/3Virtualization IBM z/VM and native LPAR

– LPAR virtualization is strict hardware virtualization (server partitioning, whole system, logical partitions)– LPAR is an hardware feature (OS must support it, but no specific virtualization software needed)– z/VM is a specific hypervisor OS (optional virtualization level)– Built-in feature → compatibility given by hardware certification

IBM Advanced Power Virtualization respectively PowerVM and LPAR– LPAR virtualization on System p/i equivalent to LPAR on System z– PowerVM acts as an hypervisor a of Power 5 and above– Built-in feature → compatibility given by hardware certification

Vmware (vSphere)– Hypervisor OS: ESX (hypervisor to be installed) or ESXi (embedded hypervisor on USB memory stick)– Compatibility check requires additional certification or Intel/AMD-based hardware certification including

virtualized system

Xen– Hypervisor e.g. within Linux host OS containing Linux guest OS or other guest OS (Windows guest only

if there's CPU extension for hardware assisted virtualization, i.e. Intel VT-x & AMD-V)– Can achieve partitioning similar to LPAR (normally not possible on Intel/AMD-based systems)– Compatibility check requires additional certification or Intel/AMD-based hardware certification including

virtualized system

KVM– virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) – originally Intel/AMD

only, meanwhile ported to Mainframe and PowerPC– Hypervisor within Linux host OS containing Linux guest OS or other guest OS– Compatibility check requires additional certification or Intel/AMD-based hardware certification including

virtualized system


Product Availability Matrix 1/2Database Platforms (RDBMS)

All SAP supported databases are supported on the Linux platform, too – except of MS SQL Server, of course (associated with MS Windows platform only)

In the past this contained DB2/390*, DB2/400**, DB2 UDB***, Informix, Oracle, SAP DB (formerly Adabas)****

After acquisition of Informix by IBM and renaming of SAP DB by SAP: DB2/390*, DB2/400**, DB2 UDB***, maxDB****, Oracle

After Sybase (SAP acquisition in 2010) has joined: DB2/390*, DB2/400**, DB2 UDB***, maxDB****, Oracle, Sybase ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise)

Perspectively: SAP HANA or SAP In-Memory DB respectively (database kept in main memory, specific database vendor not needed anymore)

* SAP naming: DB2** SAP naming: DB4*** SAP naming: DB6**** SAP naming: ADA


Product Availability Matrix 1/2Database Platforms (RDBMS) – e.g. SAP NW 7.3 with common RDBMS

© 2011 SAP AG - http://service.sap.com/pam


Product Availability Matrix 1/2Database Platforms (RDBMS) – e.g. SAP NW BW 7.3 with SAP HANA



Product Availability Matrix 2/2SAP Netweaver Stack

Target: Whole SAP Netweaver Stack available on Linux!

Since 64 bit porting of Linux/Intel/AMD platform this target could be reached with few exceptions (cf. Slide 14)

In the meantime „only“ a few MS only SAP components remained; e.g.– Business Objects (BOBJ)– CRM Mobile App– CRM Communication Station

Aside from that– Client programs (installed additionally); e.g. SAP Netweaver Developer Workplace– Development tools; e.g. Visual Composer (modeling tool for developers – both runtime & design

time inside MS IE!)– Browser dependency (MS IE must be used!) for administration tasks etc.; e.g. for NW Enterprise

Portal


Product Availability Matrix 2/2SAP Netweaver Stack – MS only SAP components e.g. CRM



Product Availability Matrix 2/2SAP Netweaver Stack – MS only clients & tools e.g. Developer Workplace, Visual Composer, Adobe Designer for SAP NW CE 7.3



Product Availability Matrix 2/2SAP Netweaver Stack – Browser Support e.g. for SAP NW 7.3 - IE



Product Availability Matrix 2/2SAP Netweaver Stack – Browser Support e.g. for SAP NW 7.3 – Mozilla Firefox



