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Best Practices for Downloading SAP Products

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Best Practices for Downloading SAP Products

This blog is an attempt to demystify some of the steps required to download SAP and related applications and patches, as it can be complicated to the inexperienced user. An SAP Support login will be required before you can proceed with the steps outlined below..

It’s a good idea to download and install the “SAP Download Manager” which is found on the bottom of the page below. The Download Manager allows you to select multiple packages to be downloaded at the same time.This allows unattended download of multiple packages.

Follow this link for SAP instructions on how to install and configure the software download manager.

Once you download and execute the DLManager.jar, you will be prompted with the configuration assistant:

Click Next

Enter your SAP login credentials, if you need a proxy then you can configure it.

Enter the location where downloads will be saved. Click Finish.

Now the Download Manager is running and you will add files into the basket to download them, see below.

Click the Double green >> arrow to download all items in the download manager.

Installations & Upgrades

Scroll to the top of software downloads:

What we’re interested in here is primarily “Installations and Upgrades”. This is where complete SAP version images are available.

For HANA scroll to H

For Hana I select “H” and then find “SAP HANA Platform Edition 2.0”.

Lots of HANA, Find and select “SAP HANA PLATFORM EDITION”

Clicking on this gives me the option to select “Installation”.

Now we are presented with a list of available current software releases, for HANA it’s currently either version 2.0 SP5 or SP6. You need to select the hardware platform you want, in our case Linux x86_64.

If we wanted to use the download manager we would simply click the shopping cart (circled red), or we can download directly through our browser by clicking the link (circled green).

HANA comes in the form of a ZIP that needs to be uploaded to your Linux VM and then unpacked using unzip. Most of the SAP packages come in .SAR format and this requires SAPCAR to extract, SAPCAR is the SAP utility that’s used to compress or uncompress files.

You can search for SAPCAR and download the version appropriate for your platform, SAPCAR is typically used with -xvf options e.g. ./SAPCAR -xvf SAP.SAR

Support Packages & Patches

“Support Packages and Patches” would get you certain patch levels that can be applied to base product levels. “Databases” is used to support a third party database for use with SAP (other than HANA).

Once we select “Support Packages and Patches” we are presented with several options on how we want to locate software. I normally use “By Alphabetical Index (A-Z)”.

H for SAP HANA

Then the software component you want to patch, e.g SAP HANA PLATFORM EDITION

Again, select which subcomponent you want to patch, e.g. SAP HANA PLATFORM EDITION 2.0

Finally, choose the exact patch level you want for that selected subcomponent.

Finally, you are ready for the fun part…installing SAP! If you need help with ensuring your SAP infrastructure is highly available, please reach out to SIOS. We would be glad to speak with you.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

How to Reduce Downtime in SAP

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How to Reduce Downtime in SAP

How to Reduce Downtime in SAP

Thinking about how to reduce downtime in SAP is an important topic that should be visited during initial solution design. Changes to existing SAP landscapes can be made, these can be more tricky in existing production environments where downtime will be an issue.

There are several typical components in an SAP landscape that can be considered single points of failure; ASCS (Central Services), HANA DB, NFS nodes and SAP Application servers. Ideally these should be protected by using redundant servers in a High Availability configuration.

HA/DR Goals for SAP

Core goals when designing components of High Availability/Disaster recovery for SAP should be:

● Minimize Downtime
● Eliminate Data loss
● Maintain data integrity
● Enable flexible configuration

In today’s modern cloud environments the infrastructure of the underlying hardware is typically well protected from failures by using multiple redundant NICs, redundant storage and hardware availability zones – however, this still doesn’t guarantee that your SAP application will be running and responding to requests.

Using a high availability solution such as the SIOS Protection Suite introduces intelligent High Availability coupled with local disk replication to ensure that your SAP applications and services are continually monitored, protected and have the ability to automatically switch to redundant hardware when a failure is detected.

Now lets consider a simple example of an SAP configuration that’s not HA protected, it might look something like this (figure 1):

If this environment is used to process transactions from a web server that is used to sell clothing to customers, SAP is being used to process sales, track orders, track inventory and provide multiple automated ordering etc based on these transactions.

Now let’s imagine that this sales processing environment (pictured above) was configured in the cloud without HA because the architect thought that highly redundant hardware in the cloud environment was good enough to protect from failures. If that HANA DB experiences an issue and shuts down let’s look at the steps that are typical required to get the database back up and running:

● Even if HANA is configured with HANA System Replication, failover to the secondary HANA DB system isn’t automated. This will require someone who knows HANA to correct, after the failure is detected and they are notified of the outage.
● Real Time transactions from web server will be suspended until the issue is resolved

If this small clothing retailer transacts about $10 million annually from web based sales, that equates to roughly $1150 per hour in sales equalized over the year. Peak times would cost much more per hour.

This report from IBM suggests that the average downtime cost per hour is $10k

Figure 2: SAP Landscape with HA/DR

If HA software had been in use (figure 2), HANA DB failover would have been automatic and interruption to the web server would have been within the configured timeouts and absolutely no sales would have been lost. An alert would be generated and the cause could be looked at and diagnosed in a more leisurely manner than a system down situation.

Scale up the customer size and it’s very likely that any system down situation would start to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and consume significant people resources to resolve.

Another IBM report suggests a staggering 44% of respondents had bi-monthly unplanned outages and another 35% had monthly unplanned outages.

