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Former Member
Aug 14, 2008 at 10:22 PM

Design Options - SAP MII 12.0 on Netweaver 7.0 on Windows

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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