Product Availability Matrix 2/2SAP Netweaver Stack – Browser Support e.g. for SAP NW 7.3 – Safari



Specific SAP/Linux solutions – selective examples

Evaluation TestDrive (aka Technology TestDrive, Technology Preview, SAP NW Trial etc.) - free demo/trial of SAP software on Linux that can be installed on a common x86 PC – at first developed based on R/3 4.6B & running on RedHat 6.1

Appliances first developed on Linux on Intel-based blade servers:– Bundle of Hardware, OS & SAP software– BIA/BWA (Business Intelligence Accelerator/Business Warehouse Accelerator) - based on SAP

Netweaver BI/SAP BW solution– ES (Enterprise Search) – based on TREX Search & Classification engine

SAP All-In-One FastStart (aka SAP Business All-in-One FastStart) – program bundle for implementation of SAP Business All-in-One (preconfigured ERP system for medium-sized businesses and/or enterprise subsidiaries) – FastStart bundle consists of inter alia SAP Business All-in-One, maxDB database and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server – developed on Linux (Novell SLES)


Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software 1/7RedHat

First Linux distribution supported for SAP: Red Hat Linux 6.1 Enterprise Version 1.0 – manual modifications and additional packages were needed and provided by RedHat

Afterwards Red Hat Linux 6.2 & Red Hat Linux 7.1 were supported – manual modifications and additional packages were needed and provided by RedHat

Because of special requirements and porting experiences within the scope of Enterprise software special editions were issued from work between RedHat and SAP

– RedHat Enterprise Linux 2.1– RedHat Enterprise Linux 3– RedHat Enterprise Linux 4– RedHat Enterprise Linux 5– RedHat Enterprise Linux 6


Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software 2/7SUSE (formerly SuSE, now belonging to Novell)

First porting work was done with SuSE 7.0 Professional

Subsequently this porting work was extended by using SuSE 7.2 Professional

Both common distributions were not certified for SAP, but experiences gained in porting were basis for– SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (based on SuSE 7.0)– SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 (based on SuSE 7.2)

Because of special requirements and porting experiences within the scope of Enterprise software special editions were issued from work between SuSE/SUSE and SAP

– SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8– SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9– SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10– SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11


Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software 3/7Linux Kernel

Use of specific Linux kernel required – not every common Linux kernel is suitable for productive use of SAP software – specific enteprise SMP kernels were built and issued by SUSE and RedHat respectively

Specific kernel parameters must be set or adapted, e.g.– kernel.shmmax– kernel.msgmni– kernel.sem– fs.file-max

These settings shall be made in /etc/sysctl.conf and activated with command „sysctl -p“

For some Linux distributions (especially SLES editions) there's a special sapinit RPM package (for SLES formerly also suse-sapinit) doing these settings


Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software 4/7RAM & Swap space

Differentiation between 32 bit & 64 bit systems

On 32 bit Linux versions there was no dependency on RAM (main memory, physical memory): the maximum swap space was 2 GB; if more swap is required, it should be distributed over multiple swap partitions – usually 2 GB swap space sufficient because of „late swap allocation“ (other memory limits reached before swap space reached full capacity)

On 64 bit Linux versions there is dependency on RAM up to 32 GB – recommended swap space is 2*RAM

64 bit Linux systems running SAP with more than 32 GB can't efficiently use such high amount of swap space (2*RAM) without performance degradation – reason: swap space area on a disk is slower than the physical RAM in most cases

– 32...63 GB RAM 64 GB Swap– 64...127 GB RAM 96 GB Swap– 128...255 GB RAM 128 GB Swap– 256...511 GB RAM 160 GB Swap– 512...1023 GB RAM 192 GB Swap– 1024...2047 GB RAM 224 GB Swap– 2048...4095 GB RAM 256 GB Swap– 4096...8191 GB RAM 288 GB Swap– 8192 GB RAM and above 320 GB Swap


Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software 5/7Additional packages & further adaptions required

