White Paper

May 2021

Your Ultimate
Cloud Migration
Guide for SAP 2021
SUSE.com
 2021

Index
03 The Future of SAP is in the 11 Top Risks – and How to
Cloud Mitigate Them
Map a worry-free transition to Have a plan to overcome
the cloud common obstacles

03 Why SAP Customers are 12 SUSE Consulting

Moving to the Cloud A trusted partner for every step
SAP workloads are moving to of your journey
open source platforms

12 Learn More
00 Five Key Steps for Migrating View more resources to chart
SAP to the Cloud your cloud future with SAP
Chart every step of your
journey to the cloud

10 Five Best Practice for Migrating

SAP to the Cloud
Advice learned from thousands
of SAP migrations

2 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP SUSE.com


The Future of SAP is in the Cloud
Make your SAP cloud migration worry-free with SUSE,
the leading and trusted open source platform for SAP
solutions.
SAP solutions help your organization drive
digital transformation to grow revenue,
increase customer retention, and improve
operational excellence. SUSE enables your
SAP systems to deliver uninterrupted access
to business insights and improve time to
market for new services. Over 20 years of
co-innovation with SAP have made SUSE the
leading and trusted open source platform for
SAP solutions, both on-premises and on the
cloud.
SUSE Dominates the Market When It Comes
to SAP
85% Market Share
#1 Linux operating system (OS) for SAP
30k+ Customers for mission-critical applications
130+ worldwide performance records
Now, as you consider the best ways to mi-
grate SAP to the cloud, SUSE stands ready
to make your transition worry-free. Use this
guide to map your journey and anticipate
3 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
potential problems before they arise. With
the right planning, and the right partner, you
can set out on your cloud migration journey
and return a hero.
Why SAP Customers are Moving to the
Cloud
To cloud or not to cloud, that is no longer
a question. The cloud delivers unmatched
agility and the potential for cost-effective,
right-sized infrastructure.
SAP workloads play a critical role in your
business. In the coming years, all SAP cus-
tomers using SAP ERP and business appli-
cations must migrate to SAP HANA, SAP’s
in-memory database. SAP HANA runs only
on Linux and SAP S/4HANA runs exclusively
on SAP HANA. Linux is the platform of the
present and the future: stable, open, and
innovative.
There are several motivations to move to
the cloud. Hardware costs to deploy SAP
SUSE.com

