A large government data center in Europe, supporting 28,000 users and maintaining confidentiality regarding its client and location, continuously optimizes its infrastructure of over 3,500 physical nodes. This optimization is crucial to reduce downtime and guarantee improved SLA for SAP HANA services.
“We are the leading technology partner in the public sector. We employ the most advanced technologies to drive administrative development. We offer our customers innovative, tailor-made products that adhere to the highest security standards,” said the Head of Infrastructure. “For this special project, which involves one of our key customers, performance and availability were crucial. Without these, the infrastructure would be unusable,” he added.
Our comdivision team of architects has a long-standing relationship with this customer. Naturally, we were the first point of contact for this task,” explained Fabian Lenz, comdivision’s lead architect for the project. “The hardware wasn't the issue for the customer, but they faced challenges with SAP HANA’s SLAs, particularly during maintenance windows. We recognized that virtualization was essential for success. With such a large user base and operation scale, the customer needed experienced planners for migrating from physical systems to a virtualized infrastructure.”
Since Hyper-V is not supported by SAP HANA, VMware vSphere was the only viable choice for the Intel-based hardware platforms. Virtualizing the high-performance SAP HANA database offers several benefits: agility, hardware consolidation, simplified system provisioning, reduced TCO, and enhanced planning and management of multiple system landscapes. These benefits include choosing vSphere HA for government agencies requiring above-average availability.
“We first verified that the hardware in use was certified by both SAP HANA and VMware vSphere,” said Lenz. “Our team, alongside the customer’s infrastructure personnel and using the SAP HANA configuration check tool, analyzed the existing infrastructure for compatibility. We then planned according to the customer’s performance needs and suggested integrating VMware DRS groups to ensure that virtual machines run on their designated hosts, as resources are planned per machine based on varying needs.”
“The ability to dynamically vacate hosts using vMotion was particularly important to us,” stated the Head of Infrastructure. “We can now seamlessly move workloads off a system, perform necessary updates, and reintegrate the host into the cluster once hardware or software updates are completed.”
“The performance has been exceptional,” he commended. “And thanks to the comdivision team’s guidance throughout the process, my operations team is now more confident in guaranteeing significantly improved SLAs,” he concluded.
