Automate SAP S/4HANA infrastructure deployment on IBM Power Virtual Server with deployable architectures

When businesses need industry-leading performance scalability and reliability for their SAP ERP landscape, they turn to IBM® Power® for their compute infrastructure. I can pull a list of benchmarks that highlight why over 4,500 customers run SAP HANA on Power—highest SAP-certified memory scalability, leadership in SAPS performance benchmarks, ranked most reliable among SAP-certified infrastructure platforms, etc. 

IBM Power Virtual Server delivers that platform experience in a multi-tenant environment with access to IBM Cloud services. We are focused on accelerating the cloud move for Power deployments by automating the Day 1 and Day 2 operations in Power Virtual Server. Automation can shrink SAP deployment from weeks to hours and help avoid error and configuration variance. The time taken by various automated components is detailed in Mike Moore’s blog post.

Deployable architectures

Automation in IBM Cloud is delivered as a “deployable architecture.” We GA’ed the deployable architecture (DA) for SAP S/4HANA which is based on the best practices from both IBM and SAP. Let’s dive into the details. 

To access DAs, click here or go to IBM Cloud catalog and select Deployable architectures from the filters on left side of the page.

Figure 1. Deployable architecture catalog. 

You’ll find the below tiles, along with other DAs.

• Power Virtual Server with VPC Landing Zone
• Power Virtual Server for SAP HANA 

Power Virtual Server with VPC landing zone

Clients moving from on-premises to Power Virtual Server may not be familiar with network connectivity, storage configurations and the best practices to deploy cloud infrastructure. Power Virtual Server with VPC landing zone helps to get the instances up and running quickly, securely and with minimal manual intervention. It automates the deployment of the following components: 

• Provisions three VPCs with one VSI in each VPC: 
  • One management (jump/bastion) VSI
  • One inet-svs VSI configured as squid proxy server
  • One private-svs VSI configured as NFS, NTP, DNS server
• Installs and configures the Squid Proxy, DNS Forwarder, NTP forwarder and NFS on hosts, and sets the host as the server for the NTP, NFS, and DNS services by using Ansible roles.

A PowerVS workspace instance with the following network topology. Creates two private networks: a management network and a backup network. Creates one or two IBM Cloud connections. Attaches the IBM Cloud connections to a transit gateway. Attaches the private networks to the IBM Cloud connections. Creates an SSH key.

Figure 2. Power Virtual Server with VPC landing zone architecture.

Power Virtual Server for SAP HANA

This DA is designed to assist you in deploying SAP S/4HANA software landscapes into the IBM Power Virtual Server infrastructure. This is the second step in the deployment process to prepare SAP-certified Power Virtual Server instances for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver workloads. After the deployment is complete, you may (depending on the framework you chose) begin installing SAP on the configured instances or login to your newly created SAP instances directly.

The Power Virtual Server for SAP HANA architecture automates the deployment of the following tasks, all based on best practices:

• Creates and configures one Power Virtual Server instance for SAP HANA.
• Creates and configures multiple Power Virtual Server instances for SAP NetWeaver.
• Creates and configures one optional Power Virtual Server instance that can be used for sharing SAP files between other system instances.
• Connects all created Power Virtual Server instances to a proxy server that is specified by IP address or hostname.
• Optionally connects all created Power Virtual Server instances to an NTP server and DNS forwarder that are specified by IP address or hostname.
• Optionally configures a shared NFS directory on all created Power Virtual Server instances.

Figure 3. Power Virtual Server for SAP HANA architecture.

Get started

These deployable architectures not only help automate the deployment of the infrastructure for SAP provisioning but can also be used for AIX, IBM i, or Linux deployment on Power Virtual Server. You can further connect it to x86-based workloads running on IBM Cloud, enabling you to take advantage of workload-optimized infrastructure across Power and x86. 

Check out the deployable architectures for IBM Power Virtual Servers

Documentation: 

Automation sources: