Hello,
About 3 weeks ago I was suddenly tasked with designing a
zero-downtime infrastructure for a 9 site SAP/MII on windows
implementation.
I can barely spell SAP, and have been furiously reading 60
hours a week for 3 weeks.
Now the common wisdom seems to be to use Windows Clustering.
I have never been comfortable with windows clustering for a number
of reasons, and we are chronically short-staffed to the point of
lunacy and have no in-house expertise and no budget for
consultants.
(we also have NO remote IT staff, and facilities that are 2 hours
drive from the nearest airport)
I'm supposed to order parts in 17 days.
In an effort to avoid windows clustering at all costs I have looked at
two other alternatives:
1) vmware.
I love vmware. I know vmware. Vmware never lets us down. Vmware
solves most of our problems.
My reading says that vmware is FULLY certified and acceptable
per SAP support note #0001159490
However to be ultra conservative we called up SAP and they
said categorically that we may not use vmware and receive
any support whatsoever.
I'm really confused.
Our hardware is 10x over-specced. We could support 200 heavy
ERP users on it, and only need to support like 20 light MII
users. It could run on a desktop PC with 4 gig of ram.
Ok, so another alternative I came up wtih was to use an all
boot from ISCSI san design for a very rapid boot to a backup
box. I could script the whole thing, so that a remote secretary
could failover with a web page link if necessary.
However our main internal SAP guy wants nothing to do with this
design.
So I have 3 designs in mind, none of which I can use, and 17
days to order parts.
Question #1:
Would any of you recommend the use of Windows clustering,
at remote sites 2 hours drive from civilization, with no remote
support staff and no competent support staff back at corporate?
(I'm a principal engineer with 17 years windows/network experience
and I don't classify as competent on windows clustering)
Question #2:
Can someone in a position of authority clarify about whether
virtualization with vmware VI 3 is or is not supported?
Question #3:
What would you do?
Thanks,
Kevin