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Running SAP on AIX LPAR's

Former Member
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Would like to hear folks experience if running SAP/Oracle using AIX IBM LPAR technology and whether the experience has been good/bad.

Thanks.

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Former Member
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Hi Ed,

the IBM SAP Competence Center collected customer experiences on AIX advanced power virtualization (both with Oracle and DB2). The study describes the feedback on technical architecture implementation, cost benefits and what we called "mindset", meaning the soft factors like administration effort, dealing with scalability or flexibility in setting up new systems promptly. I will send that study to you via mail.

If other folks want to obtain this study, please contact me directly.

Regards,

Irene Hopf.

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basis_citec
Explorer
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Hi Irene,

We are planning to move our SAP Db2 UDB systems from P690 to P550 which will run AIX 5.3 and Db2 9.1 on a 64Bits.

Our AIX Administrators recommend not to use VIO, but the Architecture people recommend to use it.

As an SAP/Db2 Administrator, I am not sure with way is the best for u201Cmyu201D SAP environment.

Could you please advice or send me the information you had from other Customers who have experience of using VIO.

Kindly Regards,

Kien

Former Member
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Hello Kien,

I sent you the package of customer experience documents already via email.

Yes, we do endorse to use VIO for both network (Ethernet) and storage (FC) access.

It is proven and beneficial. As well, it is a prerequisite for the usage of Live Partition Mobility, which helps in continuous availability of SAP applications in case of e.g. HW maintenance. .

Kind regards,

Irene.

Answers (8)

Answers (8)

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Former Member
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Former Member
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We will be installing AIX version 5.6, Oracle 9.2.0.6 and SAP 4.6C. Once installed, we can upgrade to Oracle 10i and SAP enterprise. Our plan is to prove this concept to upper management, then run it in our production environment. We will bring it up on a test LPAR on a new AS400/570 We currently outsource SAP (one division on it) but we want to bring it in-house, cut loose the outsourcer which will give us more control and huge cost savings. Ultimate goal is to run most divisions on SAP. Anyone have additional experiences with pitfalls or successes? IBM will come in for a day to help with the AIX instal and two days remote support. Failure is not an option.

Former Member
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Keith,

I believe the latest AIX version available is 5.3, do check this again. The LPAR details are not clear, is it a P570 server running AIX or on AS400 partition?

Nisch

Former Member
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A developement partition. None of the three of us invovled in the project are AIX pros.

Former Member
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Nisch,

It is 5.3. installation was smooth - we had an IBMer come in and install it and give a class too.He will be coming back in November to give other classes - we have vouchers. One thing the SE did not do during the set-up was tell AIX what the boot order/ sequence was so when the partition was inactivated and then activated, the system didn't know what to do (couldn't find the bootfile) and wouldn't come up. (SE was gone at this point). We had another Engineer help us with that after a two hour phone call with IBM produced no results.

We are waiting for The OS Update Kit AIX 5.1L from SAP to update the kernel before installing Oracle and SAP

Former Member
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Keith,

You also need to be aware of another controlling system, the HMC or hyperviser, through which you manage the partitions, you need to keep it up to date with the latest firmware updates and always have it backed up. We have had a few issues with it, but its quite stable now.

Its quite an interesting system and once you get the hang of it, management will be smooth.

Download lparmon tool, it is quite good and gives you a picture of your systems performance.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/lparmon/download

Cheers,

Nisch

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Former Member
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Hello Khogalan,

I am happy to send you my customer experience documents via mail.

The performance behaviour you report cannot be analyzed with the data you describe. It depends on many factors, what response times you see. Capped or uncapped LPARs, how much main memory, or other LPAR settings, how big the machine is in total. Are there other workloads running at the same time? Settings in the SAP instance profile, or the DB.

We can talk offline about that. 300 SAPS ? That is not a lot anyway.

Regards, Irene.

Former Member
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Former Member
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Hi Edward,

We have been running SAP on AIX LPAR's for last 2 years, its on 2 IBM P570's, where one of them is running our DR environment (using Oracle dataguard).

The environment is stable, though we need to keep it up to the latest firmware and fixes regularly. Dynamic resource allocation to individual LPAR's using HMC makes management easy, we can move resources for planned activities / high loads. We do not have application severs all over the place, its a central administration. Capacity on demand is very effective for resource hungry systems like SAP, on the production server we exhausted the existing available capacity and had to add new enclosures to give it more power. Micro partitioning of CPU’s is a useful feature that is part of this architecture.

I would not recommend using VIO, we have had serious performance issues with it on a development LPAR that we setup as VIO. Refer to SAP note: 895816, where saposcol is not able to generate correct stats for LPAR environment and the stats are misleading in EWA reports. Overall this is a good solution, but not a cost effective one.

cheers,

Nisch

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Hi Nisch,

regarding saposcol: recently the LPAR stats have been significantly improved, please refer to SAP note 994025.

Former Member
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Nisch,

What costs are you referring to?

Thanks

Keith

Former Member
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Keith,

The costs I ment are the hardware costs, on demand resources and managing the servers.

But overall, once the server is setup and you are meeting SLA's for performance you should be fine. Just need to make sure that the additional buffer for unexpected workload is available.

Nisch

Former Member
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I don't know all the bells and whistles of this 570. It's new this year and very powerful/fast. Once we prove the concept, there are substantial funds for hardware and three additional support people (Oracle Admin, Unix Admin and 2nd Basis Admin.)

Former Member
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Former Member
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Despite the comment from Maurice, I would like to endorse the usage of VIO for all shared processor LPARs except the ones, where you <b>know</b> that there is heavy IO load (order of magnitude > 30000 IOs per second) expected. Then dedicated adapters in the LPARs are the more reasonable choice.

We have customers, who made good experiences with that approach.

I sent you the documents with a separate mail.

Regards, Irene.

Former Member
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Former Member
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Edward,

Our experience with micro-partitions (AIX 5.3 required) in combination with Oracle and SAP is very good. However we had to learn how to size these instances and we had to learn the more complex capacity management and process. However the flexibility and time-2-install is a huge win for us. Recommendation is not to use virtual IO for SAPDATA. We use FC for each partition.

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