Oracle Solaris: The Foundation for Successful SAP Solutions

An Oracle White Paper July 2012

Oracle Solaris: The Foundation for Successful SAP Solutions Leveraging the Power of Oracle Solaris with SAP

Oracle Solaris: The Foundation for Successful SAP Solutions

Introduction ..................................................................................... 1 Oracle Solaris: The Foundation for Successful SAP Solutions....... 2 Leveraging Oracle Solaris 11 Features in SAP Environments ..... 19 SAP Product Availability Matrix..................................................... 27 Migrating to Oracle Solaris 11....................................................... 29 Conclusion .................................................................................... 30 For More Information .................................................................... 30


Introduction IT organizations are increasingly expected to contribute to the bottom line and deliver competitive advantage by supporting dynamic business processes. In the face of diminishing budgets, they must provide high availability (HA) solutions to a global economy operating around the clock on open networks that demand continuous security. For enterprises running SAP, these challenges can be addressed with SAP NetWeaver. An enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) built on open standards and Java technology, SAP NetWeaver creates an open integration and application platform to enable rapid change. To take full advantage of the benefits of SAP NetWeaver and SOA, however, enterprises must have a scalable, reliable, secure, flexible, and open computing infrastructure. Oracle Solaris 11 can help enterprises achieve just such an infrastructure. The innovative features found in Oracle Solaris 11 make it the most advanced operating system on the planet. Indeed, the Oracle Solaris operating system typically leads with new features that are subsequently introduced in other vendors' operating systems months or years later. A strategic platform for SAP applications, SAP NetWeaver solutions running on Oracle Solaris can help IT organizations to deliver dynamic business solutions much more effectively, and with a number of advantages. •

Flexibility. Oracle Solaris is an enterprise-class operating system that runs on commodity x86 hardware as well as Oracle’s SPARC processor-based servers. Oracle Solaris draws on built-in binary compatibility to scale across architectures, facilitates consolidation and virtualization to increase system utilization, and enables file systems to grow dynamically to virtually any size. Providing the ultimate in flexibility, Oracle’s virtualization technologies make it possible to virtualize SAP instances and draw from an underlying pool of dynamically managed, heterogeneous resources.

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Price/performance. Oracle Solaris is ideal for applications such as SAP that require high performance systems, massive threading and batch processing, high I/O rates, and large memory-addressing capabilities at an attractive price point.

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Reliability. Oracle servers feature hot-swappable, redundant components, and can leverage powerful Oracle Solaris capabilities such as Predictive Self Healing, Oracle Solaris Fault Manager, and Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) to maximize SAP uptime. In addition, downtime for SAP upgrades can be minimized using a combination of Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Solaris ZFS. HA and disaster recovery are possible with Oracle Solaris Cluster and with Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition.

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Security. As more employees, customers, suppliers, and partners access the collaborative environment that SAP NetWeaver provides, the need for security increases. Regulations governing data integrity add to that need. Oracle intrinsically understands this and continues its 20-plus year commitment to building security into the operating system with capabilities that include user and process rights management, role-based access control, secure execution, and an integrated firewall.

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Complete stack. Oracle hardware and software engineers work together to integrate a complete stack and ensure that Oracle applications, database, and middleware are integrated and optimized with

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compute, storage, networking, and operating system resources. The result is extreme performance, unique features, built-in robustness, exceptional security, and seamless integration of operating system, hardware and application software. In the event of a problem, support is delivered from a single enterprise for faster resolution. Oracle engineers continue to optimize the operating system for various hardware platforms, leveraging innovations for eco-efficiency found in both SPARC and x86 processor-based servers. These improvements enhance the performance of SAP solutions on Oracle Solaris. The latest generation of Oracle servers powered by intelligent processors adapt to application behavior by automatically adjusting processing power to deliver optimum performance, scaling energy use to the workload, and offering bestin-class virtualization. With a full line of SPARC and x86 systems—all running Oracle Solaris—Oracle platforms can help enterprises take advantage of the best technology to handle multitier enterprise SAP workloads.

Oracle Solaris: The Foundation for Successful SAP Solutions The more than 600 innovative features contained in Oracle Solaris 10—including DTrace, Predictive Self Healing, virtualization technology, and the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system—have made it the most advanced operating system available. Supplying the foundation for building, deploying, and managing efficient, secure, and reliable enterprise-class service-oriented architectures (SOAs) for today’s demanding SAP solution business processes, these technologies provide a world-class platform for deploying SAP applications. Oracle continues to build on that model of innovation with Oracle Solaris 11. Forming the basis of Oracle’s complete applications-to-disk technology stack, Oracle Solaris 11 provides a strategic platform for SAP applications. Engineered to solve the most challenging issues customers face when deploying and managing a modern data center infrastructure, Oracle Solaris 11 is the first and only fully virtualized operating system. The secure, flexible, built-in virtualization services in Oracle Solaris 11 are designed for cloud computing and enable customers to maximize physical and virtual system, network, and data resources. By integrating virtualization and resource control features into the operating system Oracle Solaris 11 avoids adding layers of functionality with significant overhead and complexity.

New Oracle Solaris 11 Features Oracle Solaris 11 offers enhancements and new features in many areas, including provisioning, maintenance, security, availability, and performance. Designed for cloud and large enterprise environments, these features enable IT departments to rapidly deploy new data center software images across thousands of machines. New security features harden startup of the operating system and secure system access from the outset through default system security settings. The result is a secure environment that protects data assets from end to end without special intervention from system administrators. Oracle Solaris 11 is designed for maximum performance and scalability, and can support future hardware with tens of thousands of hardware threads, hundreds of terabytes of system memory, and hundreds of gigabits per second of I/O. Along with that performance and scalability, the operating system offers increased Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, and Java technology-based application

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performance, availability, security, and manageability through jointly engineered improvements. These improvements include optimized memory management, I/O enhancements, integrated resource management, and the offloading of compute-intensive cryptographic capabilities to hardware. Finally, with support for a wide variety of SPARC and x86-based systems from HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Dell, Cisco, and others, Oracle Solaris 11 enables organizations to deploy and support a single operating system in their SAP environments. Oracle Solaris has more certified applications than any other operating system—more than 11,000—making it possible for one operating system to span the entire enterprise.

Taking Advantage of Platform Advancements Oracle Solaris 11 is designed to take advantage of the unique performance capabilities inherent in SPARC and x86 processors. Oracle engineers have worked on the most significant areas of the platform, including CPU performance tools, compiler vectorization and tools, power management, driver support, I/O acceleration technology, virtualization technology, and predictive self-healing. Significant performance improvements come from optimizations that take advantage of the overall multicore micro-architecture, increasing single-threaded and multithreaded performance. As a result, the Oracle Solaris kernel and existing single- or multithreaded applications run faster, with no code changes or recompilation necessary. Scalability and Performance

As developers incorporate new features in SAP applications, underlying hardware platforms must provide sufficient computing power, memory and I/O to support the additional functionality. For over 20 years, Oracle Solaris has benefited from ongoing improvements that enhance scalability, enabling Oracle servers to deliver maximum performance as processor counts and memory capacity increase. Oracle Solaris 11 takes advantage of current scalability and performance characteristics of SPARC and x86 server technology, yet is designed to handle future advancements. •

Multithread awareness. As part of the optimization of Oracle Solaris 11, the operating system is platform-aware and makes the best use of the processors on which it runs. For example, Oracle Solaris 11 takes advantage of the unique chip multithreading capabilities in Oracle servers with SPARC T3 or T4 processors. While physical processor strands are exposed as logical processors (up to 128 per chip), Oracle Solaris 11 correlates the cores and the threads they support, providing a fast and efficient thread implementation that can enhance SAP performance.

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Oracle Solaris kernel optimizations. Capable of scaling with the largest servers, Oracle Solaris 11 can host many applications and large-scale SAP workloads and efficiently use the resources under its control to get more work done. Scalability enhancements include support for 64-bit memory addressing, large pages, enhancing resource locking with mutex backoff algorithms, enhancement of kernel data structures, and library optimizations. Indeed, Oracle Solaris 11 is designed to optimize the considerable resources of SPARC M-Series, SPARC T-Series systems, and x86 servers, and offers impressive scalability today—up to hundreds of cores and thousands of threads per system, with a 128-bit file system offering support for files and file systems as large as 16 exabytes (EB).

