Dell and SAP provide Competence Centers located in Austin (Texas), Walldorf (Germany), and Kawasaki (Japan) that serve as central points-of-contact for customers who want to run their SAP applications on Dell™ systems. Experienced engineers at these centers can provide custom sizings of the best-suited platform architectures for your SAP implementation needs. Dell also conducts SAP benchmarks and publishes technical papers about SAP to assist its customers when deploying SAP software.

Certified Hardware

Find a list of SAP-certified Dell hardware:

• For Windows at www.saponwin.com/pub/hardware.asp?l=vendor&sl=26&la=en
• For Linux at www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/linux?rid=/webcontent/uuid/8be216ae-0e01-0010-bf8e-b0e892790371

Similar to the certification there is

• An SAP Adaptive Compliance Test

You will only require this if you plan to use the ACC (Adaptive Computing Controller). More information on https://service.sap.com/adaptive.

• A BWA (Business Warehouse Accelerator) Validation

Your hardware vendor needs this to sell BWA solutions. Dell has a validated configuration, see below.

SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA)

SAP's BW is a data warehouse providing analytical tools against multi-dimensional business data. BWA is an optional in-memory accelerator for BW.

Both BW and BWA can run on a certified subset of Dell's standard range of servers and storage. BWA holds the BW data in memory across a set of blade servers. Dell doesn't sell SAP's BWA software but the hardware along with system integrator's services on the installation. The blades used are PowerEdge M610 in a M1000e chassis and connect to a Dell/EMC CX SAN storage array.

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Virtualization

You want to virtualize your SAP environment? Here are some hints that have made life easier:

• SAP-supported virtualization solutions for X64 hardware are VMware, Xen and Hyper-V. Consider the SAP notes
  • 674851 for Windows: VMware and Hyper-V
  • 1122387 for Linux: up to the hardware vendor. For Dell, VMware and Xen is supported, see Dell/SAP note 300900. Be aware that SAP only supports Xen from Novell and Red Hat. This means that you cannot choose the Citrix XenServer integrated hypervisor with productive SAP systems.
    
• Consider your backup strategy

Do you use fibrechannel tape drives for your backups? Please consider that you cannot attach fibre channel cable to every virtual machine. There will soon be a solution from VMware for that, VMDirectPath.

• Consider your database

Do you want a virtualized database server? Do not forget some databases do not support virtualization or demand that you be able to reproduce a support issue on "bare metal". Info on

• DB2: SAP note 1130801
  
• MaxDB: SAP note 1142243
• Oracle: SAP note 1173954
• SQL Server: Microsoft knowledge base article 956893
  

Performance Advice

As discussed in the SAP Portal InfoBrief, the prefetcher setting in the BIOS has a major influence on SAP performance. On ABAP, switching OFF the prefetcher (in a benchmark scenario) increased the system throughput (in Dialogsteps per second) by about 8 percent, and even more could be observed in Java-stack-based SAP software. To switch OFF the prefetcher (as in a Dell PowerEdge™ R900's example):

1. Reboot your PowerEdge server.
2. Enter your system BIOS by pressing F2.
3. Chose CPU Information -> Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch.
4. Set this option to "disabled."

Note: This option may also be called "Sequential Memory Access". It is not available on every server.

Setting HT Tech to HT 3 (where available) showed a performance increase of more than 10% in an SAP-specific load scenario. Here is an example from the PowerEdge M905:



Note: This performance hint was only tested in a 4-processor-configuration.

Support Limitations

Please be aware that SAP does not support SAP on the Linux® OS with PowerPath. SAP support can be denied if you use SAP on Linux with any binary-only kernel module. For more information, see SAP note 784391. For storage multipathing with SAP and Linux, you can safely chose MPIO.

Sub-topics

• understanding the SAPS number

Dell and SAP Quick Links

• Dell SAP Competency Center – The Dell SAP competency centers on DELL.COM/SAP
  
• SAP White Papers – See what Dell can do for SAP customers