This article provides step by step instructions on how to run a SAP instance with Zadara Storage at AWS.
It assumes a Zadara account and a VPSA have already been created.
If you need to create a Zadara account, please visit the link below:
https://www.zadarastorage.com/how-to-create-a-zadara-cloud-block-storage-at-amazon-aws-ec2/
Once the Zadara account and VPSA are created, it is time to create your SAP environment.
Launch a SAP instance
- Login into the AWS cloud console
- Go to the AWS marketplace and search for “SAP” AMIs:
- Select one of the SAP Solutions. In this example, we will use solutions SAP HANA One (running on SUSE Linux) or SAP Afaria (running on Windows 2008) provided by SAP.
- Click Continue
- Select “Launch with EC2 Console” option instead of “1-Click Launch”
- Choose US East (Virginia) Region and click on the “Launch with EC2 Console” button
- In EC2 Launch Wizard:
- Select the desired Instance type and VPC subnet
- Select the appropriate key pair and security group
- Review the data and click Launch
- Please note that some instance types are not supported with VPC in some zones. If your wizard returned an error, try to change the instance type.
Configuring VPSA volumes for SAP use
- Connect to your instance using ssh or RDP (if needed, assign the Elastic IP to connect from outside of the cloud)
- Before configuring the SAP, switch to use Zadara volumes as a Database back-end. For that, follow the below procedure:
- Install and start iSCSI Initiator:
- For SUSE Linux (SLES 11) based images:
- Run yast2
- Select Network Services / iSCSI Initiator and install it. If yast will not be able to install iSCSI Initiator, try the following:
- sces-getid (if it returns stale token message, run sces-activate)
- Retry iSCSI Initiator installation through yast2
- Start iSCSI Initiator: /etc/init.d/open-iscsi start
- Enable loading of iSCSI during the boot: insserv open-iscsi
- For Windows-based images:
- Run iSCSI Initiator from Administrative tools.
- For SUSE Linux (SLES 11) based images:
- At this point, iSCSI Initiator is installed. The next step will be to configure iSCSI session between your instance and VPSA. The easiest way to do it will be using VPSA’s Connect script.
- Go to VPSA GUI / Servers section and click Connect
- For Linux servers:
- Select Linux and iSCSI (you will see the instructions you need to run on the VM to connect to the VPSA)
- Go back to your SAP server and follow the instructions from VPSA GUI:
- Get the script, change mode for execution, run the script, select interface ID from the list
- For Windows servers:
- Select Windows and iSCSI. Click on script download and execute it.
- For Linux servers:
- Go to VPSA GUI / Servers section and click Refresh. You should see a new server listed
- Go to VPSA GUI / Volumes. Create the necessary amount of volumes and attach them to your SAP server. We recommend to use SAS and/or SSD volumes for SAP DB data (see next section for volume details)
- Install and start iSCSI Initiator:
Moving pre-created SAP data to Zadara volumes for SAP HANA
- The SAP HANA One image comes with multiple EBS and Ephemeral volumes attached. They are striped with RAID-0 for better performance. We recommend to substitute:
- Provisioned IOPS volumes with Zadara SSD volumes
- Regular EBS volumes with Zadara SAS 10K or 15K RPM based volumes
- With Zadara volumes there is no need to create RAID-0 across multiple volumes on Linux level and it will be enough to create one Zadara volume per each original MD array.
- Create following volumes in VPSA GUI:
- hanalog, on SSD drives, 120GB
- hanadata, on SAS drives, 200GB
- backup, on SAS drives, 200GB
- You are free to pick capacities that suit your needs most (you can always extend these volumes later)
- Attach volumes to the SAP instance.
- Use the following simple procedure for creating FS, mounting volumes and moving all the data:
-
- For Linux servers:
- You should see new devices by typing:
- ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/
- Create file systems and mount them using:
- mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda
- mkdir /hanalog1
- mount /dev/sda /hanalog1
- Move all the data and remount Zadara volume as /hanalog
- mv /hanalog/* /hanalog1/
- umount /hanalog
- umount /hanalog1
- mount /dev/sda /hanalog
- Edit /etc/fstab and set Zadara volumes to be mounted during the boot
- Detach and Delete EBS volumes
- You should see new devices by typing:
- For Linux servers:
Moving pre-created SAP data to Zadara volumes for SAP Afaria
The default SAP Afaria image has no additional EBS volumes attached. You can configure DB to use Zadara Volumes directly or move your database later and update DB configuration.
Continue your SAP configuration.