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Cost-effective data storage and management. For most organizations, storage represents a significant portion of the IT budget. SAP environments generate lots of data, and scaling data storage

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capacity massively and indiscriminately in an attempt to handle that data is rarely effective or sensible. With a range of available storage options, such as flash memory, large in-memory storage (RAM), faster and slower disk drives, and tapes, organizations must be able to store and access data efficiently and cost-effectively in order to optimize storage resources and reduce operational costs. Oracle Solaris 11 offers innovative data storage and management features to handle huge amounts of data cost-effectively.

SAP Environments Benefit from Oracle Solaris 11 Virtualization Features The sophisticated end-to-end virtualization features built into Oracle Solaris make it the most innovative operating system and help IT organizations move toward agile, efficient, and secure SAP environments. Oracle Solaris Zones

The traditional SAP model of deploying each of the SAP three-tier architectures—development, test and QA, and production—on separate servers limits resource utilization, increases data center costs, and contributes to server sprawl. It also adds complexity and makes it difficult to rapidly and cost-effectively add new SAP services. Oracle Solaris Zones, known as Oracle Solaris Containers in Oracle Solaris 10, provides partitioning technology that enables application components to be isolated from one another even though the zones share a single instance of Oracle Solaris. •

Consolidate applications or tiers on a single server. Offering a complete runtime environment for Oracle Solaris applications, Oracle Solaris Zones enable organizations to maintain the one-applicationper-server deployment model while simultaneously sharing hardware resources. With Oracle Solaris Zones, IT organizations can consolidate multiple SAP applications or tiers onto a single system, increasing utilization rates and reducing data center complexity.

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Provide a secure yet flexible environment. Oracle Solaris Zones establish boundaries for resources such as CPUs and can be expanded to adapt to the changing processing requirements of the applications running in the zone. Applications within zones are isolated, preventing processes in one zone from monitoring or affecting processes running in another zone. Even a superuser process from one zone cannot view or affect activity in other zones. For additional security, an Oracle Solaris Zone can be configured with a read-only root, or immutable zone, to make it difficult to modify the environment and applications. In a read-only zone, the configuration is preserved by implementing read-only root file systems for non-global zones. This zone extends the zone’s secure runtime boundary by adding additional restrictions to the runtime environment. Unless performed as specific maintenance operations, modifications to system binaries or system configurations are blocked.

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Make optimal use of resources. Oracle Solaris Zones are multicore-aware and are designed to provide fine-grained control over the resources that applications use. Fixed resources such as processors and memory can be partitioned into pools on multiprocessor systems, with different pools shared by different projects (a specified collection of processes) and isolated application environments. Dynamic resource sharing allows different projects to be assigned different ratios of system resources.

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Maintain specified quality of service levels. SAP applications require sufficient resources in order to complete tasks, and administrators must be able to prevent lower priority processes from consuming too

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much memory or CPU resources. Oracle Solaris Zones provides fine-grained control over resources. The Oracle Solaris Resource Manager can dynamically allocate resources that a workload in a zone receives, and the fair share scheduler in Oracle Solaris enables portions of resources—such as fractions of a CPU—to be allocated to zones. When resources such as CPUs and memory are dynamically allocated, resource-capping controls can be used to set limits on the amount of resources consumed by specific zones. Finally, Oracle Solaris IP QoS can be used to manage network bandwidth used by multiple zones, helping administrators to maintain specified QoS levels for applications and services in a consolidated environment. •

Increase application availability. Oracle Solaris Zones support fault isolation and can instantly restart SAP applications if necessary. If a hardware component is failing or fails, it is automatically taken offline, and the applications are restarted if necessary. If the application cannot restart, its server resources are dynamically assigned to the remaining applications so that the system is optimally used.

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Leverage unique scalability. Unlike other virtualization technologies, Oracle Solaris Zones do not rely on hypervisors to provide abstracted hardware resources and the zones isolate themselves from the native host system and each other. Because the zones functionality is built into the Oracle Solaris kernel, many of the kernel subsystems are zone-aware and as a result, processes executing within a zone experience little or no overhead—and have minimal impact on system performance. This lack of overhead makes Oracle Solaris Zones highly scalable, enabling even commodity desktop systems to run dozens of zones at a time. Indeed, one instance of Oracle Solaris enables nearly limitless partitioning, with a theoretical limit of 8,000 zones per instance.

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Save on database licensing costs. SAP environments face considerable costs in the form of database licenses, with licenses required for each server that runs a database. Oracle Solaris Zones can help rein in those costs. In an unconsolidated environment, a database license is required for all the cores in each system, whether those cores are being used by the database or are simply there for peak usage. With Oracle Solaris Zones, the resources of all the cores can be configured so they are constantly used, but instead of using multiple database servers, the environment can be configured with multiple database zones.

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Ease administration. Oracle Solaris Zones provide features that make it easier to administer application and service environments. For example, the update-on-attach feature in Oracle Solaris Zones enables a zone to automatically update its environment when moved from one system to another.

Figure 1 illustrates the consolidation of an SAP environment where all the Web and application servers are placed in zones on one system, and all the instances of the database, including development, test, and production, are placed in zones on a second system. In the example, the number of servers is consolidated from nine to two, dramatically decreasing complexity and operating costs and increasing utilization.

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Oracle Solaris 11 Web Server

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Figure 1. Consolidating the SAP environment with Oracle Solaris Zones.

On the database server, resources can be shifted to where they are needed, and each of the database instances is completely isolated from the others. It is even possible to reboot the individual environments without affecting the others. Should peak demand require it, however, the resources of the development and test databases could be temporarily assigned to the production database to run jobs during the night. This fine-grained resource management enables optimal resource use as well as possible decreased database license costs. The improvements to Oracle Solaris Zones in Oracle Solaris 11 make it a highly mature, widely adopted, flexible, and low-cost technology. The ease of zone creation and management, lack of execution overhead, and maturity of the technology make it the most popular virtualization technology within Oracle Solaris. Indeed, not only is Oracle Solaris Zones technology ideally suited for consolidation efforts, it is recommended as the default environment for installing applications. Network Virtualization

The need for sufficient network bandwidth increases as the number of users accessing SAP applications over a network grows. However, unless the network resources are used efficiently, adding bandwidth may not increase network utilization. Network virtualization lets applications share networking resources to maximize throughput and decrease latency, particularly as the network load increases. These features make it possible to allocate greater CPU resources to high priority, high bandwidth traffic, while more limited resources are assigned to low priority traffic. Administrators can set bandwidth limits for network interface controllers (NICs) or virtual network interface controllers (VNICs), enabling increased network throughput by scheduling and handling packets more efficiently. In Oracle Solaris 10, applications running in zones could access network interfaces, but if the application required a dedicated network stack for the zone's network interface, a dedicated physical NIC or dedicated virtual local area network (VLAN) was required. With Oracle Solaris 11, a zone can be assigned virtually unlimited numbers of VNICs and each one receives its own dedicated stack with bandwidth and CPU allocations that can be managed.

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Using zones and network virtualization in combination enables the consolidation of multiple servers and services on one instance of Oracle Solaris. Particularly useful for environments with multiple SAP applications, the low overhead of Oracle Solaris Zones coupled with the resource management and network virtualization features in Oracle Solaris 11 make it possible to deploy generic virtual topologies on a single host with limited physical resources. Organizations with dedicated servers running SAP applications, such as SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW), SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP PI), or SAP Enterprise Portal (SAP EP), can benefit from consolidating numerous systems onto a single server. Figure 2 illustrates an SAP virtualization scenario. The SAP landscape before consolidation contains three servers, one each for SAP BW, ECC, and PI. The router/firewall facilitates secure communication amongst the three servers and the client. Once the consolidation takes place, it is no longer necessary to maintain three separate servers for SAP applications. Instead, the three servers are now deployed in three separate zones, along with a virtual router/firewall zone, and a zone representing the client. The virtual switches work with the virtual router/firewall to enable direct communication among the different zones, and between the client and the zones. In this consolidated environment, SAP developers can code and test the interaction between the various server nodes using only one server. This configuration eliminates the need for multiple servers for testing the SAP software and is particularly useful when faced with limited physical resources. Before Consolidation

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Figure 2. Consolidating the SAP landscape.