have grown as the solutions have become
more sophisticated and resource-inten-
sive. Customers are not only facing the
expense of initial hardware purchases, but
also long-lead procurement processes that
must include enough computing power and
storage to match future peaks in demand.
Resources for operations and the skillset to
manage on-premises hardware are non-
trivial. Many organizations, looking at the
fast-changing nature of infrastructure, re-
alize that it’s challenging to determine how
best to invest in hardware, and instead find
more value and flexibility from cloud service
providers.
The cloud enables a new level of digital trans-
formation. You can meet the challenges of a
modern world head on, without the limita-
tions of complex on-premises infrastructure.
You can run your essential SAP workloads in
the cloud with confidence to enjoy greater
scaling, compute, and high availability/di-
saster recovery (HA/DR) capabilities.
You can also supercharge innovation: mov-
ing faster, generating greater insights, and
leapfrogging competitors. The growth of
cloud-native services adds new possibilities
for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learn-
ing (ML), analytics, and data lakes.
Once you’ve decided to journey to the cloud,
the question is, how will you get there?
4 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
Five Key Steps for Migrating SAP to the
Cloud
1. Plan Your Journey
Migrating SAP to the cloud is a large, time-
consuming endeavor. The first step is to
plan your journey from both the business
and technical perspectives to get to your
destination as smoothly and efficiently as
possible.
The first questions for planning are all about
the business. Consider the following:
• How can you leverage executive
support for digital transformation?
Do you have a plan to align your internal
stakeholders across executives, line
of business leads, and IT? Missing
buy-in from everyone affected by the
migration means you might not have
all the perspectives and use cases that
will affect your roadmap. Insufficient
planning and stakeholder alignment
leads to dead-ends: cost overruns,
schedule slippage, and opportunity cost
of your teams’ attention.
• Where are you in your hardware refresh
cycle?
Are you hitting the limits of aging
hardware? Or did you just invest in new
infrastructure that meets your current
needs? Consider how your current
systems might be compelling you to
move to the cloud fast, or delay your
migration due to lack of urgency.
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• Which partners can you trust to support
your migration?
Every organization has to answer the
question of how to undertake the work
of cloud migration. First and foremost:
which team will lead this, your internal
teams or a trusted service partner?
Operating in the cloud is a specialized
skillset – handling a migration is even
more specialized, and often outside the
comfort zone of even experienced IT
teams.
• How can you gain efficiencies with your
other cloud deployments?
Consider how moving SAP to the cloud
ties in to your broader IT strategy. Your
choice to move to the cloud affects, and
is influenced by, your organization’s
strategy for digital transformation,
analytics, and other applications in
your IT portfolio. These elements of your
strategy can influence both how and
when you move SAP to the cloud.
From a technical perspective, your IT lead-
ers should be asking a fresh look at require-
ments and business scenarios you want to
support in the future. Consider the following:
• Are you planning new SAP workloads that
will run alongside other AWS services?
First, identify exactly what you want to
move to the cloud. It may be as simple
as starting with a disaster recovery solu-
tion, or sandboxed development environ-
ments. You can also look at it from the
5 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
perspective of specific applications you
want to move, or databases such as SAP
HANA.
• Do you want to lift and shift, or move to
cloud native services?
Moving to the cloud is an opportunity to
refactor legacy applications to a cloud-
native solution built on microservices and
APIs. But in cases where speed is of the
essence – for example, if a data center
lease is expiring – you may have reasons
to prioritize a lift and shift, with refactoring
to be addressed at a later stage.
• What are your HA, DR, and scaling
requirements?
Which applications need to be highly
available, and how will you ensure con-
sistent uptime in the cloud? Over what
range does demand fluctuate – and
what factors might cause spike in de-
mand that requires fast scaling in the
future? Your technical teams need to
understand business requirements and
use cases to create a technical strategy
for these HA, DR and scaling questions.
• Do you want to accelerate deployment
with automation?
You can use automation to speed cre-
ation of instances in the cloud, which is
especially useful for proof-of-concept
pilot projects. Do you need to migrate
your one-off environments for testing
or ad-hoc systems? You can determine
how much to prioritize automation by
mapping out the environments and in-
stances you expect to need.
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• How will you simplify management for
Day 2 operations?
Once you move into the cloud, factors
such as patching, security, and configu-
ration management become far more
important.
2. Choose a Trusted Guide
Migrating to the cloud can be a high-stakes
endeavor. SAP solutions often provide the
backbone of your mission-critical IT so-
lutions, delivering both continuity and in-
sights. Most organizations are well-served
to choose a trusted guide with the special-
ized skills to make the migration a smooth
process.
You’ll want a system integrator (SI) part-
ner you can count on every step of the way.
What should you look for?
1. Demonstrated technical proficiency and
proven success in SAP implementation
As with every skill, practice makes per-
fect. While internal teams may draw on
a handful of experiences migrating SAP
systems, the right partner has been on
this journey countless times. Choose a
partner that has a long history with SAP
and makes SAP migration a core ele-
ment of their services.
2. Experience, tooling, methods, and best
practices
Look for references and case stud-
ies from your SI. You’ll want to see a
track record of success, and hear from
6 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
organizations who have worked with the
partner on similarly-scoped projects.
Try to avoid partners that rely exclu-
sively on generic migration tools – it
may be a sign the SI lacks experience or
investment in SAP migrations.
3. Cultural Fit
Consider the SI’s approach to working
with partners. Do they have an assem-
bly-line approach, or will they take
steps to discover your unique needs
and reflect that in their plan? Is their
style of communication in line with your
organization’s practices?
4. Vertical Industry Expertis
Every vertical is unique. Make sure your
partner understands your priorities and
any external factors, such as compli-
ance requirements, driving your migra-
tion process. The right implementation
and after-sale services can position you
for growth.
5. Implementation Cost
While cost is a factor, this shouldn’t
be the first criteria on your list. Look
for value rather than cost – can your
partner take on more of the work, get
you up and running on the cloud faster,
or deliver new cloud capabilities? Any
of these might justify a higher up-front
price.
While you’re choosing a guide, don’t forget
the OS! The right Enterprise Linux distribution
and support can make all the difference.
SUSE.com

