physical machine to Vmware conversion.

[former_member196929]

Hi,

We are running our Production server in physical machines we would like to change the physical server to Vmware, please let us know the below details.

We are running on windows 2012 server os and database- sybase 16.0.01.01

1. After converting from Physical to VM is there any challenges.
2. What are all the process involved on this.

Anyone has come across this scenario.

Thank you

Naveen

[Matt_Fraser]

Hi Naveen,

I rearranged the tags on your question a bit. I believe this should go under Virtualization, but if I'm wrong, I'm sure the moderators for that tag will help it further along.

I can't speak to the specifics of how this migration is done, but it's definitely possible. We run a mix of physical and VMware instances for our SAP systems in our shop, and the VMware instances work just fine. There are Notes and various guides available online that discuss the best way to configure VMware for SAP; you should be able to find them with a little searching.

As for the migration (or virtualization) process itself, I believe this is more of a VMware process than an SAP process. In our case, this has always been handled by our data center operations (network/server operations) staff, not by the SAP Basis team. All we did was specify to them how much CPU and memory needed to be allocated.

When we first brought VMware into our environment, a number of years ago, we had some growing pains with it, and at that time I was not prepared to commit anything other than sandbox instances to it. Since then, however, our data center staff have become experts at managing it, and the environment has stabilized, so today I have no reservations. Our largest production instances are still physical hardware, but I doubt I'll ever buy dedicated hardware for SAP again -- when it's time for the next hardware refresh, I'll look into migrating into VMware, if we haven't gone cloud by then. VMware has some definite advantages for management of the server host. For instance, it's much easier to expand the available memory on the fly (no downtime!), and since even the C: drive is on the SAN, that can be expanded while online if the need arises. Failover capabilities are also handled by VMware, so you don't have to worry as much about special OS configurations for this, so it's more fault-tolerant.

Cheers,
Matt

[former_member196929]

hi Matt,

Thank you for the time and detail mail.

We would like to know mainly the challenges involved in conversion from physical to VM w.r.t SAP and post implementation challenges if any, so i can take necessary steps accordingly.

Thank you

Naveen

[Matt_Fraser]

Hi Naveen,

My apologies for not previously noticing your reply. Since you replied in the form of a new "Answer" to your own Question, the system did not send me any notification. It's one of the quirks of how notifications work in the SAP Community platform. Had you replied with a "Comment" directly upon my Answer, then I would have been notified. And, because I am now replying with a "Comment" upon your Answer (which I've converted to a Comment), you should receive a notification for this reply.

And yes, to avoid confusion, I did convert your Answer to a Comment, so this is why it now shows as nested (or threaded) beneath my answer instead of "parallel" to it. Which, I just discovered, did trigger an immediate notification to me about your comment, even though your comment is a couple weeks old at this point.

So, I'm not sure what more you want to know regarding challenges. Everything is very easily available with a few search terms. You should look at:

Note 2161991: VMware vSphere configuration guidelines
Note 1056052: Windows: VMware vSphere configuration guidelines
Wiki: Virtualization

Everything you're looking for is there.

Cheers,
Matt

[claudia_baur]

hi Naveen,

Matt already listed above our central notes about virtualizing systems with VMware. When using Windows, additionally SAP Note 1612283 might help you.

We collected a lot of information which might be relevant for you at https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/VIRTUALIZATION/SAP+on+VMware+vSphere.

The most critical issues seen with VMware are all summarized on this page:
https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/VIRTUALIZATION/Virtualization+and+Cloud+Infrastructure#Virtual....

Best regards, Claudia