SAP HANA Ready for VMware vSphere 5.5
SAP and VMware today announced that the HANA in-memory database is ready for production use on the vSphere 5.5 platform, clearing the way for deployment of HANA applications in a virtualized environment.
VMware released the vSphere 5.5 platform, which provides new scalability options for virtualized application deployments, in January. SAP has been aggressively developing and promoting its HANA database application platform since at least 2012.
Running HANA on top of a virtualized infrastructure does involve a performance impact, though SAP doesn't see it as an issue.
“We can say that the majority of performance tests for the single VM/single HANA appliance scenario have met the 12 percent performance overhead or below criteria which we’ve established in joint engineering work,” Ken Tsai, VP and head of SAP Data Management at SAP Global Marketing, told EnterpriseAppsToday. “We will work together to gradually expand the number of use cases we will support for deploying HANA-based applications on virtualized environment for production use.”
SAP has been busy in recent years building out hardware partnerships for HANA. In 2012, the software giant announced partnerships with Cisco and HP.
The move to certify HANA on VMware isn't a new one for running on virtualized infrastructure. Dan Lahl, VP of product marketing at SAP, told EnterpriseAppsToday that HANA and vSphere have been certified for development and testing for almost two years.
“HANA and vSphere 5.5 are now certified for production use,” Lahl said. “Under vSphere, vMotion, DRS and HA are certified to work with HANA.”
By leveraging vSphere 5.5, customers get quick provisioning, optimum utilization of data center resources and high availability for HANA, Lahl added.
As is the case with bare metal deployments of SUSE HANA, SUSE Linux is the core operating system on which the database runs.
An important part of HANA running on vSphere is the integrated support from SAP and VMware that is available on this environment, Lahl noted.
“Customers can be sure to get their issues resolved and no finger pointing occurs,” Lahl said. ” For the future, there are many things SAP and VMware are working on together, including, but not limited to, multiple VMware vms (virtual machines) per HANA node. This is expected to be delivered by end of Q2.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