SUSE is an essential partner on your cloud
journey. We are the market leader for SAP,
and can add value to your cloud journey in
many ways:
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP is
the most trusted Linux OS
SAP and SUSE have more than 20 years
of deep engineering collaboration for SAP
on Linux. SUSE offers expertise and enter-
prise-grade support. See more than 300
success stories that show how SUSE adds
value to SAP.
• SUSE offers agility, with differentiated
technology
Customers see rapid SAP HANA certi-
fication on AWS. Exclusive end-to-end
automation makes for fast, simple de-
ployment of new environments and re-
sources. And SUSE is an innovator of SAP
HA solutions for business continuity.
• SUSE is the most trusted OS for SAP
SUSE is the only Linux OS endorsed by
SAP. SAP uses SUSE for its own SAP HANA
Enterprise Cloud, SAP Cloud Platform, its
internal operations and its Linux develop-
ment platform. We offer stable lifecycle
support (including 3-year extended
support), consistent releases, and certi-
fications. Our unified solution minimizes
deployment time and effort.
• Open source means open innovation
SUSE helps you avoid vendor lock-in
while gaining all the speed and innova-
tion you expect from open source. We’re
the first to certify, the first to introduce
7 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
new features, and the first to support
new SAP releases.
SUSE has earned:
85% share of the SAP HANA market and
100% share of SAP Business One version for
SAP HANA
SUSE is a trusted partner to help you navi-
gate the new environment of the cloud. We’ll
help you understand the pros and cons of
different deployment and consumption
subscriptions, support your SI partners, and
deliver management tools to make the
most of your system starting on Day 2. Our
intangible skills, built over decades of expe-
rience with SAP, can accelerate your journey
to cloud success.
The combination of Amazon Web Services
(AWS) and SUSE brings a winning combina-
tion: the #1 public cloud and the #1 OS for
SAP. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for
SAP Applications is the first Enterprise Linux
OS to be certified by SAP to run on the AWS
Cloud.
AWS has the longest track record of success,
with the most extensive systems to innovate:
choose from 75 native services for big data,
AI, and ML to drive business insights. AWS
runs some of the world’s most demand-
ing workloads, with 6x less downtime than
competitors. Combine these strengths with
SUSE.com

SUSE’s history with SAP, exclusive features
for HA, automation, and monitoring, and
our more than 100 worldwide performance
benchmarks, and the choice of AWS and
SUSE will make you a champion on the cloud.
3. Level Up Your Agility
In the middle of your journey to the cloud,
you’ll want to take steps to make the mi-
gration fast and successful. Consider three
things to bring an agile mindset to the
process.
First, analyze your current environment to
create a detailed design plan. You’ll want
to undertake a comprehensive breakdown
of the current application landscape – this
includes all your SAP applications and your
integrations. What’s your current database
and size – do you need to scale up or scale
out? Consider your compute needs, storage,
network connectivity, and security. Consider
your existing virtualization, OS, and man-
agement, tools. You may need to overhaul
your approach to backups in the cloud.
Finally, you should identify any legacy op-
erating system and database combinations
that simply cannot be moved during your
migration.
Next, design your cloud architecture. SUSE
has many best practices for detailed ar-
chitectural design on AWS, involving factors
such as availability zones, DR, and recovery.
For your mission-critical SAP applications,
we can help you assess the benefits of a
8 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
single availability zone, multi-node archi-
tecture versus a multi-availability zone, sin-
gle-node architecture with HA. You’ll need to
take a fresh look at networking and security.
During this step, SUSE and AWS can help you
anticipate how to operate in a hybrid mode
during the migration.
Then, you’ll need to predict costs in the
cloud. Cloud service providers and consult-
ing partners will each have tools to help you
estimate monthly costs. SUSE recommends
against committing to long-term instances
very early. Instead, consider working under
a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model for several
months until your operations have stabi-
lized and you can better predict your long-
term needs.
Finally, tackle the OS-related tasks for this
stage in your planning. SUSE customers first
need to choose between SLES versus SLES
for SAP. SLES for SAP includes features such
as the High Availability Extension and HA re-
sources for SAP HANA and SAP Netweaver.
We include installation workflows to install
SAP HANA and SAP Netweaver from tools
right in the OS, and also extra features such
as malware protection.
For your OS planning, you’ll also want to
invest in skills development through train-
ing to make the most of SAP. Plan out your
consumption model, and think about how
to bring any existing subscriptions along.
Define your OS patching and management
SUSE.com