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Storage Virtualization

As organizations become increasingly reliant on SAP and other business management software, datasets are quickly growing so large that they are difficult to manage. Oracle Solaris ZFS offers a dramatic advance in data management with an innovative approach to data integrity, tremendous performance improvements, and the integration of file system and volume management capabilities. The centerpiece of this architecture is the concept of the virtual storage pool, which decouples the file system from physical storage in the same way that virtual memory abstracts the address space from physical memory. The more efficient pooled storage model completely eliminates the concept of volumes and associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth, and stranded storage. Oracle Solaris ZFS can be used as the sole file system for any class of system. It supports system booting, use as a root file system, and is the default file system for Oracle Solaris 11. In Oracle Solaris ZFS, space is shared dynamically between multiple file systems from a single storage pool and is parceled out from the pool as file systems request it (see Figure 3). As a result, physical storage can be added to storage pools dynamically, without interrupting services. This provides new levels of flexibility, availability, and performance. It also provides virtually unlimited scalability—up to 21 billion yottabytes of capacity. Traditional Volumes

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Figure 3. Conceptual overview of an Oracle Solaris ZFS file system. Data Integrity

Oracle Solaris ZFS contains features that help ensure the integrity of SAP data and protect against data loss. •

Ensure consistent data. Oracle Solaris ZFS combines proven and cutting-edge technologies such as copy-on-write and end-to-end 64-bit checksumming, providing extreme reliability to help ensure the ondisk data is consistent at all times.

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Encrypted Oracle Solaris ZFS datasets. Oracle Solaris 11 supports on-disk encryption/decryption and key management for Oracle Solaris ZFS datasets, providing more exacting mechanisms for data protection.

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Triple-parity RAID. Lengthy disk repopulation times open a window of vulnerability when one drive is being repopulated and another fails. Triple-parity RAID extends double-parity RAIDZ to protect against as many as three simultaneous drive failures.

Performance

Oracle Solaris engineers incorporate advanced technologies into Oracle Solaris ZFS in order to derive optimal system performance for SAP software and other applications. •

Improved data handling. To prevent application performance degradation when handling vast amounts of data, Oracle Solaris ZFS optimizes the code paths from the application to the hardware, producing sustained throughput at near-disk speeds. By using intelligent prefetch, Oracle Solaris ZFS performs read-ahead (in either direction) for sequential data streaming and can adapt its read behavior in real time for more complex access patterns. Striping data across all available storage devices eliminates bottlenecks, increases the speed of reads and writes, balances I/O, and maximizes throughput.

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Flash technology support. Oracle Solaris ZFS seamlessly and transparently supports new hybrid disk storage pools that include Flash technology for accelerated application performance. This is very helpful in SAP environments that are using tiered storage for faster storage performance and lower overall costs.

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Low overhead RAID. Oracle Solaris ZFS provides software RAID through RAID-Z. RAID-Z is a virtual device that stores data and parity on multiple disks, similar to RAID-5. RAID-Z uses variablewidth RAID stripes so that all writes are full-stripe writes.

Backup and Migration

Oracle Solaris ZFS contains a number of innovative technologies that facilitate the process of backing up or migrating SAP data. •

Snapshots. Snapshots are read-only copies of an Oracle Solaris ZFS file system or volume. Snapshots can be created almost instantly and are a valuable tool for administrators who need to perform backups. They can be used to save the state of a file system at a particular point in time and to recreate the file system later on the same or another system without stopping the production system. This functionality is vital for SAP administrators who need to perform regular backups within tight timeframes or recreate environments for development, QA, and testing purposes without impacting the performance of other processes running on the system.

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Clones. Clones are writeable snapshots, ideal for storing private copies of shared data for operations such as data migration, test and development, or backups.

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Shadow migration. Shadow migration supports data migration from any non-Oracle Solaris ZFS, NFS source, or from a different pool between controllers on the same clustered Oracle Solaris ZFS system. This is a key feature when vital data is residing on one pool and must be moved to a different pool. It is

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also particularly useful when data from an older, non-Oracle file system might take a while to migrate and must be accessible while the migration is taking place. The original source data is made read-only during the migration and users can mount and use the new share being created. •

The zfs diff command. New to Oracle Solaris 11, the zfs diff command lists the differences between Oracle Solaris ZFS snapshots, enabling users with appropriate privileges to view the file and directory level changes that have occurred between snapshots. SAP administrators can use the Oracle Solaris zfs diff command to compare snapshots of SAP environments.

Space Utilization

As systems expand, the use of storage space must be controlled where possible. Oracle Solaris ZFS offers features to help contain the amount of disk space used on a system. •

Data deduplication. Oracle Solaris ZFS can reduce the amount of total data stored by eliminating and sharing common components. Using checksum-based comparison of blocks with optional verification, deduplication is performed for selected datasets or across the entire Oracle Solaris ZFS storage pool.

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Compression. Data compression transparently compresses file system data and can be enabled or disabled dynamically. Compression policies can be applied on a per-file system basis and can be used to save space on a file system that is used primarily to archive data. This can help reduce the impact on storage space, particularly when preserving older SAP environments for legal or compliance reasons.

Cost Reduction

Some features of Oracle Solaris ZFS result in reduced costs by eliminating the need for additional software or reducing system administration complexity. The data deduplication feature in Oracle Solaris ZFS mentioned in the section on space utilization also helps to reduce costs by reducing the amount of space required for data storage and reducing bandwidth usage. •

Eliminates the needs for volume manager software. Unlike traditional file systems that require a separate volume manager, Oracle Solaris ZFS architecture integrates volume management functions, so there is no need to purchase additional volume manager software.

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Simplified management. Large SAP storage environments can present a management challenge to SAP administrators. Oracle Solaris ZFS integrates device, storage, and file system structures into a single structure, simplifying file system management and providing a reliable and flexible solution that can help reduce costs, complexity, and risk.

Hybrid Storage Pools with Oracle Solaris ZFS

Innovations in microchip technology highlight a significant gap in the IT ecosystem, revealing how multisocket, multicore servers far outpace the performance limitations of traditional disk drives. The result is expensive and complex architectures that use massive amounts of expensive dynamic random access memory or disk drives designed to maximize CPU use and an IT infrastructure that is costly to buy and operate. Oracle Solaris ZFS and high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) combine to provide innovative hybrid storage pools (HSPs). Flash-based SSDs provide 100x I/O performance improvement compared to

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mechanical disk drives. Oracle Solaris ZFS can use a handful of SSDs as high-speed disk cache to turbocharge application performance, helping to keep up with modern multicore systems. Using HSPs can provide maximum performance while reducing capital and operating expenses. Oracle Solaris ZFS transparently manages data placement, holding copies of frequently used data in fast SSDs, whereas less frequently used data is stored in slower mechanical disks. As illustrated in Figure 4, the application data set can now be completely isolated from slower mechanical disk drives, unlocking new levels of performance and higher ROI. Oracle Solaris ZFS also transparently caches data on SSDs, eliminating the need to modify applications.

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Desktop Virtualization

IT organizations with a large and sprawling desktop client community struggle with complex and ineffective desktop management strategies, running all applications directly on a local desktop. Oracle desktop virtualization solutions help IT deliver applications and full desktop environments to clients using a server-based computing model. All the intelligence—compute power, storage, software, and administration—is concentrated in the data center. Many companies are reducing their SAP data center costs and energy consumption with Oracle desktop virtualization solutions, including SAP University Competency Center, SAP Belgium Education Center, Publiacqua SpA, and University Hospital rechts der Isar, among others. Managing Virtualization

Virtualization has quickly become an important technology across all aspects of the SAP environment, including server, storage, networking, and client environments. Oracle offers a complete virtualization product portfolio for SAP environments and a comprehensive set of virtualization service offerings to

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help enterprises deploy new SAP services faster, maximize system resources, and more easily monitor and manage virtualized environments. Virtualization Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

Without the proper tools, the task of observing and managing virtualized SAP applications and services can be difficult. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center enables IT administrators to actively manage and monitor infrastructure resources from virtually anywhere on the network. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center simplifies the management of Oracle Solaris using an advanced knowledgebase while enabling automated lifecycle processes. It also provides full lifecycle management of virtual guests, including resource management and mobility orchestration. This capability provides observability and manageability for SAP administrators responsible for SAP environments running in Oracle Solaris Zones. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides integrated, simplified management of virtual and physical environments. The application enables virtual guest management, making it easier for users to manage thousands of geographically distributed systems simultaneously. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center lifecycle management simplifies and accelerates compliance reporting and the discovery, provisioning, updating, monitoring, and reporting of physical and virtual assets through one unified, browser-based interface. Oracle Virtualization Services and Resources

