SAP provides a range of enterprise software applications and business solutions to manage and run the complete business of a company. Companies that have deployed such products depend on information and processes managed by SAP solutions, and continuous availability of the SAP system is essential. An integrated architecture of VMware® Site Recovery Manager with NetApp® storage and data management solutions provides an effective disaster recovery (DR) solution to address these business continuity requirements.
This paper documents the configuration and validation of an SAP DR architecture using Site Recovery Manager and NetApp storage and tools. The infrastructure was installed and verified at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) in Palo Alto, CA and was jointly deployed by NetApp, SAP and VMware staff.
The scope of the architecture documented here includes:
• Two installations of Virtual Center and Site Recovery Manager to simulate a primary and
secondary site
• A freshly installed SAP ECC 6.0 system (MSSQL / Windows Server 2003 64 bit) deployed on:
2 x vCPU, 8 GB virtual machine running on VMware ESX; 4 x NetApp volumes; 1 x VMFS
LUN; 3 x RDM LUN.
• A storage array replication of LUNs (via SnapMirror) between two separate NetApp storage
systems (in the same lab) simulating a primary and secondary site.
• The execution of a test DR recovery plan using Site Recovery Manager. This test included
starting storage array replication while the primary SAP system was subjected to a batch
load created by the SAP "SGEN" transaction.
• As of May 2008, the architecture did not include NetApp products for database consistent
recovery, and the DR test workflow is based upon the crash recovery of the underlying SAP
database (MSSQL).
• A complete solution requires crash consistent recovery of the SAP database (best practice), and this will be incorporated into the COIL setup in the future. The solution will include NetApp products SnapDrive 6.0 and SnapManager for MSSQL. This content will be
updated in the next revision of this document.