WHITE PAPER Fibre Channel Storage Area Network Design Considerations for Deploying Virtualized SAP HANA Business Case Enterprises are striving to virtualize their mission-critical applications such as SAP HANA, Oracle Applications, and others to meet their goals in terms of performance, availability, and cost. The benefits of virtualization help organizations optimize and utilize resources, but they also include new challenges. Often, organizations that move to virtualized environments are still relying on storage systems that were not designed with the flexibility and ease of deployment and management that a virtualized data center requires. As a result, their application performance is impacted and they are forced to sacrifice efficiency and deployment time for the agility and cost advantages that virtualization offers. To compensate, organizations commonly over-provision storage to address latency and application performance, however this introduces increased costs and does not solve the need for the scalability, speed, and resilience required by virtualized environments. Enterprises need a storage and networking solution that is easy to deploy and user-friendly while also enabling the ability to support application performance and evolve as the environment scales. Solution Overview HANA Tailored Data Center Integration Scope This solution provides a reference (TDI)-Certified hardware. Definition This solution focuses on virtualized SAP architecture to deploy virtualized SAP and testing of this solution followed HANA with a TDI environment. Best HANA in a VMware environment based the process and best practices as per practices for virtualizing SAP HANA for on VMware vSphere and VMware NSX, Application Workload Guidance (formerly scale-up and scale-out configurations offering customers agility, resource VMware Validated Design). This white are utilized in this design. The solution optimization, and ease of provisioning. paper provides the best practices and is sized, tested, and validated on SAP- This solution enables SAP customers to architecture to deploy the Fibre Channel certified partner hardware for different use provision SAP HANA instances faster SAN used in this solution. cases. This reference architecture provides and more effectively by using vSphere The design details of the SAN solution information specific to SAP HANA and Virtual Machines (VMs). VMware selected is based on Brocade® Gen 6 Fibre leverages existing VMware Validated Brocade, a leading technology partner, Channel products to satisfy the storage Designs for general-purpose guidelines. to provide the products and architecture requirements as specified by this solution. The physical architecture includes Dell for a Fibre Channel-based Storage Area Please refer to reference section at the end R630 and R730 PowerEdge Servers Network (SAN) together with Pure Storage, of this paper for more detailed information with up to 1 TB memory, a Pure Storage another leading technology partner, to about this solution. TDI array, and Brocade SAN and network provide an all-flash high-performance components. storage array. This work involved defining and testing a VMware Software-Defined Data Center-based reference architecture to deploy virtualized SAP HANA on SAP Use Cases Design Overview SAP has published guidelines for This design is targeted for the following A prototypical enterprise SAP customer calculating and sizing the correct storage use cases: with example requirements is used as requirements for SAP HANA TDI a basis for all design activities in this configurations. These guidelines change • Rapid provisioning to increase timelines solution. Requirements, assumptions, from time to time; therefore, it is always for testing, training, and SAP upgrades and constraints are carefully logged so all recommended to download the latest – Clones SAP systems quickly and logical and physical design elements can SAP HANA storage requirements white easily be easily traced back to their source and paper. It is also recommended to involve the storage vendor offering an SAP HANA • Enhanced application availability justification. TDI storage solution for SAP HANA – High out-of-the-box availability Storage Requirements for Scale-Out configurations to ensure they without complex configuration and SAP S4/HANA have followed the correct space and IP setup to protect against VMware ESXi All SAP HANA worker VMs have a sizing guidelines. server failure; no downtime due to database log, data, root, local SAP, and The SAP HANA nodes connect to the ESXi server maintenance shared SAP volume. The storage capacity storage arrays through a Fibre Channel sizing calculation of these volumes is – Continuous utilization monitoring SAN. SAN components require a based on the overall amount of memory across resource pools and intelligent minimum 8 Gbps link speed, and the SAN needed by SAP HANA’s in-memory allocation of available resources topology must follow best practices for database. SAP has defined very strict among VMs, based on predefined all redundant components and links. The performance KPIs that should be met rules that reflect customer business connectivity, which includes host HBAs, when configuring a storage subsystem. needs and changing priorities SAN ports, switches, and array front-end With conventional arrays of spinning – VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance for ports, requires careful planning. 16 Gbps disks, this often resulted in low storage SAP Central Services Fibre Channel (or faster) is recommended utilization in order to achieve required IO for the best performance and all Fibre • Server consolidation and data center performance and latency. Incorporating Channel ports can negotiate to lower energy cost reduction; runs SAP in VMs all-flash arrays dramatically changes both speeds. consolidated onto fewer physical servers IO performance and latency resulting in that use less energy overall increased demand for a high-performing • Unified performance monitoring of SAN. the virtualized SAP environment; coordinates performance reporting and analytics across the solution Table 1: Shared Storage Physical Design Specifications. infrastructure stack, including the SAP and database tier, the guest operating Attribute Specification system, the hypervisor layer, and storage Vendor and model Pure M50 Storage Array • Enhanced security that leverages Type Active/Active VMware NSX; enables restricted ESXi host multi-pathing policy Round Robin communication between application components Minimum/maximum speed rating 16 Gbps of switch ports Audience This white paper is intended for administrators, architects, and System Engineers who are responsible for designing and deploying infrastructure for enterprise mission-critical applications. 2 Building the Storage Area • Leverages Brocade Fabric Vision™ SAN Topology Redundancy and Network technology to simplify administration, Resiliency The SAN used for this SAP S4/HANA quickly resolve problems, increase An important aspect of SAN topology is Solution is based on the Brocade G620 uptime, and reduce costs the resiliency and redundancy of the fabric. switch, though it is fully interchangeable The main objective is to remove any single Fibre Channel SAN Design point of failure. Resiliency is the ability of with other switches in the Brocade Considerations Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio depending the network to continue to function and/ When designing the SAN for an all-flash on the required scale. The entire Brocade or recover from a failure, while redundancy array, understanding the application Gen 6 portfolio also includes Brocade describes duplication of components, workloads and the intended scalability, Fabric Vision technology, which provides even an entire fabric, to eliminate a single redundancy, and resiliency requirements unprecedented insight and visibility point of failure in the network. Brocade are the main factors to consider. across the storage network. With fabrics have resiliency built into Brocade enterprises migrating to high-performance When deploying a SAN, the main design FOS, the software that runs on all Brocade flash storage for their mission-critical consideration is the adequate sizing of B-Series switches, which can quickly applications, Brocade Gen 6 switches the ISLs between the edge switches “repair” the network to overcome most are best suited to build the Fibre Channel where the servers are connected and failures. For example, when a link between SAN to support applications such as SAP the core switches where the storage switches fails, FSPF quickly recalculates S4/HANA. arrays are connected. In implementations all traffic flows. Of course, this assumes where the storage arrays are deployed that there is a second route, which is Brocade Gen 6 is backward-compatible to serve specific latency- and IO- when redundancy in the fabric becomes with previous generations providing intensive applications such as SAP important. 16 Gbps and 8 Gbps connectivity. While Hana, Oracle and other business-critical this solution is tested with a Pure Storage The key to high availability and enterprise- systems connecting both servers and M50 array connected with 16 Gbps class installation is redundancy. By Fibre Channel storage array to the core speed, there are features listed below eliminating a single point of failure, backbone switch(es) can be advantageous. unique to Gen 6 FC that benefit this business continuity can be provided deployment. When deploying dedicated SANs for Fibre through most foreseeable and even Channel storage