Oracle offers comprehensive services to help enterprises build and support next-generation virtual data centers. Oracle’s virtualization solutions provide the right mix of services for planning, designing, and implementing, including virtualization workshop, architecture, and implementation services. As part of this offering, Oracle provides customized assessments of current and long-term needs and helps organizations implement the appropriate virtualization technology from Oracle and other recognized platforms, thus reducing risk and speeding up deployments. In addition, Oracle offers the: •

Oracle Solution Support Center for SAP to fine-tune the reference architecture to specific needs and minimize deployment risk

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Oracle Joint Support Center for SAP Applications to resolve interoperability issues—increasing the availability of SAP application services

High Availability Global competition and international customers mean SAP solutions must be available 24x7x365 and capable of immediately handling increases in demand. Oracle Solaris includes features such as Oracle Solaris Predictive Self-Healing and the Oracle Solaris Fault Manager to keep systems and applications up and running, even if hardware fails. Oracle Solaris Cluster and Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition protect against system and site failure for even higher availability and disaster recovery. Oracle Solaris Cluster

Oracle Solaris Cluster systems consist of two or more nodes that work together as a single entity to cooperatively provide applications, system resources, and data to users. Each node provides some level of redundancy. A high-speed, redundant, private interconnect provides access to resources across the server

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set. Redundant connections to the public network provide each node with multiple paths for access to outside systems, helping ensure continued access in the event of a network connection or node failure. Application-specific modules—called agents—in Oracle Solaris Cluster manage application availability. Agents start, stop, and monitor application health, taking corrective action to restore application availability upon failure. Due to its kernel-level integration with Oracle Solaris, node failures are very quickly and reliably detected, enabling faster recovery for failed services. Data is stored on highly available redundant disk systems with redundant host connections, supporting Oracle Solaris data access in the event of a service interruption on a single disk or storage subsystem. Should a cluster node fail, data integrity is further protected by I/O fencing from the cluster to its shared storage devices. In addition, data can be mirrored to increase availability. Oracle Solaris Cluster can be used to improve the availability of SAP components running on Oracle Solaris and is delivered with SAP-specific agents. In addition, Oracle Solaris Cluster agents for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) offer enterprises increased manageability and availability for Oracle RAC deployments on SPARC and x86 platforms. Support is provided for a wide range of storage management options such as Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle’s Sun QFS shared file system, Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, hardware RAID, cluster volume managers, and more. Controlling SAP application software and Oracle RAC through Oracle Solaris Cluster facilitates operations by managing dependencies between application and database, and among application components, delivering increased availability of the overall solution. •

Tier consolidation. All tiers of an SAP NetWeaver platform can be consolidated within an Oracle Solaris Cluster deployment. Agents are available for SAP MaxDB (formerly SAP DB), SAP Enqueue (including enqueue and replication servers, central services, and Web application server), SAP J2EE Engine, SAP liveCache, and more, allowing for a single point of management.

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Cluster agents. Oracle Solaris Cluster includes built-in support for Oracle Solaris services such as Apache, Apache Tomcat, DHCP, DNS, NFS, as well as additional Oracle software such as Oracle Database 11.2.0.3 (single instance and Oracle RAC) and Oracle WebLogic Server1.

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Virtualization. Oracle Solaris Cluster provides extended support for Oracle Solaris Zones. Zone clusters support the creation of fully isolated virtual clusters based on Oracle Solaris Zones, enabling server consolidation even in HA environments. These virtualization capabilities allow scalable or failover applications and associated Oracle Solaris Cluster agents to run unmodified within Oracle Solaris Zones. Oracle Solaris Cluster HA Zone agents can be used to perform zone monitoring and management.

Oracle Solaris Cluster also extends Oracle Solaris Zones support for distributed applications such as Oracle RAC databases2. Distributed applications can be run in separate virtual clusters, and multiple

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For a list of agents, see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris-cluster/overview/featurescluster-166765.pdf

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databases or database versions can be consolidated into one physical cluster, creating a highly available consolidated service. This type of environment fosters greater isolation. Applications can be run in a dedicated zone cluster, each with their own separate management policies. The environment also creates multiple layers of availability. For example, an application can be configured to first try to restart in its zone. If the restart fails, it can attempt to restart on a different server. New in Solaris Cluster 4.0

Available for Oracle Solaris 11, the first cloud OS, Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.03 provides additional capabilities. Leveraging existing and proven Oracle Solaris 11 availability features to automatically increase overall system availability, Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 integrates tightly with Oracle Solaris 11 and enables applications controlled by the Oracle Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) to be automatically integrated within Oracle Solaris Cluster. Local service-level management continues to be operated by Oracle SMF, whereas Oracle Solaris Cluster carries out whole resource-level, cluster-wide, failure handling operations for nodes and storage. Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 uses the Oracle Solaris Image Packaging System (IPS) to simplify software delivery and facilitate lifecycle management. In addition, utilizing the Oracle Solaris Automated Installer enables Oracle Solaris Cluster to provide integrated and automated system provisioning. Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition

Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition can be used to combine SPARC and x86 clusters across unlimited distances to provide business continuity even if a data center fails, and enables multi-site, multicluster support for high availability and disaster recovery. Managing the availability of application services and data across geographically dispersed clusters, Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition informs system administrators as soon as a primary cluster goes down, so they can automatically start up business applications with replicated data on the secondary Oracle Solaris Cluster. Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition also provides reliable protection from disaster for local, campus, metropolitan and worldwide clusters in physical and virtual environments through automated application failover and coordination with application-, storage-, host-based replication solutions such as Oracle Data Guard. Oracle Solaris Predictive Self Healing Software

Oracle Solaris Predictive Self Healing is an innovative capability that automatically diagnoses, isolates, and recovers from many hardware and application faults. As a result, business-critical SAP applications and essential system services can continue uninterrupted if software fails, a major hardware component fails, or even if there are software configuration problems. The two main components of Predictive Self Healing are the Oracle Solaris Fault Manager Architecture (FMA) and Oracle Solaris Service Manager Facility

2

Oracle RAC 11.2.0.3 is certified for zone clusters on Oracle Solaris 11. For details, see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/virtualizationmatrix-172995.html 3

Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.x is available for Oracle Solaris 10 and earlier. Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 is available for Oracle Solaris 11.

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(SMF). The powerful combination of fault management features in FMA and service management features in SMF enable SAP administrators to proactively monitor hardware and software problems before they can adversely affect the SAP landscape. Minor problems that might have halted the applications in the past can be flagged and resolved without affecting SAP execution. Oracle Solaris Fault Manager Architecture

Systems that cannot properly handle hardware and software errors can leave SAP services vulnerable to failure if errors are not detected and resolved. The Oracle Solaris Fault Manager collects data relating to hardware and software errors. It automatically and silently detects and diagnoses the underlying problem, with an extensible set of agents automatically responding by taking the faulty component offline. Easy-tounderstand diagnostic messages link to articles in Oracle’s knowledgebase, which clearly guide administrators through corrective tasks requiring human intervention. The open design of the fault manager facility also permits administrators and field personnel to observe the activities of the diagnostic system. With the fault manager, the overall time from a fault condition to automated diagnosis to any necessary human intervention is greatly reduced, increasing application uptime. Oracle Solaris Service Management Facility

SAP applications and services are dependent on system services provided by the operating system. These system services start sequentially and can be dependent on the availability of other running services. An ever-growing collection of services adds complexity and interdependencies, and system services can fail if inadvertently terminated by an administrator, aborted due to a software programming error, or interrupted by a hardware problem. The failure of these services can cause SAP applications to fail as well. Oracle Solaris 11 makes the use of SMF mandatory and replaces rc scripts to start and stop services. The SMF interface allows administrators to observe service states, dependencies, and properties, and provides powerful centralized tools for configuring and modifying services easily. A number of diagnostic features can help administrators pinpoint problems more easily. SMF can display a list of broken services along with an explanation as to why the service is broken and any additional dependent services or instances that are impacted. Some SMF features enable administrators to resolve issues without affecting SAP applications at all. Administrators can make changes and refresh service configurations without having to first kill the running service, and system services can be set to restart automatically, reducing the need for manual intervention. The result is increased uptime for vital SAP applications and services.

