SAP LinuxLab Virtualization Certification Workshop #3 The SAP LinuxLab ensures that released SAP software will run on a certain software and hardware combination. When talking about the underlying software and hardware stack, the definition of both was very clear in the past. The software is the Linux distribution and the hardware is the bare metal in the data center. By introducing virtualization the whole definition becomes somehow unclear. From the distributors point view, the virtualization layer is handled as if it is new hardware. From hardware perspective, the virtualization layer is another software layer in between.
There have been already two SAP LinuxLab Virtualization Certification Workshops in the past. The first workshop focussed on the comparison of native and virtual performance. Two years ago this was of course a hot topic, as there weren't many benchmarks out. And if there were benchmarks, each virtualization vendor's performance was superior compared to the other virtualization technologies. But it was not clear, how these technologies perform using SAP technology. This workshop focussed on VMware and Xen from SLES10. The results for VMware are not available, but the results for Xen can you find here:
The second SAP LinuxLab Virtualization Certification Workshop, 15 months later, focussed on the scalability of different virtualization technologies. The question which we had in mind was, how does the performance scale if the virtual environments use more then 100% of the CPU of the underlying host or hypervisor. Such high load scenarios don't happen every day, but you have to make sure that the virtualized environment handles such workloads well. The results of this workshop can you find here:
Now it is time for the next SAP LinuxLab Virtualization Certification Workshop. As topic like native/virtual performance and scalability in an over subscription phase are already covered (assuming that the performance will stay the same for both), we are going to focus on new use cases in the next workshop. This time we'd like to use customer like use cases and new features that come with the various new virtualization technologies. Speaking of customer like scenarios we are going to use "Live Migration / VMotion" during our tests. Speaking of new features, we may think of DRS (VMware) or some other fail over technologies. Also, Green IT topics such as migrating idle VM's to a single host to shutdown other hosts to save energy and money sound interesting.
Besides these topics, do you think of other scenarios or features which he should look into? We can't promise to look into all due to limited time, but we are grateful for any input you can give us. In our opinion, a certification should reflect a customer scenario and nothing else.
