What is SAP Landscape?

Landscape : is the arrangement for the servers

DEVELOPMENT ---> QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA)----> PRODUCTION

DEVELOPMENT SERVER : is where the consultants do the customization as per

the company's requirement. It will have 3 clients

Clients:

a)Sand Box—It is used to test out configuration ideas and theories at any time.

b)Configuration(Golden)(Customizing Client)—Once we are comfortable with

configuration solution in the sand box recreate the same configuration in
configuration client. In this client no transactions or testing should take place.
Transport recording will be turned on here--It should be moved to development
testing client

c)Development-testing—Generally unit testing will be done in this client-

In some project they conduct integration testing also here.
QUALITY ASSURANCE(QA)SERVER:

Clients:

a)Q/A testing

Where all final testing is done here before moving to Production client. Normally
here integration (end to end business process) testing and user acceptance testing
(UAT) is conducted.

b) Training clients-For giving training this client will be used

PRODUCTION SERVER : is where the live data of the company is recorded.

This is the last/ most refined client where the user will work after project GO
LIVE. Any changes/ new develpoment is done is development client and the
request is transported to production.

A request will flow from Dev->Qual->Prod and not backwards.

SAP Architecture (SAP R/3)–

SAP works on client server architecture. The term client/server was first
used in the 1980s in reference to personal computers (PCs) on a network.
The actual client/server model started gaining acceptance in the late 1980s.
The client/server software architecture is a versatile, message-based and
modular infrastructure that is intended to improve usability, flexibility,
interoperability, and scalability as compared to centralized, mainframe, time
sharing computing.

I’ll explain the client server model using a small example. I’m sure that all of
us have used Microsoft outlook to send and receive mails to our buddies. To
send a mail we open the Microsoft outlook on our pc, type the new mail and
press the send button. Here the Microsoft outlook acts as a client. Once we
pressed the button outlook connects to the exchange server which will
receive the request from the client and send the mail for you. Here the
microsoft outlook as a client sends the request to the exchange server.
server receives the request and process the tasks.

When the client and server programs both run on the same computer, the
configuration is referred to as single-tier client/server. (A tier is the
boundary between two computers.) When they run on different computers,
the configuration is referred to as two-tier client/server.
A program can function as both a client and a server if it both requests
information and replies to requests. When you have three programs in
communication, the configuration is called three-tier client/server.

The main advantage of the software of this nature is that it can be fine
tuned to give maximum performance for the given scenario. The
client/server configuration enables the MySAP ERP system to spread its load
across multiple computers. This provides the customer with the ability to
scale the processing power of the system up or down by simply adding
another computer to an existing configuration, instead of replacing a single
computer that performs all of the processing, such as that which occurs in
the mainframe world.

The main software components on a SAP system can be categorized as

follows.
1.Presentation server
2.Application server
3.Database server

Presentation server

Presentation server is nothing but the laptop or PC which has sapgui.exe

that you use to log into SAP system.

Application server

An application server is a set of executables that collectively interpret the

ABAP/4 programs and manage the input and output for them. Application
severs act like a mediators between the presentation server and the
database sever. Application sever receives the requests from the
presentation sever and process them on its work processes.

Database server

The database server is a set of executables that accept database requests

from the application server. Database server will pass the requests to the
RDBMS that has been used. As you should know SAP supports Database
management systems from various vendors such as Microsoft SQL server,
Oracle, Informix and Sybase etc. The RDBMS sends the data back to the
database server, which then passes the information back to the application
server. The application server in turn passes that information to the ABAP/4
program.