Security SAP NetWeaver enables access to a broader range of applications and information by a wider range of users, delivering critical benefits to the enterprise. Products ship faster, productivity climbs, and customer satisfaction increases. The challenge is to cost-effectively open up the enterprise to more users while ensuring information assets remain secure. Adhering to security principles such as least privilege and secure by default, Oracle Solaris 11 provides a number of improvements and new security features that enable security administrators to minimize and harden Oracle Solaris to an even greater degree than ever before.

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Oracle Solaris Secure Execution and File Integrity

SAP environments can contain some of an organization’s most critical and sensitive data, and IT departments need to maintain data integrity and defend it against malicious software. Increasingly sophisticated system attacks that can be leveled at servers include applications that masquerade as legitimate software and attempt to take control of corporate compute resources. In Oracle Solaris, most binaries are digitally signed, enabling administrators to track changes easily. In addition, all patches or enhancements are embedded with digital signatures, eliminating the false positives associated with upgrading or patching file integrity-checking software. Secure execution with Oracle Solaris makes it possible to configure a system to enable only valid, signed executables from a list of trusted authorities to run. Rogue applications, Trojan horses, and viruses cannot execute. And any binary can be signed—thirdparty commercial offerings, open source, or homegrown code—without needing the source code. Basic Audit and Reporting Tool is a file integrity-checking application for data files and applications. As part of the Oracle Solaris fingerprint database project, digital signatures are provided for all files shipped in Oracle Solaris, and these signatures enable the integrity of Oracle Solaris files to be inspected to ensure that critical system files have not been modified. Oracle Solaris fingerprint database also offers free online verification of Oracle-issued binaries. Together, these tools provide powerful, flexible ways to monitor and protect against unauthorized changes to the operating system platform. Oracle Solaris User and Process Rights Management

Organizations typically rely on their SAP applications to support data-driven corporate decisions. Any user or application with root access can make major changes to the system and its applications, either inadvertently or as the target of a hacking attempt. Regardless of intent, the best way to protect systems and applications against modification is by restricting access to system privileges. Oracle Solaris offers unique user rights management (also known as Role-Based Access Control) and process rights management (also known as privileges). These technologies reduce security risk by granting users and applications only the minimum capabilities needed to perform their duties. And, unlike other solutions on the market, no application changes are required to take advantage of these security enhancements. Furthermore, when integrated with the industry leading identity management solution for enterprises, Oracle Identity Management (OIM) tools, and the SAP specific Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) components, the result is the most powerful security solution in the market. The combined software addresses the end-to-end lifecycle of user identities across all enterprise resources, within and beyond the firewall. With the user and process rights management feature in Oracle Solaris, IT operators can limit and selectively enable applications to access just enough system resources to perform their functions. This capability dramatically reduces the possibility of attack from a poorly written application by eliminating inappropriate access to the system. Even if hackers gain access to an application server, they are unable to increase operating privileges, thus limiting the opportunity to inject malicious code or otherwise damage data or operate devices (for example, accessing the /dev/ip device). In addition, Oracle Solaris user and process rights management helps ensure that applications running on Oracle Solaris Zones—even those run with privileges—are constrained to access resources only in their

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own zones. Oracle Solaris 11 also adds new features for administering Oracle Solaris Zones, enabling administrators to delegate zone administration to allow specific users and roles to act as administrators for each zone. Zone configuration and administration privileges can be granted through the admin resource in zonecfg. Individual authorizations for users and roles can now be specified on a per-zone basis. Building on the least privilege and Role Based Access Control security features of Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Solaris 11 extends those features with the introduction of root as a role and enhanced pfexec. Root as a role makes the root account accessible by default only as a role. Authorized users assume the root role through the command line sudo utility instead of logging into a root user account. This functionality enables authorized non-root users to complete tasks and scripts with superuser privileges, but because each user assumes the role from within their own user account, there is greater accountability for system modifications. Privileged actions are tracked through Oracle Solaris Accounting, which is enabled by default in Oracle Solaris 11. Processes that require root privileges to execute can and have been used for attacks on systems. Oracle Solaris 11 contains mechanisms that provide processes with only the privileges necessary to complete their tasks, without opening the system to attack through root privileges. Pfexec is used to execute administrative commands that require a higher privilege level. Another important use of the pfexec feature is to limit the privileges given to programs with setuid to root. Processes requiring the setuid mechanism traditionally run with all privileges, but now execute with just the privileges that are specified in their entry in the Forced Privileges rights profile. Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions

Many SAP systems are subject to either corporate governance or must comply with stringent regulatory security requirements. Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions is an advanced security feature that enables enterprises with specific regulatory or information protection requirements to take advantage of labeling features previously only available in highly specialized operating systems or appliances. Trusted extensions enables controlled access to data and applications based on sensitivity level, not just on ownership. The security policy in Oracle Solaris is extended to support labels on elements of the operating system so that data marked “Confidential” cannot be accessed by public services such as Web browsers and e-mail applications, regardless of who attempts the access. In addition, data cannot be written to a device such as a CD or USB flash drive that is labeled with a lower classification than the data itself, which helps protect most sensitive data. Labeling extends to network packets, CDE and Java Desktop System interfaces, file systems, terminals, disk drives, USB thumb drives, CD-ROMs, printers, audio devices, network interfaces, and all processes. Labeled IPsec, introduced in Oracle Solaris 11, permits sensitivity labels to be associated with IPsec-protected traffic. This facilitates labeled networking over untrusted networks. With Oracle Solaris 11, Trusted Extensions is enhanced to explicitly set security labels on Oracle Solaris ZFS datasets, further securing data assets in Multi-Level Secure (MLS) environments. In these environments, sensitivity labels are applied to operating system resources for granting access in conjunction with least privilege. In Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions, the existing Commercial Internet Protocol Security Option (CIPSO) trusted networking protocol assumes that the underlying network is secure and that CIPSO packet headers cannot be manipulated or observed while packets are in transit.

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Cryptographic Framework

Opening SAP environments to customers and partners in order to conduct business outside the enterprise necessitates the use of encryption and decryption operations, even where once considered impractical. Often underutilized due to the system overhead it can generate, encryption is vital along with security standards and new regulations requiring greater use of encryption key factors. The Oracle Solaris cryptographic framework adds a common API for system-wide cryptographic routines. This no-cost, integrated framework provides a single point of administration and uniform access to hardware-accelerated cryptographic functions for cryptographically aware applications and can load balance across accelerators, increasing encrypted network traffic throughput. Taking advantage of hardware acceleration in both SPARC and x86 platforms, the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework features strong cryptographic routines—up to AES 256-bit key length. In order to meet more stringent government standards, the cryptographic framework in Oracle Solaris 11 now supports the NSA Suite B algorithms. IP Filter

Utilizing a firewall to secure SAP environments is a wise choice, but requires that IT staff first research, then configure and deploy the appropriate software. Oracle Solaris includes a built-in firewall to make this process easier for administrators. Oracle Solaris has included firewall protection technology with every copy shipped for years, with the specific goal of protecting individual systems from attack. In Oracle Solaris, the IP Filter firewall is completely integrated into the IP stack in Oracle Solaris. This high-speed firewall allows administrators to restrict access to particular networking services. Network Security

Hackers commonly attempt to gain access to unguarded systems through open network services. Servers in SAP landscapes are just as vulnerable to this type of attack as any other system. Following the principle of secure by default, Oracle Solaris 11 is delivered in a secure configuration designed to minimize external network attacks. Fully secure from the moment of installation, the Oracle Solaris network services are disabled by default or set to listen for locally initiated system communications only. Oracle Solaris 11 supports creation of one or more fully virtualized and dedicated network stacks per Oracle Solaris Zone through the use of exclusive IP stacks and network virtualization. These network stacks facilitate fine-grained network security policies—such as zone-specific IP routing—on a per zone basis. Securing Stored Data

SAP systems contain vital corporate data that can be vulnerable to threats from within the organization. Oracle Solaris 11 contains features that enhance data security while it is stored. Administrators have the option of encrypting individual Oracle Solaris ZFS datasets as they are created, protecting against theft of physical storage, man-in-the-middle attacks on the SAN, and to provide dataset level secured deletion. A single Oracle Solaris ZFS storage pool can contain a mix of encrypted and unencrypted datasets. Oracle Solaris ZFS volumes—including those used for swap and dump—and file systems can also be encrypted.

