SAP HANA on Nutanix

Nutanix Best Practices

Version 1.0 • August 2018 • BP-2097

 SAP HANA on Nutanix

Copyright
Copyright 2018 Nutanix, Inc.
Nutanix, Inc.
1740 Technology Drive, Suite 150
San Jose, CA 95110
All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual
property laws.
Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other
marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Copyright | 2
 SAP HANA on Nutanix

Contents

1. Executive Summary................................................................................ 4

2. Introduction..............................................................................................5
2.1. Audience........................................................................................................................ 5
2.2. Purpose..........................................................................................................................5

3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview...................................................... 6

3.1. Nutanix Acropolis Architecture...................................................................................... 7
3.2. Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) for SAP HANA Certification................................ 7

4. SAP HANA Best Practices..................................................................... 8

4.1. Prerequisites.................................................................................................................. 8
4.2. Design Considerations and Caveats............................................................................. 8
4.3. Hardware and Hypervisor............................................................................................10
4.4. VM and Application..................................................................................................... 11
4.5. SAP HANA Specifics................................................................................................... 12

5. Conclusion............................................................................................. 14

Appendix......................................................................................................................... 15
References.......................................................................................................................... 15
Version Information............................................................................................................. 15
About the Authors............................................................................................................... 15
About Nutanix......................................................................................................................15

List of Figures................................................................................................................16

List of Tables................................................................................................................. 17

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 SAP HANA on Nutanix

1. Executive Summary
SAP helps customers migrate from traditional relational databases to their in-memory SAP HANA
database to gain more agility in their business processes. Many SAP customers are searching
for ways to deploy SAP HANA in an efficient, simple way that minimizes risk while preserving the
benefits of an agile platform. Nutanix can provide such an option.
This document outlines best practices and guidelines for deploying SAP HANA on the Nutanix
Enterprise Cloud to help you achieve the best possible performance for your SAP HANA
database virtual machines.
This first version of the SAP HANA on Nutanix best practices guide describes all the relevant
technical settings and considerations you need to get the most out of your SAP HANA scale-up
environment running on Nutanix AHV. Nutanix, in collaboration with SAP Engineering, developed
the recommendations and guidelines presented within this document through extensive testing of
SAP HANA on the Nutanix platform. These recommended settings ensure that you are running a
fully supported production SAP HANA system.
SAP has pointed out the importance of new, less complex ways to deploy SAP HANA for their
customers in the blog article More Choices, Lower Costs, Improved Scalability: Making the Most
Out of Your SAP HANA Deployment.
Compared to traditional three-tier virtualization implementations, deploying SAP HANA on
Nutanix lets you realize several key benefits, including dramatic reductions in complexity,
significant risk avoidance, gains in flexibility, and a faster time to market.

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2. Introduction

2.1. Audience
This best practices guide is part of the Nutanix Solutions Library. It is intended for customers,
partners, and internal employees who are responsible for working on any SAP HANA project.
Readers of this document should already be familiar with Nutanix and SAP HANA.

2.2. Purpose
We cover all necessary guidelines and prerequisites for successfully deploying SAP HANA in
production on a Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Table 1: Document Version History

Version
Published Notes
Number
1.0 August 2018 Original publication.

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3. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Overview

Nutanix delivers a web-scale, hyperconverged infrastructure solution purpose-built for
virtualization and cloud environments. This solution brings the scale, resilience, and economic
benefits of web-scale architecture to the enterprise through the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
Platform, which combines three product families—Nutanix Acropolis, Nutanix Prism, and Nutanix
Calm.
Attributes of this Enterprise Cloud OS include:
• Optimized for storage and compute resources.
• Machine learning to plan for and adapt to changing conditions automatically.
• Self-healing to tolerate and adjust to component failures.
• API-based automation and rich analytics.
• Simplified one-click upgrade.
• Native file services for user and application data.
• Native backup and disaster recovery solutions.
• Powerful and feature-rich virtualization.
• Flexible software-defined networking for visualization, automation, and security.
• Cloud automation and life cycle management.
Nutanix Acropolis provides data services and can be broken down into three foundational
components: the Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF), the App Mobility Fabric (AMF), and AHV.
Prism furnishes one-click infrastructure management for virtual environments running on
Acropolis. Acropolis is hypervisor agnostic, supporting three third-party hypervisors—ESXi,
Hyper-V, and XenServer—in addition to the native Nutanix hypervisor, AHV. SAP HANA is
validated for Nutanix AHV.