policy – your tooling, patch frequency, and
attitude to risk. Explore SUSE’s Live Patching,
which can apply kernel patches without in-
terrupting operations, to determine if this
approach can help you maintain uptime.
And don’t forget the importance of configu-
ration management to limit configuration
drift as you move toward operations.
4. Flex Your Power
With the majority of your planning now com-
plete, you are almost ready to launch.
Take care of any final details to your plan. Put
a set of fresh eyes on your resources, time-
line, and dependencies of intricate tasks.
Make sure everyone involved can access
the plan so they understand their role in the
larger operation.
It’s now time to start provisioning. Consider
data tiering depending on the priority and
responsiveness required from your vari-
ous data types. Confirm the details of your
plan: instance sizing, compute, storage, and
network access. How will your existing sys-
tems network to the new cloud deployment?
Are you going to scale up or scale out your
databases?
Start deployment and automation with mi-
gration of a non-production environment.
During this phase, you can come up with
procedures and plans to be used for future
migration of production environments. You
can get experience using products such as
9 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
AWS Launch Wizard to build out your en-
vironment. SUSE also offers automation to
build out your environments and install SAP
in an automated fashion.
During deployment, there are several OS-
specific tasks you’ll want to tackle.
OS configuration requires tuning. SUSE
provides Saptune to make it easy for you
to apply SAP-recommended settings to
your SAP HANA and SAP Netweaver envi-
ronments. The tool enables you to enter
any particular node into your system and
apply the settings exactly the way SAP in-
tends. Filesystem tuning is different is cloud,
a process SUSE can support with choices
around disk layout. SUSE can also support
your efforts with application installations
and OS security hardening, beyond the
published guides.
You’ll want to double check your network
considerations. HA requirements in the
cloud are different from on-premises, so
you’ll want to make sure your network re-
quirements and access to endpoints are
configured correctly.
Health monitoring starts at day 0. The SUSE
SAP Landscape Monitoring Tool, based on
Prometheus with dashboards based on
Grafana, enables you monitor SAP HANA,
SAP Netweaver, and HA settings right out of
the box.
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5. Return A Hero
Congratulations, you’ve reached production!
You’re now a hero in your organization. But
truth be told, the hard work starts with Day 2
operations. Working with SUSE, you’ll gain ex-
tensive resources to support your operations.
SUSE Manager is a solution that maximizes
SAP services availability, enhance opera-
tional efficiency, and protect business rev-
enue. With SUSE Manager, you can manage
Linux systems across a variety of hardware
architectures, hypervisors as well as con-
tainer, IoT, and cloud platforms — all with a
single tool.
Gain precise control over your environments,
whether they’re used for development, test,
or production. Beyond that, you can use
SUSE Manager for faster, consistent, and
repeatable server deployment which helps
to optimize operations and reduce costs. It
also automates Linux server and IoT device
provisioning, patching, and configuration.
SUSE Manager helps you stay a hero: your
operations are smoother, more consistent
and more automated, so IT teams can keep
their hands free for projects that deliver
genuine business advantage.
Five Best Practice for Migrating SAP to the
Cloud
Working with thousands of customers mov-
ing SAP to the cloud, SUSE has generated
10 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
expertise about the optimal approaches.
Here are the highlights of our wisdom.
1. High Availability: Don’t do it yourself
Always lean on an expert – there are sim-
ply too many potential traps and pitfalls
to configuring HA with SAP HANA and SAP
Netweaver. We have encountered many
customers who haven’t tuned their HA prop-
erly for the cloud environment, which gen-
erates problems in the production. As part
of your work with a trusted advisor, take the
time to develop and execute your task plans.
You want to know exactly how your environ-
