Has EMC gone productive with a SAP HANA instance virtualized on VMware? Yes it has!
The question coming is how and why, since SAP hasn't yet released productive support for SAP HANA virtualized.
The first thing to realize is that EMC has done it without SAP's support!
Is this a big issue? No its not! Anyone who has worked either as a consultant or on operations management has done something "unsupported" by SAP at some point in their life.
Why? Because SAP support is by nature conservative. And if you had multiple contracts with SLA's on resolution time, you would be also. So, when SAP supports something, it always means it has been sufficiently tested, and eventual problems can be easily tracked and solved in due time.
Any experienced consultant knows that "not being supported" doesn't mean it won't work. It means it has risks, may fail, and if "shit happens" you are on your own, so you better have a backup plan.
Why EMC has done it? In my personal perspective for a number of valid reasons:
- Because EMC owns VMware, and so, no one better than the owner of the technology to take the first step and prove it;
- Because EMC has embraced the principal of "proven IT", meaning, "we want to test on our own internal IT the technologies and the concepts we sell to our customers, so that we have a real world experience we can share";
- Because SAP said it themselves. To support productive operations of SAP HANA virtualized, they feel its needed to have further experience managing it. So, what is better than having a customer taking the risk of testing it and gathering the knowledge?
Also, the experience of running SAP HANA virtualized for non-productive use has been quite extensive, for example with SAP's own internal private cloud of the Education department having deployed HANA virtualized to support the training needs for quite some years now. So if you take for example the courses HA100 or HA200, you'll have a test system deployed on VMware. Other large customers have also been doing this for some time now.
EMC moving forward with the announcement of having a running productive instance of SAP HANA virtualized with VMware just confirms that HANA can run virtualized with minimal performance impact, and with significant benefits in terms of availability and cost reduction (both on setup and operations).
So, what is making SAP take so long to announce this widely expected support? I've heard comments about a wide variety of reasons, but in fact only SAP can say what is still missing.
The fact is EMC has been productive since last November, many customers have been running it for non-production for years now, and that for smaller installations, at this moment virtualizing HANA would be a great solution, for example enabling the boost of the service provider business, by being able to deploy smaller HANA instances (up to 1 TB) which fits many of the smaller customer needs, and so enabling the boost of HANA adoption.
On my side, I'm preparing to have some fun installing one HANA SP7 system on a VM and play around with VMotion, backup and other stuff, just to confirm how easy it is to get the functionality out.
If you want to know more about running SAP HANA virtualized, let me suggest the following resources:
· EMC story regarding virtualizing SAP HANA: https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-33197
· SAP HANA Guidelines for being virtualized with VMware vShpere: http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-4192
· SAP HANA Virtualized overview (roadmap and highlights): http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-3334
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