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Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

3.1. Nutanix Acropolis Architecture

Acropolis does not rely on traditional SAN or NAS storage or expensive storage network
interconnects. It combines highly dense storage and server compute (CPU and RAM) into a
single platform building block. Each building block delivers a unified, scale-out, shared-nothing
architecture with no single points of failure.
The Nutanix solution requires no SAN constructs, such as LUNs, RAID groups, or expensive
storage switches. All storage management is VM-centric, and I/O is optimized at the VM virtual
disk level. The software solution runs on nodes from a variety of manufacturers that are either
all-flash for optimal performance, or a hybrid combination of SSD and HDD that provides a
combination of performance and additional capacity. The DSF automatically tiers data across the
cluster to different classes of storage devices using intelligent data placement algorithms. For
best performance, algorithms make sure the most frequently used data is available in memory or
in flash on the node local to the VM.
To learn more about the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, please visit the Nutanix Bible and
Nutanix.com.

3.2. Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) for SAP HANA Certification

The HCI certification for SAP is brand new and recognizes the possibilities of HCI as a way to
reduce the TCO, risk, and complexity of traditional implementation methods for SAP HANA.
The certification has two primary segments. As the first step, a platform vendor (Nutanix, in this
case) must validate their platform, which consists of a hypervisor and an HCI component. In a
second step, the hardware OEM must certify a suggested configuration via some additional HCI-
related tests.
When both parts of the validation are complete, the solution is certified and is then listed in a new
HCI for SAP HANA category. The Hardware OEM is then responsible for selling and supporting
the certified solution for the customer.

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4. SAP HANA Best Practices

To ensure that you are running your SAP HANA VMs in a way that allows for maximum
performance while assuring full production support, work through the lists below to verify your
settings and complete any option modifications.
The following recommendations and guidelines are the direct results of intensive testing and
validation exercises run by Nutanix with guidance from SAP HANA Engineering.
To make it easier for you to confirm that everything is covered, we have grouped our best
practices in four main categories:
• Prerequisites.
• Design considerations and caveats.
• Hardware and hypervisor.
• VM and application.

4.1. Prerequisites
Before installing a system, verify that it meets the following prerequisites:
• Ensure that you are using a supported operating system for your VM, as per the SAP Product
Availability Matrix (PAM) (SAP account required).
• Ensure that your version of Nutanix AHV is AHV-20170830.151 or newer.
• Ensure that your version of Nutanix AOS is 5.9.0 or newer.
• Both SAP HANA version 1 and SAP HANA version 2 are supported.
• SAP HANA on HCI is only supported on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors of the Intel-
Skylake-Microarchitecture.
Please review the Appendix of this document for guidance on how to verify your current version.

4.2. Design Considerations and Caveats

When designing your environment, keep the following caveats in mind for production SAP HANA
database systems:
• The maximum memory size of a single production SAP HANA VM is 2.3 TB.
• The maximum number of virtual CPUs for a single production SAP HANA VM is 168 vCPU.

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• Do not place the SAP HANA production database on the same socket as the controller VM.
• Resource sharing between production SAP HANA VMs and any other VMs is not allowed.
• For production SAP HANA database VMs, ensure that you adhere to the resource
combinations outlined in the table below.

