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Key Considerations when Migrating SAP to the SAP Solutions White Paper Key Considerations when Migrating SAP to the Google Cloud Platform

Key Considerations when Migrating SAP to the Google Cloud Platform

What You Need to Know before Migrating Your SAP Remember Your SAP Basis Support System to Google Cloud After considering infrastructure, you need to address SAP Basis support. Whether you have decided to run your critical SAP systems on the You might be losing this support if your current hosting company Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or are considering the move, there are provides it. Determine whether your SAP Basis team has the necessary several things to know before you go! To help you get started, let’s skills and training to support the migration of your company’s critical explore all of the critical factors to include in your migration plan to SAP applications to GCP. You will need this expertise to successfully ensure that your SAP migration to GCP is smooth, headache-free, and run and manage SAP applications on the Google Cloud Platform. 100% successful. Begin Your Technical Planning Where to start? Here’s a short list to help you get started The first thing to consider is your current SAP technical and functional teams, as well as your IT infrastructure and network teams. Determine whether the Google Cloud Platform supports your current SAP system. If not, you might need to apply patches to your SAP If you are migrating out of a data center that you don’t own, notify your applications, install upgrades, or make (OS) or hosting provider. This step is critical. Work out any contractual details (DB) changes. and resource requirements with your hosting partner to support your migration project. The sooner you do this, the more time they will have SAP has certified combinations of SAP applications, OS, and DB to recover from losing your hosting business. Their support is vital for versions that are supported in the Google Cloud Platform. a successful migration. Determining SAP support for your existing systems will influence the methods used for migration. If you are hosting your systems on-premises, your focus on hosting servers, maintenance, SLAs, DevOps, backups, Disaster Recovery, Determine the best approach for your migration. In most cases, you and High Availability is critical. Does your infrastructure team have will employ multiple methods. the necessary training to migrate and support your company’s vital SAP applications into the Google Cloud Platform? If your answer to Importing a VM – “Lift and shift” is taking the entire VM from this question is anything other than “yes,” you will need help from your hosting provider or on-premises data center and moving it someone skilled in the Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud has a to GCP. An actual “Lift and shift” approach is nice in theory, but robust program to certify cloud partners who can apply their expertise difficult in practice. to your GCP migration.

2 DB replication – If SAP and GCP support your current database, Don’t forget: you could use native database replication methods to get your data into GCP and minimize cutover downtime. Alternatively, you Engage global business process owners early so they can begin could replicate your database onto newly installed DB servers. planning for the scope of testing. Or, you could import VMs from your on-premises DB and Test printers and migrate print servers. application servers to “seed” the new GCP environment. Look at other services needed to run your business. Interfaces SAP tools – If Google Cloud doesn’t support your SAP version, to tax, fax, email, document storage/archival, encryption OS, or DB, or if you are upgrading SAP or changing your OS/ services, and others need testing. You might need to re-install DB, you will need to define a migration path. This likely means these interfaces and plan a migration for each one, in addition that an OS/DB migration or an SAP upgrade + migration will be to your core SAP server migrations. required. For this situation, SAP provides Software Provisioning Review your external access requirements. Your existing Manager (SWPM) and Software Update Manager (SUM) to assist. environment might allow connections from the Internet by - When using SAP tools, you are rebuilding your current way of public DNS records, firewall rules (NAT), and reverse environment on the Google Cloud Platform from the ground proxies such as SAP Web Dispatcher. Include these in your GCP up. Without getting into too many details, an upgrade requires environment. a review of existing add-ons, customizations, and integrations. Hostname and IP address changes might be required. Create or It is a good idea to enlist the help of an experienced SAP Basis update DNS records and modify the configuration between SAP project team to guide you through this. applications to reflect these changes. The SAP GUI connections on each user’s workstation and bookmarks in browsers will also If you have several SAP landscapes and systems, will you migrate need modification. them one at a time or all at once? Critical Considerations for Your SAP Migration to the If possible, keep things simple. Google Cloud Platform So far, we’ve covered topics involved with a typical SAP landscape How much downtime can the business tolerate for each migrated migration. Most of this isn’t unique to a SAP migration into the application? Google Cloud Platform. Here are some key considerations specific to GCP: Downtime is a critical factor that influences many other decisions. The answer will be specific to your business. Network Connectivity between the Google Cloud Platform and customer sites, such as data centers, corporate offices, branch How do you plan to get your data to GCP? offices, field locations, warehouses, etc. Network Security is a blank slate when you initially create a Although you have backed up and exported your data, you can’t virtual private cloud in GCP. To protect your systems, you must simply take your NAS device to a Google data center and ask them maintain your firewall ingress/egress rules to enforce security. to plug it into your environment. The only way to get your data Your certified Google Cloud partner can help to ensure that you into a Google data center is through a Google Transfer Appliance are securing your landscape through your GCP firewall rules. or the network. A transfer appliance requires additional cost Cloud Quotas are allotted to each GCP project and region. As you considerations, as well as an understanding of the timing and build your systems, pay attention to the cloud-specific GCP quotas orchestration of human resources at the data center, ingestion to make sure that you aren’t about to hit the standard limits. time, and shipping partners.