ment will work if and when you encounter
issues with networking, storage, power, etc.
It’s far better to find out early, as opposed to
waiting until you need it in production.
2. Tuning
Like HA, tuning involves specialize knowl-
edge. Test and optimize your systems with
the guidance of a trusted partner. Beyond
using Saptune, look specifically at net-
working and storage to determine how you
can go live with an optimized system in-
stead of waiting for performance issues in
production.
3. Periodic health check
It’s important to understand how your sys-
tem is running before you encounter prob-
lems in production. For customers who
have been running in the cloud for months
or years, problems can crop up as a sur-
prise. But recommendations, such as SAP
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Notes, can change multiple times per year,
and tuning parameters are not fixed. A little
medicine – a periodic check on system con-
figuration, security patches, and other on-
going maintenance – goes a long way.
4. Consider a custom Image
SUSE provides images to the Amazon mar-
ketplace. These generic images are relatively
stripped down, based on SAP requirements.
Using the configuration used to create the
generic image, we can update it to meet
your specific needs, such as Continuous
Improvement Software (CIS), security factors,
storage, or state requirements for partitions.
SUSE also has an image building platform
built into SUSE Manager so you can track and
patch images just as you would your servers,
and update them on a quarterly cycle.
5. Plan for Day 2
After deployment, plan for optimized pro-
cesses and operations. This scope includes
patching, configuration management, and
monitoring. It’s important to note, often
procedures and policies that you used suc-
cessfully for on-premises operations don’t
translate directly to the cloud. SUSE can help
you build a plan for consistent, automated,
secure operations with best practices that
help your organization make the most of SAP.
Top Risks – and How to Mitigate Them
A bonus, here are three risks SUSE experts
have identified in moving SAP to the cloud.
11 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
Be aware of the risks and have a plan to ad-
dress them during your migration!
1. Risk #1: Performance
Performance is hard to get right. SUSE pro-
fessional Services has a team of architects,
designers, consultants and engineers to
help simplify performance tuning. We can
help you and your SI design and run tests
to aid in tuning exercise. SUSE is ready to
share best practices and provide technical
expertise on SAP and cloud environments.
2. Risk #2: High Availability
Running performance databases in SAP
HANA is nontrivial. An initial deployment
may go smoothly, only for issues to crop up
down the road. There are many configura-
tion nuances with HA and cloud. Things you
do on-premises simply don’t map to the
cloud, such as timeouts and tuning param-
eters. Work with a trusted partner who can
help you make your HA work flawlessly.
3. Risk #3: Storage
Challenges with storage are often over-
looked because it seems relatively sim-
ple. But the cloud approach to storage is
so different from on-premises: you’re not
necessarily paying for size of storage, but
performance. Techniques such as striping
or setting the right block size can make the
difference with SAP HANA. SUSE can also
help at the intersection of storage and se-
curity with templates for firewalls that are
already custom built to SAP HANA
SUSE.com

SUSE Consulting
The SUSE Consulting team is made up of
architects, designers, consultants and en-
gineers who share a common goal: we are
here to help simplify your business mod-
ernization journey. Our flexible offerings will
meet you where you are and get you where
you need to go to stay ahead of your com-
petition. Trust the experts working with the
leading Linux OS for SAP to help you migrate
successfully to the cloud.
12 Your Ultimate Cloud Migration Guide for SAP
2021
SUSE offers consulting packages for ev-
ery phase of your project journey. Now,
SUSE Consulting is available on the AWS
Marketplace for streamlined procurement.
Learn More
For more information on how SUSE and AWS
can help you move SAP to the cloud, visit
https://more.suse.com/moreawsinfo/
SUSE.com
 2021

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