Table 2: Resource Combinations for Production SAP HANA Database VMs

Dual Socket Platform Quad Socket Platform

—1 VM with 1 socket worth of CPU

and memory
—1 VM with 1 socket worth of CPU
3 VMs
and memory
—1 VM with 1 socket worth of CPU
—1 VM with 1 socket worth of and memory
CPU and memory (for example,
1 VM 56 vCPU and 768 GB RAM on —1 VM with 1 socket worth of CPU
an Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 and memory
Processor) 2 VMs
—1 VM with 2 sockets worth of CPU
and memory

—1 VM with 3 sockets worth of CPU

and memory (for example, 168 vCPU
1 VM
and 2.3 TB RAM on an Intel® Xeon®
Platinum 8180 Processor)

We support nonproduction SAP HANA database systems as follows:

• For nonproduction databases, we support the above production VM configurations, as well as
database VMs that consume half a socket worth of CPU and memory resources.
• For nonproduction databases, we support running the database VM in parallel with other
nonproduction VMs, including the controller VM.
For your Nutanix cluster design, consider the following points:
• Always plan for failover capacity in the form of N+1.
• If possible, Nutanix recommends starting with a four-node cluster.
• When sizing usable storage on the cluster, ensure the following:

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# For production VMs, assume 4x the SAP HANA database memory footprint, available
locally on the node where the VM is running.
# For nonproduction VMs, assume 2x the SAP HANA database memory footprint, available
locally on the node where the VM is running.
• Do not configure storage saving functionalities such as compression, deduplication, or erasure
coding (EC-X) on a storage container that holds production database files.

4.3. Hardware and Hypervisor

The platforms listed below are currently available, but always consult the SAP HANA on HCI
hardware compatibility list to ensure that you are selecting the latest officially certified hardware.
We plan to update this document when SAP adds this list to their website.
• Lenovo
# Lenovo HX7820
• Dell
# DELL XC940
# DELL XC740
When selecting and setting up your hardware, follow the SAP HANA networking
recommendations as described in SAP HANA Network Requirements, which involves ensuring
the availability of enough physical and virtual network interfaces.

Note: It is mandatory to separate HANA network traffic (for example, database

access and HANA replication) from all other types of traffic.

Production SAP HANA databases require NVMe storage devices.

On a quad socket host, we require the use of network cards that support Remote Direct Memory
Access (RDMA) technology. When you select these cards, ensure that your Ethernet switches
support the RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) standard.
Verify with your hardware vendor how to set the hardware-specific BIOS to the equivalent of
“Maximum performance.”
To ensure maximum performance and availability, adjust the following hypervisor settings:
• To allow for energy saving when a CPU is idle, you can instruct the CPU to enter a low-power
mode. There are various power modes available to each CPU; the various power modes are
referred to as "C-states." On Nutanix AHV, we recommend disabling C-states 3 and 4. To

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disable these modes automatically, run the following commands from one of the controller
VMs:
hostssh chkconfig --add cstate
hostssh service cstate start

• When planning for N+1, we recommend following the steps in the Prism Web Console Guide
to configure the cluster for high availability.

4.4. VM and Application

Note the following sizing limitations when creating your VMs:
• On dual socket hardware:
# A VM cannot have more than 56 vCPU.
# A VM cannot have more than 1.5 TB RAM.
• On quad socket hardware:
# A VM cannot have more than 168 vCPU.
# A VM cannot have more than 2.3 TB RAM. There is some overhead, which varies
depending on the hardware platform configuration. To avoid VM startup issues, we
recommend staying below 2,300 GB).
Besides these sizing limitations, there are several guidelines for creating your VMs:
• Stay within NUMA boundaries for each VM’s vCPU and memory configurations. To find out
more about NUMA, please refer to the AHV Best Practices Guide.
• Apply operating system settings for SAP HANA inside the VM as recommended in SAP notes
2205917 (SLES) and 2292690 (RHEL) (SAP account required).
• Use a minimum of four vDisks for the database log and four vDisks for the database data
volume.
• Use a supported file system, as described in SAP note 405827 (SAP account required).
• SAP fully supports the use of the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM), as described in SAP
note 597415 (SAP account required). The disks for the data volume and the disk for the log
volume should be in separate LVM volume groups. When creating the logical volume, create a
striped logical volume using all the physical volumes in the volume group.
• Please check SAP HANA Storage Requirements for disk space requirements for SAP HANA
log, data, and shared volumes.
To create the respective file systems, follow these steps:

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• Create log and data volume groups for SAP HANA:

vgcreate hanalog /dev/sd{b,c,d,e}
vgcreate hanadata /dev/sd{f,g,h,i}
vgcreate hanashared /dev/sdj