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Leveraging Oracle Solaris 11 Features in SAP Environments The new features in Oracle Solaris 11 can facilitate and simplify administration tasks in SAP environments dramatically. •

Accelerating provisioning and deployment of SAP application and infrastructure

•

Hosting older SAP landscapes that require Oracle Solaris 10

•

Consolidating SAP landscapes on a single server

•

Replicating development, test, and production SAP environments

•

Making system changes safely

•

Completing backups with minimal downtime

•

Minimizing planned downtime during SAP upgrades

Accelerate SAP Application and Infrastructure Provisioning and Deployment Purchasing, configuring, provisioning, and deploying SAP systems and services can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. Enterprise software often contains numerous components or modules, each of which may need to be installed and configured separately—with its own dependencies on patches, operating system versions, or other packages—and in the proper order. Furthermore, application complexity can result in the risk of something being overlooked or done incorrectly. The entire process often is viewed as a cost burden that reduces project ROI by lengthening the time it takes to get an application or service up and running reliably. For SAP production environments where downtime must be kept to a minimum, this process can be an obstacle to meeting uptime requirements. Oracle Solaris 11 contains innovative installation and deployment tools that automate installation and update processes and eliminate the process of patching. Figure 5 illustrates how these tools and processes have changed in going from Oracle Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11.

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Oracle Solaris 10 Jumpstart

Oracle Solaris 11 Distro C Constructor

Install DVD Zone Install

Automated Installer (AI)

LiveCD

Upgrade Live Upgrade

Volume / Slice BEs

ProdReg

smpatch Patching P

IDRs

SVR4 Pkging U UFS

Jumpstart J

Image Packaging (IPS)

Oracle Solaris ZFS

Oracle Solaris ZFS Based Boot Environment

Install DVD

Oracle Solaris ZFS

Figure 5. Oracle Solaris 11 streamlines the processes of patching and upgrading software. •

Deploy software quickly and accurately. An Automated Installer allows administrators to deploy software to multiple systems at once over the network, rapidly adding infrastructure to the SAP landscape. The Automated Installer is designed to help each system automatically find an installation profile, or manifest that matches its specifications, and download and install the appropriate software.

•

Install the correct packages in the proper order. The Image Packaging System (IPS) in Oracle Solaris 11 can provide administrators with information on every software component on each system in the SAP landscape, including what needs to be done to update it. The robust dependency checking feature, combined with automated patch installation eases the process of software installation and eliminates tedious and flawed patch installations.

Preserve Older SAP Environments Sometimes, for legal or compliance reasons, older SAP landscapes must be maintained for specified periods of time that may extend beyond the timeframe originally planned. Alternatively, an organization might find that re-implementing or replacing software is too complicated or expensive. Maintaining legacy applications on aging hardware can be expensive. Oracle Solaris 10 Zones enable administrators to move legacy applications dependent on older environments to Oracle Solaris 11. This functionality also is useful for SAP environments that need to run on Oracle Solaris 10 for a little longer than would normally be expected. It enables the environment to be placed on currently supported hardware and software without an extensive migration effort. Figure 6 illustrates Oracle Solaris 10 applications running on Oracle Solaris 10 Zones on Oracle Solaris 11.

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Oracle Solaris 11 Oracle Solaris 10 Zones

SAP CRM CRM

SAP ERP

SAP

SAP NetWeaver

SAP CRM

SAP ERP

SAP

NetWeaver

Figure 6. Consolidating Oracle Solaris 10 applications on Oracle Solaris 11.

Consolidate Multiple SAP Environments with Oracle Solaris 11 Organizations looking to simplify server management tasks in the SAP landscape, or reduce the number of departmental SAP applications to be managed can consider consolidation. Multiple SAP development servers running SAP code on different patch levels are good candidates for consolidation as well. The virtualization and partitioning features of Oracle Solaris Zones enables consolidation of multiple SAP applications, instances, and environments onto a single Oracle server. Oracle Solaris Zones make it possible for SAP administrators to run multiple SAP environments with varying patch levels, different software configurations, and other variations while maintaining complete isolation of the different versions. The result is varied environments to meet different departmental requirements or satisfy testing needs while providing easier administration.

Replicate Development, Test, and Production SAP Environments Trying to replicate development, test, and production SAP environments in order to create and test new functionality traditionally is a great challenge for SAP application developers. In order to protect production systems, testing typically requires that a separate system be installed with a clone of the software and data. This can be time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive. The combination of Oracle Solaris 11 Zones and Oracle Solaris ZFS makes it possible for organizations to easily develop and test new functionality. Applications can be developed in an isolated environment, cloned, and packaged for movement to testing systems. The shared storage enabled by Oracle Solaris ZFS makes it possible to quickly replicate environments to new systems. Organizations without a lot of system resources can create the new Oracle Solaris Zones on the production system to carry out fully isolated development and testing of the new features.

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Make Software Changes Safely Software changes to Oracle Solaris 11, such as patches and upgrades, are designed to be safe, fast, and reliable with the introduction of a new concept called boot environments (BE). BEs take advantage of the underlying Oracle Solaris ZFS file system to take a snapshot of the Oracle Solaris 11 instance on the system. When patches or upgrades become available for the system, a new BE is automatically created as a target for the updated files. This enables the patch or upgrade to be applied to the new BE while the production system continues to operate safely. When the update is completed, the system is ready to be rebooted when convenient, and is set to automatically reboot into the new environment. If for some reason the system fails to boot, or applications are adversely affected by the update, the existing BE is still available as a fallback, enabling administrators to rapidly restore the system to its pre-update state. The Oracle Solaris ZFS snapshots that underlie the BE are efficient and lightweight, so Oracle recommends creating a new BE any time a potentially disruptive change—such as editing a system configuration file—is to be made to the system. This functionality can eliminate the labor-intensive processes associated with installing, patching, or upgrading software used in the SAP landscape.

Offline Backups with Minimal Downtime Completing backups of SAP environments typically presents a challenge, as traditional backups must be performed with the database halted. The features in Oracle Solaris enable administrators to momentarily halt the database, take a snapshot of the system, and restart the database. Administrators can mount the snapshot and begin backing up the system while SAP users continue to work. This results in minimal impact on the SAP environment. Administrators can also be certain that all elements of the database are properly backed up because the database is shutdown in an orderly fashion before the backup commences.

Minimize Planned Downtime During SAP Upgrades Oracle Solaris ZFS and Oracle Solaris Zones help minimize planned downtime when upgrading SAP applications. For example, Figure 7 shows a production SAP portal instance running in a zone. In Step 1, the SAP instance is copied, or cloned, into Zone B using Oracle Solaris ZFS file system features. This process typically takes only a few seconds, after which the application can be started on Zone B. In Step 2, the SAP system in Zone A continues to run, while the SAP system in Zone B is upgraded to a new version. After the upgrade of the SAP system on Zone B is finished, the live system is switched from Zone A to the upgraded system on Zone B in Step 3. This is a very effective process and dramatically reduces downtime during upgrades. This process is especially beneficial when upgrading portal applications because when the portal is down, users cannot access the systems.

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Step 1: Create Clone

Step 2: Upgrade Clone

Step 3: Switch Clone

Container A

Container B

Figure 7. Minimizing downtime with Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Solaris ZFS.

Oracle’s SPARC and x86 Server Families As feature-rich SAP applications continue to add functionality, and demand for those functions increases, systems need additional power, more memory, faster I/O and better networking capabilities in order to keep pace. Oracle offers a comprehensive portfolio of SPARC and x86 servers—all running Oracle Solaris 11—that are ideally suited to SAP applications. Offering high performance, massive threading capabilities, and large memory configurations, these servers provide organizations with a broad range of choices and makes it possible to match the right server to workloads. •

Oracle’s SPARC M-Series servers. Based on SPARC64 VII+ quad-core processors, Oracle’s SPARC M-Series servers scale from 1 to 64 processors, 256 cores, and 4 TB of RAM. Delivering the highest levels of performance, scalability, and availability for mission-critical applications, they provide an always-on platform ideal for system consolidation.