Planned outages themselves are another potential problem with 46% of respondents reporting monthly planned outages and a further 29% reporting yearly planned outages. Having applications and services protected by HA software can also mitigate these planned outages by allowing services to be moved to running systems during maintenance activities.

Learn more about high availablity for SAP and S/4HANA.

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

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SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

SIOS High Availability Solution And Its Benefits

What SIOS can do for you?

With SIOS, get ready to enjoy high availability cluster protection for 70% less than SQL Enterprise Edition, Oracle Enterprise Edition/ RAC. On top of that, save running costs from not having to migrate to a certain vendors’ cloud platform for extended support.

Rest assured. SIOS is SAP certified for all major Linux and cloud providers, hence you can easily achieve High Availability and Disaster Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). Thereby, allowing snapshot-based backups to succeed.

Best of all, overcome technical limitations of native features from application and database software vendors.

No Configuration Limitations

SIOS is a high availability solution that is suitable for use in any Windows/Linus Application on Physical, Virtual, Public/Virtual Cloud.

Why Sell SIOS HA Solutions

SIOS has been a high availability solutions leader for 20 years, with its strength as a simple add-on to fit any HA environment. Specifically focusing on channel sales, the great margins translate to cost reduction for customers by more than 60% . You will be provided with sales support and given marketing opportunities. Most of all, you can be guaranteed access to a world-class technical support team.

SIOS strives to solve customers’ challenges by providing usable solutions. 

  • Benefits for MSSQL customers

Use SIOS Datakeeper with AlwaysOn FCI on SQL standard edition with no need for Enterprise Edition, thereby saving more than 66% of cost. Maintain support even after migrating customers’ old MSSQL 2008 to cloud. SIOS supports multinode cluster (MS limitation), and provides protection for Master System Databases (Master, MSD). Also, it protects other files and applications other than MSSQL

  • Benefits for Oracle customers

SIOS offers protection for Oracle DB and  75% cost savings with Oracle standard edition. Use SIOS with STD edition and continue to get High Availability even as Oracle ends RAC support for STD edition from v.19c onward. SIOS is less complex than Dataguard and RAC, thereby reducing administrative time and costs. Enjoy the ease and flexibility to  run Oracle DB with High Availability on any cloud provider platform. Protect other files and applications not just Oracle DB.

  • Benefits for SAP customers 

With its easy implementation, application protection wizards, and management via GUI, be sure to save time and cost on your projects. No change from on-premises clustering design and versions used as you migrate to cloud by “life-and-shift”.

As a high availability solution, SIOS promises to offer protection that SAP does not cover. Automatic failure detection and failover orchestration for HANA and Central Services with automatic ERS switchover to opposite node (feature not provided by opensource/HAE). Certified by SAP for any cloud provider and and linux flavor. This includes Oracle Linux with SAP in public cloud providers All SAP customers enjoy commercial-grade replication and tech support.

  • Benefits for VMware environments

Achieve High Availability, Data Recovery on VMware without RDM (shared storage). This allows for snapshot backups that is not supported with VMware HA. Additionally, you get to enjoy cost savings since there is no need for single-point-of-failure SAN or SAN-to-SAN replication for High Availability, Data Recovery. Similarly, this ends the need for complex vSphere replication for DR of applications like SQL, SAP, Oracle etc. With SIOS, you’ll easily achieve full application monitoring and automated failover.  Furthermore, this feature is not provided by VMware HA, only VM and host failures. 

The solution is specifically designed for HA with full stack monitoring (server, VM, application, network, split-brain). Like a hybrid our high availability solution works on-premises with any VM-to-any Cloud.

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SAP High Availability Solutions For Linux

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SAP High Availability Solutions

SAP High Availability Solutions For Linux

Are you looking for a powerful yet easy to implement High Availability / Disaster Recovery solution for your SAP environment?  If so, you will want to take a look at the SteelEye Protection Suite (SPS) for Linux, from SIOS Technologies.  SPS provides integrated High Availability and Data Replication functionality that works with any server or storage configuration.  Support for SAP is provided out-of-the-box without the need for any scripting or customizations.

SPS for Linux was recently officially certified by SAP against their “SAP NetWeaver High Availability Cluster 730 Certification” (NW-HA-CLU 730)

A list of certified HA solutions for SAP can be found here:  http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31701

For more information on SAP High Availability Solutions For Linux, do drop us a note
Reproduced with permission from Linuxclustering

Minimize Downtime Using High Availability Clustering And Data Replication For Sap

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Why implement high-availability cluster configuration?

What does it cost your business when your SAP system is down due to a hardware failure, an administrator mistake or for maintenance activities?  The impact can range from thousands of dollars lost in sales per minute to significant drops in employee productivity and customer satisfaction.  Through the implementation of a high-availability cluster configuration, downtime from both planned and unplanned outages can be virtually eliminated.

SteelEye and SAP AG have worked closely together to ensure that the availability needs which corporate users have for critical business infrastructure running on Linux and Windows platforms are achieved through the deployment of monitoring and switchover solutions for SAP Application Server (AS) and both JAVA and ABAP Web Application Server (WAS) environments.

Please join Steel Eye EVP of Product Management, Bob Williamson as he explains how you can minimize your downtime using SAP High Availability with SteelEye.

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2010/06/30/minimize-downtime-using-high-availability-clustering-and-data-replication-for-sap/