Is there really a case for integrating SAP Netweaver
Landscape Virtualization Management as an orchestration tool for large SAP
customers?
My belief is YES. Although there are intense discussions
around the benefits of the multiple orchestration tools in the market, one
thing is the potential, and another is “out of the box functionality”.
Business / IT alignment has been a widely discussed topic,
which have observed pages and pages of blogging and experience sharing, mostly
focusing on the IT Governance layer.
But many of these discussions become so high-level, that
they forget the reality on the datacenter. Being the poor communication between
infrastructure and applications teams a key problem in many IT organizations,
having tools that bring transparency to the “connection points” between the
diverse teams, can be a key contributor to reduce the inefficiency at the multiple
dimensions of IT operations.
On the other side, when thinking of tools, it’s also
critical to think who their intended users are. And LVM doesn’t aim to replace
any tools for other teams (Virtualization console, Storage Console, Network
console, etc), but rather provide tool that SAP systems admins didn’t have
until today, one that provides them
automation and visibility capacity to infrastructure components that up until
now they had no info on.
So, LVM enables the SAP Technical teams to have increased
visibility on the infrastructure, to perform certain regular maintenance tasks
in a more autonomous and automated way, as well as provide them added capacity
to fulfil their role of ensuring SAP Systems Availability and Performance,
through better communication with the underlying infrastructure having them all
seeing the systems through the same set of metrics.
Finally, bridging the communication between the Networking,
Storage, Servers, and applications teams is key to enable the private cloud
operating model, and run SAP better, fully automated in an industrialized way.
Over the next paragraphs, I’ll be sharing my key takeaways
from my training today on LVM 2.0, as well as what I’ve found most interesting
to consider as potential use cases for LVM based on my own SAP Operations
Management experience.
Brief summary of some of the interesting features on LVM 2.0
Going through the details of TechEd session ITM160, and with
a virtual lab just for me for the full day, I took the opportunity both to take
some notes of what I liked the most on the new LVM 2.0, as well as document
certain usage scenarios I would see as interesting.
First, a summary of features on LVM 2.0, I liked the most:
·
Possibility to integrate custom scripting, for
example when wanting to provision a system from a backup/restore, enabling
afterwards the LVM to pick up that restore to continue the provisioning;
·
Manage in LVM systems provisioned through the
SAP Cloud Appliance Library on public clouds, having LVM as the single
orchestration tool for start / stop and other mass operations and control of
all SAP Systems within a company;
·
Ability to organize systems and resources in
multi-level pools and containers, enabling an easier organization of the
landscapes, and preventing further risks from human errors on mass-operations;
·
In this new version, on top of the existing
systems visualization, it is added the storage visualization, which maps disk
pools down up to the physical devices. Great tool for performance troubleshooting
and capacity planning;
·
Possibility to configure 3rd party
apps to be viewed on LVM, enabling for example to bring to LVM visibility on
infrastructure consoles with relevant data on SAP System specific
infrastructures, adding a “never seen before” level of infrastructure
information available to the SAP Systems Administration teams;
·
Possibility to customize the post copy
automation, to the level of adding customer specific actions and completely
tailor the system setup, making the refresh of Q&A systems a predictable and
fully automated process.
Future features and my view on its benefits
/ use cases
There were also some previews of upcoming / desired features
for the future of LVM, which I found very interesting, as well as where I see
interesting potential:
·
Inclusion of HANA task lists for system clone /
copy / refresh:
o
As customers adopt a private cloud operating
model, HANA datacenter practices will need to further integrate with the
private cloud specifics, and being able to deploy HANA systems through the simple
processes of LVM will be a great add-on!
·
Use of the SAP Cloud Appliance Library also for
the private cloud:
o
The SAP Cloud Appliance Library today is only
available to service providers, and enables them to provide a menu of
pre-defined SAP System images that customers can easily deploy. Imagine that
you are starting a CRM project and need to deploy quickly a test system for
your consultant to start testing. Having this option in the private cloud, with
LVM as a management tool will be a great reinforcement of the benefits of
adopting a cloud operating model for internal IT;
·
Enhancements to system visualization:
o
One of the key challenges when virtualizing SAP
systems, it that SAP Systems teams loose complete track of where those systems
are, and the trend of infrastructure teams to “over provision” and abuse of the
“pooling and sharing” practices lead systems to degraded performance over time.
It them becomes a nightmare to manage performance! On one side those
infrastructure teams say it’s everything all right (according to their
standards that may not suit the needs of SAP applications), and on the other
side SAP teams have no tools to argue. End to end system visibility, from the
application down to the disk is an outstanding tie-breaker on these situations,
and will be key in accelerating virtualization adoption for productive SAP
systems, being particularly important in the future reality of SAP HANA
virtualized.
·
System provisioning using backup / restore:
o
Having LVM able also to launch backup and
restore jobs makes all the sense. It’s not casual the fact that many SAP
customers on Oracle databases used BRtools. I don’t know how far will this
functionality go, but if the goal is to be able to provision systems from
previous backups, why not extend a bit further and have a central tool for
backup management across all the SAP landscape? For me it makes sense in the
perspective of LVM being a tool for the most experienced SAP resources in the
customer’s organizations, and a central point for infrastructure management.
Also, for service providers moving towards a cloud operating model in their
internal systems, it may be a good evolution.