•

Oracle’s SPARC T3- and T4-Series servers. Oracle’s T3-Series servers are based on SPARC T3 sixteen-core processors and scale from 1 to 4 processors, 512 compute threads, and 512 GB RAM. Based on SPARC T4 8-core processors, Oracle’s SPARC T4-Series servers scale from 1 to 4 processors, 256 threads, and a system maximum of 1 TB of RAM. Oracle’s SPARC T4-Series servers enable performance- or latency-sensitive threads in an application to be given more exclusive access to hardware resources. Designated threads run with a higher priority and can use more hardware resources than less critical threads. The result is faster overall performance by accelerating the more critical components in threaded applications.

•

Oracle’s x86 servers. Oracle offers a portfolio of x86 Sun Fire and Sun Blade servers based on Intel Xeon processors. The newest additions to the family are the Sun Fire X4800 M2 and Sun Fire X4470 M2 servers running Intel’s Xeon E7 processors. These servers set a new standard for x86 systems, revolutionizing the x86 market with industry-leading performance, outstanding scalability, and unmatched RAS.

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The Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Server IT departments looking to consolidate SAP environments or deploy complete SAP solutions rapidly and without a lot of intensive integration work can take advantage of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Server. •

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Delivered completely integrated and balanced for optimal performance, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine loads data faster, returns queries sooner, and sets new IT performance standards. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine delivers the complete technology stack—hardware, software, and middleware—in a reliable, redundant database machine that’s easy to manage, fast to deploy, and fully supported by a single vendor. Preconfigured, scalable, and secure, Oracle Exadata Database Machine provides SAP environments with the ability to consolidate multiple databases on a single system. SAP environments also benefit from its ease of management and high availability.

•

The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is specifically designed to provide a foundation for secure, mission-critical private clouds capable of virtually unlimited scale, unbeatable performance, and previously unimagined management simplicity. With fully integrated compute nodes, storage, and networking, it is ideal for applications of all types, from small-scale departmental applications to the largest and most demanding ERP and mainframe applications.

•

The Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Server. The Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 server is a general purpose engineered system that delivers high performance, availability, scalability, and security across a wide range of enterprise applications, including database, middleware and Oracle and custom applications. The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is a completely optimized package of servers, storage and software that integrates Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud while utilizing the newest SPARC T4-4 servers, ZFS Storage Appliance, InfiniBand I/O fabric, and Oracle Solaris. Oracle offers a version for SAP, the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster for SAP, which is available as an Oracle Optimized Solution.

World-Record SAP Benchmark Performance In October 2011, Oracle announced a new overall world-record result on the SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark running the SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.04. This benchmark utilized Oracle Database 11g Real Application Clusters (RAC) running on Oracle Solaris and Oracle’s Sun Fire X4800 M2 servers. The configuration was replicated to create up to eight Oracle RAC nodes that delivered the outstanding performance results as shown in Table 15.

4

Results as of October 4, 2011. See http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512968

5

The SAP SD-Parallel standard application benchmark performed on September 26, 2011, by Oracle in Burlington, MA, USA, has been certified with the following data: 49,860 SAP SD-Parallel benchmark users. 0.91 seconds average dialog response time, 5,481,670 fully

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The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) business test that represents full business workloads of order and invoice processing. It reflects the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments. A variant of the SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, the SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark enables vendors to apply parallel database technologies like Oracle RAC to the same transactions, user interaction steps, and business processes as the SAP SD Benchmark. The difference between the two is the technical data distribution. In order to achieve comparable results within the SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark, benchmark users must be equally distributed across all participating database nodes using a round robin mechanism. This prevents segmented workloads, leading to higher scalability and therefore better results— for the sake of comparability. Usually, the SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark results are somewhat lower than non-parallel benchmark results utilizing the same amount of hardware. Demonstrating the superior performance, reliability, and near linear scalability of Oracle Database RAC clusters running on Sun Fire X4800 M2 servers with Oracle Solaris, the new world-record result of 180,000 SAP SD-Parallel benchmark users far exceeds the performance of any IBM result ever published with the SAP SD standard application benchmark. When measured with two-, four-, six-, and eight-node configurations, Oracle Database with Oracle RAC running on Sun Fire servers with Oracle Solaris shows an extraordinary ninety percent scalability, while maintaining superior performance and availability. The only vendor able to provide benchmark results of over 1,000,000 SAPS, Oracle’s scale-out technology

processed order line items per hour, 16,445,000 dialog steps per hour, 274,080 SAPS, 0.010 seconds/0.030 seconds average database request time (dialog/update). CPU utilization of servers, 91% (node 1 active: 88%, node 2 active: 94%). Server configuration: 2 Sun Fire X4800 M2 servers each with 8 processors / 80 cores / 160 threads, Intel Xeon Processor E7-8870, 2.40 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 30 MB L3 cache per processor, 512 GB main memory, Solaris 10 operating system, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with Oracle Real Application Clusters, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0. Certification Number: 2011040. (2) The SAP SD-Parallel standard application benchmark performed on September 26, 2011, by Oracle in Burlington, MA, USA, has been certified with the following data: 94,736 SAP SD-Parallel benchmark users, 0.41 seconds average dialog response time, 10,921,000 fully processed order line items per hour. 32,763,000 dialog steps per hour. 546,050 SAPS, 0.010 seconds/0.041 seconds average database request time (dialog/update). CPU utilization of servers, 93% (node 1 active: 89%, node 2 active: 94%, node 3 active: 94%, node 4 active: 94%). Server configuration: 4 Sun Fire X4800 M2 servers each with 8 processors / 80 cores / 160 threads, Intel Xeon Processor E7-8870, 2.40 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 30 MB L3 cache per processor, 512 GB main memory, Solaris 10 operating system, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with Oracle Real Application Clusters, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0. Certification Number: 2011039. (3) The SAP SD-Parallel standard application benchmark performed on September 20, 2011, by Oracle in Burlington, MA, has been certified with the following data: 137,904 SAP SD-Parallel benchmark users 0.81 seconds average dialog response time, 15,309,330 fully processed order line items per hour, 45,928,000 dialog steps per hour, 765,470 SAPS, 0.009 seconds/0.045 seconds average database request time (dialog/update). CPU utilization of servers, 89% (node 1 active: 85%, node 2 active: 90%, node 3 active: 86%, node 4 active: 86%, node 5 active: 92%, node 6 active: 92%). Server configuration: 6 Sun Fire X4800 M2 servers each with 8 processors / 80 cores / 160 threads, Intel Xeon Processor E7-8870, 2.40 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 30 MB L3 cache per processor, 512 GB main memory, Solaris 10 operating system, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with Oracle Real Application Clusters, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0. Certification Number: 2011038. (4) The SAP SD-Parallel standard application benchmark performed on September 5, 2011, by Oracle in Burlington, MA, has been certified with the following data: 180,000 SAP SD-Parallel benchmark users (overall world-record result on SAP SD benchmark) 0.63 seconds average dialog response time, 20,327,670 fully processed order line items per hour, 60,983,000 dialog steps per hour, 1,016,380 SAPS, 0.010 seconds/0.055 seconds average database request time (dialog/update). CPU utilization of servers, 89% (node 1 active: 85%, node 2 active: 89%, node 3 active: 90%, node 4 active: 90%, node 5 active: 90%, node 6 active: 89%, node 7 active: 89%, node 8 active: 90%). Server configuration: 8 Sun Fire X4800 M2 servers each with 8 processors / 80 cores / 160 threads, Intel Xeon Processor E7-8870, 2.40 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 30 MB L3 cache per processor, 512 GB main memory, Solaris 10 operating system, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with Oracle Real Application Clusters, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0. Certification Number: 2011037. Source: SAP, www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/index.epx

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delivers both world-leading performance and virtually linear scalability from small systems to the largest systems.