Process resource limits need to be increased – reason: some components (e.g. SAP J2EE engine) need to keep a large number of file handles opened simultaneously

1)Adapt /etc/security/limits.conf2)OR install sapinit RPM package (cf. Slide 25)

For Non-Unicode SAP systems the saplocales package (later compat-locales-sap-common (Red Hat) or sap-locale (SUSE)) needed to be installed for correct sort sequences – only needed if locales for a desired language on OS level are missed or if existing locales must be adjusted for use with SAP (e.g. tr_TR)

– The saplocales package depends on package glibc (C standard library released by GNU project) – if you need to update glibc, you need to update saplocales, too!

– For Unicode SAP systems the saplocales are not needed any longer!– Attention: Don't install saplocales which isn't suitable for your Linux system and glibc!

DB related packages and/or adaptions:– DB2 UDB: package ksh, formerly pdksh (Korn Shell)– Oracle on IBM PowerPC: IBM XL C/C++ Advanced Editions V7.0/8.0 for the Linux runtime

environment component– Informix: adaptions required for „password encryption“ (e.g. in /etc/pam.d/passwd)


Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software 6/7Memory management 32 bit On 32 bit Linux very restricted memory address space (user space)

Address space has a total of 4 GB for 32-bit software

On systems with more than 4 GB RAM PAE (Physical Address Extension) can be used as of Linux kernel 2.4 – does not change the 4 GB limit per process!

Linux kernel requires 1 GB for its own consumption (kernel space)

An operating system process can address approximately between 2 GB and 3 GB of memory

An unrestricted-use address space (user space) of 3 GB applies to the Linux kernels tested by SAP

Experiences of SAP LinuxLab:– A maximum of approximately 2 GB of address space is available for SAP shared memory

segments (SAP buffer and extended memory) - about 1.5 GB generally remains available for the SAP buffer on 32-bit systems

– Unfortunately the amount of address space used for SAP shared memory segments varies from Linux version to Linux version – need to care of many different SAP profile parameters

– Profile parameter es/implementation=map (Mapping; MS Windows alike - only the currently active user context is displayed in the address space of the work process) sets many required memory parameters by just mapping the extended memory (ZAMM=Zero Administration Memory Management)

– Attention: The values of parameters em/max_size_MB and em/initial_size_MB must not be higher than the configured TMPFS (/dev/shm, shared memory) – if space on /dev/shm runs out you will get system downtime and process terminations with SIG 7 & SIG 11!


Adaption of Linux for use with SAP software 7/7Memory management 64 bit

On 64 bit Linux practically no restricted memory address space

Both memory management systems are available and supported, too– es/implementation=map (Mapping; MS Windows alike - only the currently active user context is

displayed in the address space of the work process)– es/implementation=std (Standard UNIX - all user contexts are displayed in the address space at

the same time)

Two SAP profile parameters still need attention: em/initial_size_MB and ztta/roll_extension - both are related to SAP extended memory

Shared memory parameters set on OS level (Linux kernel parameters) are very important, of course:– kernel.shmmax– kernel.shmall


Remarks about benchmarking & SD benchmarks 1/4Benchmarking

Additional benchmarking (Attitude: „Stability before High End Performance“) for Linux Kernels and Hardware

Internal Performance benchmarking according to the issue „comparable to the MS Windows platform“

Selective SD benchmarks were performed on the Linux/Intel/AMD platform

First Intel Xeon 64 Hexacore SD benchmark in 2008 provided comparability: Windows native, Linux native, Linux virtualized on same server model


Remarks about benchmarking & SD benchmarks 2/4IBM System x3850M2 Windows native


Remarks about benchmarking & SD benchmarks 3/4IBM System x3850M2 Linux native


Remarks about benchmarking & SD benchmarks 4/4IBM System x3850M2 Linux virtualized (Xen)


Q & A

wwwibm.com/linuxsap.com/linux

service.sap.com/notes171356 SAP on Linux – Essential information

[email protected]

THANK YOU !


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