• Create logical volumes for log and data striped across four vDisks with 64 K stripe size and
readahead=none. Use all logical extents of a volume group for the logical volumes:
lvcreate -i 4 -I 64K -l <LogicalExtentsNumber> -r none -n vol hanalog
lvcreate -i 4 -I 64K -l <LogicalExtentsNumber> -r none -n vol hanadata
lvcreate -l <LogicalExtentsNumber> -r none –n vol hanashared

• Create XFS file systems on the log and data volumes:

mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/hanalog-vol
mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/hanadata-vol
mkfs.xfs /dev/mapper/hanashared-vol

• Create mount points /hana/log, /hana/data and /hana/shared:

mkdir -p /hana/{log,data,shared}

• When using XFS, add the following mount parameters to the relevant entries in /etc/fstab:
noatime,nobarrier,inode64,largeio,swalloc 1 2

When creating a VM, verify the following configuration:

• Set the VM NUMA topology:
acli vm.update <vm name> num_vnuma_nodes=<number of virtual sockets>

• Define the VM CPU topology:

acli vm.update <vm name> num_vcpus=<number of virtual sockets> num_vnuma_nodes=<number of
virtual numa nodes> num_cores_per_vcpu=<amount of virtual cores> num_threads_per_core=<1 for
no hyperthreading, 2 for hyperthreading vcpu_hard_pin=<True or False>

• Example:
acli vm.update SAP-HANA num_vcpus=3 num_vnuma_nodes=3 num_cores_per_vcpu=28
num_threads_per_core=2 vcpu_hard_pin=True

• Enable the VM metrics host daemon as described in SAP note 2656072 (SAP account
required).

4.5. SAP HANA Specifics

• View the SAP HANA Master, Server Installation, and Update Guides at help.sap.com/hana.
• Always check the relevant SAP notes prior to installing any SAP HANA-specific updates.

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• Only SAP HANA scale-up is supported on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.
• SAP HANA System Replication is supported on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to ensure
application availability.

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5. Conclusion
When choosing Nutanix for your SAP HANA implementation you will benefit from the reduced
complexity and improved agility. Following the recommendations provided in this document can
help ensure successful implementation and operation of SAP HANA on Nutanix.
The native Nutanix hypervisor, AHV, and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software are certified
for production SAP HANA deployments. Lenovo and other Nutanix partners are working to
certify their respective Skylake-based hardware platforms to run SAP HANA with Nutanix
Enterprise Cloud OS software and AHV. Once hardware certification is complete, Nutanix
expects production solutions for SAP HANA to be generally available through these partners later
in the year.

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Appendix

References
For SAP support information and verification, see SAP note 2686722: SAP HANA Virtualized on
Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor.

Version Information
To view the Nutanix version running in the cluster, click the user icon in the main menu, then
select About Nutanix from the drop-down list. The About Nutanix window that appears displays
the AOS and Nutanix cluster check (NCC) version numbers. It also includes a link to Nutanix
patent information.

About the Authors

Alexander Thoma is a Sr. Manager, SAP Engineering at Nutanix, Inc. In this role, Alexander is
responsible for executing all necessary actions, certifications, validations, performance analytics,
and third-level support required to build the technical side of the Nutanix SAP ecosystem.
Follow Alexander on Twitter @vcdx026.
Rainer Wacker is a Staff Solutions Architect, SAP Engineering at Nutanix, Inc.
Bas Raayman is a Staff Solutions Architect, SAP Engineering at Nutanix, Inc.
Follow Bas on Twitter @basraayman.

About Nutanix
Nutanix makes infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that
power their business. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS leverages web-scale engineering and
consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtualization, and storage into a resilient,
software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The result is predictable performance,
cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security, and seamless application mobility for a
broad range of enterprise applications. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter
@nutanix.

Appendix | 15
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List of Figures
Figure 1: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud................................................................................... 7

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List of Tables
Table 1: Document Version History.................................................................................. 5

Table 2: Resource Combinations for Production SAP HANA Database VMs................... 9

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