TABLE 1. RESULTS OF SAP SD BENCHMARK WITH ORACLE DATABASE 11G RAC RUNNING ON SUN FIRE X4800 M2 SERVERS NUMBER OF NODES

NUMBER OF SAP SD BENCHMARK USERS

NUMBER OF SAPS

Two Nodes

49,860

274,080

Four Nodes

94,736

546,050

Six Nodes

137,904

765,470

Eight Nodes

180,000

1,016,380

The Assemble-to-Order Benchmark

In September 2011, Oracle announced a new world-record result on the SAP ATO Benchmark6. This benchmark utilized Oracle Database 11g running on an Oracle SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server with 64 SPARC64 VII+ 3.0 GHz quad-core processors. Demonstrating its capabilities for workload consolidation, both the application tier and the database tier were deployed on the server. The benchmark delivered a record result of 206,360 fully business processed assembly orders per hour—the highest score ever posted with the SAP ATO standard application benchmark. This record-breaking result demonstrates that Oracle’s integrated and consolidated solution based on a single SPARC Enterprise M9000 server is well suited for customers planning large deployments of SAP applications. The Assemble-to-Order (ATO) Benchmark captures the complex process of creating a final assembly order for products, such as PCs, pumps, and cars, using components of the SAP Business Suite software. Characterized by high volume sales and short production times—ranging from a number of hours to one day at most—the ATO benchmark runs transactions from many different SAP components so it more closely simulates real-world customer business scenarios. For this reason, Oracle uses the ATO benchmark to help customers gain a more accurate understanding of expected performance results in typical SAP environments. Many customers have asked SAP and Oracle to run an ATO benchmark, as it has been a number of years since the last one was published.

6

Results as of September 2, 2011. Source: SAP, www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/index.epx The two-tier SAP ATO standard application benchmark performed on July 28, 2011, by Oracle in Burlington, MA, has been certified with the following data: SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server, 64 processors, 3.0 GHz, 256 cores and 512 threads running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Solaris 10 achieved 206,360 fully business processed assembly orders per hour. Certification number 2011033.

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SAP Product Availability Matrix SAP is supported on Oracle Solaris 10 and 11 for both SPARC and x86 platforms using either Oracle Database or SAP MaxDB. Using Oracle Database version 11.2.0.3 requires Oracle Client 11.2.0.3 software. The version of SAP MaxDB database to use depends on the SAP solution and the version of SAP NetWeaver on which it is based, either MaxDB 7.8 or 7.9. The SAP releases supported on Oracle Solaris 11 start with products based on SAP Kernel 6.40 or later. All releases prior to SAP Netweaver 7.0 require SAP Kernel 640EX2. SAP NetWeaver 7.0 requires the SAP 720_EXT Kernel. For more information on product versions supported by SAP, see the SAP Product Availability Matrix (PAM), at http://service.sap.com/pam. The PAM lists each SAP product along with a product summary and the supported Oracle Solaris versions. A portion of the SAP Product Availability Matrix pertaining to Oracle Solaris 11 appears in Table 2.

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TABLE 2. SAP PRODUCTS SUPPORTED ON ORACLE SOLARIS 11 PRODUCT

SAP BASIS

SAP

RELEASE

BUSINESS SUITE

CRM 4.0 SR1

6.20

R3E 4.7ExtSet2 SR1

6.20

ECC 5.0 SR1

6.40

SRM 4.0 SR1 (Server 5.0)

6.40

NetWeaver 04 SR1

6.40

ECC 6.0 SR3

700

SRM 5.0 SR3 (Server 5.5)

700

CRM 5.0 SR3

700

SCM 5.0 SR3

700

NW 7.0 SR3

700

SRM 6.0

700

CRM 2007 (6.0)

700

SCM 2007

700

SolMan 7.0

700

ERP 6.0 EHP4 SR1

701

SRM 7.0 SR1

701

SCM 7.0 SR1

701

CRM 7.0 SR1

701

SolMan 7.0 EHP1 SR1

701

NW 7.01 SR1

701

NW 7.1

710

NW 7.11

711

NW 7.0 EHP2

702

SolMan 7.1

702

ERP 6.0 EHP5

702

SRM 7.0 EHP1

702

SCM 7.0 EHP1

702

CRM 7.0 EHP1

702

NW 7.20

720

NW 7.30

730

NW 7.0 EHP3

731

ERP 6.0 EHP6

731

SRM 7.0 EHP2

731

SCM 7.0 EHP2

731

CRM 7.0 EHP2

731

NW 7.31

731

ORACLE DATABASE 11.2.03 SPARC

MAXDB**

X86

BS 2005

BS 2007

BS 7i2010

BS 7i2011

** MaxDB is supported by SAP kernels 6.40 – 7.20. MaxDB 7.9 is supported by SAP kernel 7.20_EXT. Key

Supported

Supported with limitations

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Installation information is available in SAP Note 16696847, SAP on Oracle Solaris 11. SAP products supported on Oracle Solaris 10 are listed in Table 3. TABLE 3. SAP PRODUCTS SUPPORTED ON ORACLE SOLARIS 10 SAP BUSINESS SUITE

2005 and later

SAP NETWEAVER

2004 and later 6.40 and 7.x

SAP KERNEL

Unicode

Non-Unicode

SPARC/x86

SPARC

x86

SAP Application Server for ABAP and Java, SAP Central Services, DBMS, 2/3tier

SAP Application Server for ABAP and Java, SAP Central Services, DBMS, 2/3-tier

SAP Dialog Application Server for ABAP

ORACLE 10G AND 11C

Available

Available

Available

MAXDB

Available

Available

Available

Available (only available for ERP 6.0 [SR3 EHPX] and only for DB2 for UNIX version)

Available

Available

Full stack and all major SAP components available including DBMS

Full stack and all major SAP components available including DBMS

SAP Central Services not available on Solaris 10 on x64 platforms

OFFERING

DB2

COMMENTS

Migrating to Oracle Solaris 11 Migrating to Oracle Solaris 11 is straightforward. This section discusses the process for migrating a database, installing a new SAP environment, and adding dialog application servers to an existing environment.

Migrating the Database Server To migrate databases that reside on systems with an operating system other than Oracle Solaris 11, install a target platform as a database server with a prerequisite SAP kernel of 7.00 or later running on Oracle Solaris 11. The migration process is the same as for any other standard SAP heterogeneous migration. It is possible to use any supported migration method, such as an R3load, export/import, or transportable tablespaces (Oracle Database 10g only). On the target system, use SAP’s standard installation tool (SAPinst) to install the system and choose Codepage:Unicode.

7

Existing SAP customers can find the SAP note 1669684 on the SAP Service Marketplace using their secure customer login.

29


Installing a New SAP Environment Installing a new SAP environment on Oracle Solaris 11 is simple because the full SAP stack and database are supported for the SAP 7.00 kernel. Use the SAPinst installation tool to perform a full SAP installation of a Unicode database. This is an SAP 7.00 kernel environment, so the application servers can be Oracle Solaris 11 or any other SAP supported platform, such as Linux or Windows.

Conclusion Widely recognized as the platform of choice for enterprise and mission-critical applications, Oracle servers running Oracle Solaris power some of the world’s largest and most complex SAP installations. With stateof-the-art development and deployment platforms based on SPARC and x86 processors, Oracle offers a wide range of choices that maximize performance, scalability, power efficiency, reliability, security, and virtualization for SAP enterprise implementations. To help customers take advantage of best-of-breed hardware and software, Oracle and SAP work together to validate Oracle Solaris for SAP NetWeaver on Oracle servers. The synergy of Oracle's complete, integrated stack provides an optimal, seamless platform for SAP applications, from departmental solutions running on single blade systems to the largest and most demanding enterprise applications on Oracle's innovative high-end systems. Now more than ever, the winning combination of Oracle Solaris, Oracle servers, and SAP applications helps IT organizations to meet the challenges of a global economy.

For More Information For more information on Oracle Solaris 11, see the references listed in Table 4. TABLE 4. REFERENCES

Transitioning From Oracle Solaris 10 to Oracle Solaris 11 (Overview)

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E24456/overview-1.html

Oracle Engineered Systems

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/engineered-systems/index.html

Oracle Server and Storage Systems

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/index.html

Oracle Solaris

http://www.oracle.com/solaris

Oracle Solaris Cluster

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solariscluster/overview/index.html

Oracle Solaris 11 Compatibility Checking Tool

http://www.samplecode.oracle.com/sf/projects/solaris_11_compatibility_tools/

Oracle Database and IT Infrastructure for SAP

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/sap/index.html

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Oracle Solaris: The Foundation for Successful

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July 2012

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