Some images of my tour to LVM 2.0
Having the system just for me to play for a full day, gave
me time to go a bit beyond just the scenarios presented at the SAP TechEd’s
session ITM160.
Having worked many years as both a system admin, Basis Team
leader and Operations Manager, the thing I loved the most was the configuration
of the “post-processing task list”!
Man, I do remember all the hours I’ve spend doing these
tasks!
I’ve heard some consultants claiming that this functionality
will hurt severely their number of consulting hours. Well, on my perspective,
doing it a couple of times in different platforms is fun, but repeating exactly
the same thing over and over again… I’d rather spend my time improving other
aspects of the landscape than keep repeating one thing I already knew from
memory.
I’m all for automation! Once you’ve learned something
new, if it is to be repeated, automate it and move forward! I believe one of
the key challenges today in managing SAP systems (and IT in general) is the
excessive manual work.
So, here is a look of the transaction STC01 on a managed
system – Maintain Post Processing task list:
Note that today you have these task lists built both to Business Suite as well as BW!
Another cool thing is the easy navigation and look of the overall
LVM user interface.
LVM 2.0 – Monitoring >
Activities
On the above image you have a summary of all activities, but then you can drill down and check the details of each activity.
LVM 2.0 – Monitoring >
Activities > Steps (detail of a system copy steps)
I really liked the fact that it keeps a log of the time
spent on each of the tasks within an activity. This is fantastic to plan future
activities.
Working as operations manager one key question I always
faced when performing planned maintenance tasks was the expected time to
perform them. Now you can get it easily from the records on the system!
The image bellow gives you an idea of the activities you can
perform with a system. Note that the buttons change depending on each of the
systems.
LVM 2.0 – Provisioning >
System and AS Provisioning (view of available options for a productive system)
Regarding the options available, not for the bellow example,
where the “refresh” option only shows up for a QA system related with an
existing productive system.
LVM 2.0 – Provisioning >
System and AS Provisioning (view of available options for a quality assurance
system)
I’ve found the dashboards also very usefull. When you are
managing dozens of systems, unless you have some automation, its likely that
once and a while some of the non-productive systems to be down on the beginning
of the day. Many organizations do not implement monitoring for non-productive
systems, and its costly to have a human resource (even if it’s a junior
consultant) logging on to all systems to check that they are online every
single morning (yes, I’ve seen it happening in more than one organizations…).
LVM 2.0 – Overview > Dashboard
As I said before, one key value for me is the end to end
visualization. On this demo I could only see in separate the relationship
between the disk volumes and the underlying layers, but not the end-to-end
relationship from SAP system down to the disk. So, I’m curious to see the demos
we will be building internally to check whether it will happen. If not, it’s a “must”
addition for future releases.
LVM 2.0 – Overview >
Visualization > Storage Managers
One thing you have already is the relationship between the
SAP systems and the hosts they are running in. I do believe though, that it
would be useful to have the full picture of all SAP systems on a single
physical host.
LVM 2.0 – Overview > Visualization
> Pools
Another great feature is the mass-operations. Imagine a
datacenter maintenance on a weekend, and you have hundereds of SAP systems. Do
you know how many resources and hours do you need just for the stop start if
you don’t have it all scripted already? And even if you have, in larger
environments, its possible that some systems have changed and are not captured
by the scripts. This is definitely a major “human cost” saver in IT operations.
LVM 2.0 – Automation > Tasks
(overview of an example of a planned mass operation – non-prod weekly restart)
Although I didn’t have the opportunity to test it (as my
systems had no workload, even if I’ve launched some SGEN jobs to try and get it busy), this feature is
quite interesting for very large systems. Having LVM starting new dialog
instances or changing operation modes in case response times go over certain thresholds
is definitely something usefull. Again, it’s all about automation and having
the system self-adjust instead of waiting for the users to complain.
LVM 2.0 – Automation >
Capacity Management (overview of systems available)
Summary
Definitely, in my perspective SAP NW LVM, with the
enhancements of version 2.0 is becoming a very interesting tool to enable the
operation of SAP Systems in the private cloud.
Some numbers I saw some days ago, pointed out that today the
cost of hardware on the IT Infrastructure budget these days accounts usually
for less than 10%, being the biggest chuck IT staff and consulting.
This makes absolutely no sense.
IT came with the promise of automating company’s processes,
so it doesn’t make sense that IT itself is being managed on a manual ad-hoc
way.
IT reached a level of complexity, where managing operations manually
will completely block the need for rapid adaptation and real time response to
disruptions.
The “private cloud” operating model is all about having an
industrialized automated datacenter.
And LVM will be a key tool enabling it for the SAP System
Landscapes, due to both its out of the box functionality and tight integration
with the SAP Systems reality.
Seeing increased integration being led by SAP partners to provide additional functionality to LVM will only increase its value, being one example all the integrations already delivered for example at the level of storage integration for snapshots, cloning, etc, having LVM as the single front-end for all SAP Systems operations automation.
Seeing increased integration being led by SAP partners to provide additional functionality to LVM will only increase its value, being one example all the integrations already delivered for example at the level of storage integration for snapshots, cloning, etc, having LVM as the single front-end for all SAP Systems operations automation.
Know more about EMC integration with SAP NW LVM at the SCN page, the support page or the community site.
Know more about Cloud Computing by reading the NIST
definition of cloud computing and its reference
architecture.
Know more about SAP NW LVM 2.0 at SCN’s page on
Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure.
No comments:
Post a Comment