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Capacity Planning and Compute Reservations are two SUSE Enterprise Live Patching. To achieve the best HA/ different things but are closely related. You might ask why you DR configuration, you need to provision servers appropriately would need to think about capacity planning. “I’m going to the and span them across multiple regions. Your certified Google Google Cloud Platform so I can stop thinking about capacity Cloud partner is the best resource for configuring your planning, right?” It is still beneficial to consider this as you are environment in the best way possible. entering a large migration project. Your Monitoring Solution should be as cutting edge as your - Ideally, your certified Google Cloud partner would be working new GCP solution. Choose a certified Google Cloud Partner closely with Google to let them know that they are about to that knows SAP Basis and implements automated monitoring see 200 servers created on their infrastructure over the next tools. Watchdog, an automated monitoring platform developed three months. Letting Google know about your specific server by Managecore, provides visibility into the health of your SAP requirements will ensure that GCP has the compute capacity applications, database, server, and GCP Stackdriver. available to support you as you provision your servers during Track your Billing. Google Cloud provides a billing dashboard each phase of the migration. that you should closely monitor with your certified Google - Compute Reservations are similar to capacity planning. Cloud partner until you’ve built the majority of all VMs required They allow you “pin” Google resources to your project and to support your entire SAP migration. Use the billing dashboard keep them from being used by other GCP customers. For to monitor the effect of Sustained Usage Discounts and example, you could run into a situation where your SAP Basis Committed Use Discounts. This will help you stay on top of your team needs to restart your SAP HANA Production server. If monthly spend and avoid sticker shock when you get you your that server and the backend infrastructure supporting the monthly bills. production server within your VM’s zone are exhausted, you might not be able to restart your VM without first switching to a configuration with different performance characteristics. “At Managecore, we combine leading-edge Google The new configuration could result in reduced performance. Cloud infrastructure with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Reserving your configuration before restarting your SAP HANA server protects it from other customers. Please platform to create responsive, reliable and flexible note that billing starts with the reservation of the reserved SAP HANA landscapes that deliver better value over configuration. time.” Database Backups are straightforward in Google Cloud. Typically, your database backup will either integrate with SAP BACKINT and NICK MILETICH write the backup directly into a GCP Storage Bucket or will be Director of Technology backed up to a local filesystem and then copied to a GCP Storage Managecore Bucket. Either way, your backups will be stored in a GCP Storage Bucket. The Bucket settings will determine when data is copied to Bottom Line cold storage and how long it is retained, to control storage costs. Don’t wait until the project starts to begin planning and executing Because the GCP Storage Buckets can be multi-regional, you’ll some of the key steps in moving to Google Cloud. Nobody likes have the ability to restore your database backups to any Google surprises, especially when they involve business-critical applications Cloud VM around the world. such as SAP. Plan early and review your plan often. Enlisting the GCP supports traditional High Availability options using code support of partners with SAP and Google Cloud Platform experience from the open source “Pacemaker” project. SUSE contributed will help to eliminate any surprises and make the journey to cloud the code for Pacemaker from SUSE Linux Enterprise High computing successful. Availability Extension. You can extend SAP availability with

4 About Managecore Managecore is a SUSE Cloud Partner, a certified SAP Partner, “Migrating our SAP hosting service with Google and a leading provider of SAP Technical Managed Services. Cloud and Managecore has been a game-changer. Utilizing highly skilled engineers and industry-leading technology, Managecore is providing intelligent solutions for the enterprise It maximizes the reliability of our IT systems and customer. Managecore is also a recognized leader in SAP HANA puts us on a path toward advancing our digital transformations, Cloud solutions, and Basis managed services. transformation.” Managecore is also a certified Google Cloud Platform Partner and JON HAHN Reseller. Chief Information Officer FFF Enterprises For more information, visit www.suse.com/google or contact us: [email protected] About the Author Jake Gagas is a Senior SAP Consultant at Managecore with over 14 years of professional SAP Basis experience, supporting over 50 customers in both technical and leadership roles. His focus on developing and implementing SAP “Best Practices,” along with his advanced technical knowledge, has made him a sought-after technical SAP resource. As part of Managecore’s delivery team, Jake carries out daily technical activities and end-to-end project support for our customers’ full SAP landscape, SAP projects, cloud migrations, and HANA upgrade projects.

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