BI Platform 4.1 Tomcat or Netweaver

[Former Member]

Hello Experts,

I'm tasked at redeveloping our BI landscape and curious to know what application server would be recommended Tomcat or NetWeaver?

I know this discussion has been brought up before, however previous discussion are several years old (2011) and with the recent updates to BI I wonder if the recommendation has changed.

Thanks, Erik

[Farid]

Hello,

I am sorry to hijack your thread.

We are in the process of implementing BI 4.1 in the near future, and are hesitating between Tomcat and Netweaver Applications servers.

We are SAP Basis Administrators, so Netweaver would be the logical choice , but things might not be that simple :

* Yes, in theory whether yo use Tomcat,Netweaver, Websphere,JBoss,... as application server

SAP BI 4.x functionalities remain the same.

In practice, I assume that each one of those products has its own limitation, for example for Netweaver AS Java, we already have several expensives BW Web Application Queries that caused Out Of Memory Errors, we had to implement a safety belt to limit the number of cells to be retrieved.

So for those queries we have asked the users to run the Bex instead, we do not know if we will be running into similar issues with BI 4.1x if  we use Netweaver as AS.

We do not know if Tomcat has the same limitation ?

What the performances impacts of using Netweaver versus Tomcat as Application servers ?

As mentionned in this thread there are several BI 4.x How To Guides on how to improve perfromances when using Tomcat, I could not find anything on Netweaver ...

Thanks and Regards

[former_member136842]

Hi,

the Safety Belt fetaure can be consumed by all BI4 Front- End Applications and its a pretty good feature. For sure something similar can happen on Tomcat. If a user want to render a Report with Millions of rows and thousands of pages the Tomcat can crash as well. But thats a design issue, not really a technical issue from the Tomcat.

I am not aware of any performance Guides for a NW deployment.

One thing i know is that you have to enable the http compression on the NW. Otherwise the Web Applications behave very slow. This is a "global" Setting for the NW and could affect other Web Applications that are deployed on the same NW.

Regards

-Seb.

[Farid]

Thank you very much Seb,

For your information, we have deployed SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) over the past few years,   we have been facing with some severe performance issues, and the infrastructure has been immediately and constantly blamed for those problems by all kind of people.

We spent a tremendous amount of time and effort trying to prove that the servers configuration were not the problem.

So with the next BI 4.1 implementation, we really want to make sure that we are not building an "unorthodox" BI 4.1 Landscape.

We are thinking of deploying a dedicated Netweaver AS Landscape , which only purpose would be to provide Web Application servers to BI 4.1.

But there are still two aspects that worry me :

1/The lack of performance guides for BI4/NW :

* For example, I have found a Performance Guide for Tomcat giving some advices when using Java 7 ( parallel Garbage collector) SAP Netweaver Java AS do not support Java 7, so the recommendations could not apply.

* There are also several documents for Tomcat recommending to split the Web Application Servers, between static and dynamic content. We could not do that with Netweaver AS

Is it fair to assume that with Tomcat AS you have more leverage to improve performances that with NEtweaver AS ?

2/ The validation of the SAP infrastructure :

As you know we can not install Netweaver AS, without installing first a Database.

We obviously do not want to deals with two databases per landscape tier (one for BO CMS/Audit another for NEtweaver), so we were thinking of having one database with three schemas :

Something that looks like this :

The problem is that we do not know if this database configuration is supported by SAP ?

Sap note 581312 - Oracle database: Licensing restrictions which explicitly prohibits third party tools (reporting for example) from creating database users/schema in the database.

I tried to open a sap customer call but they do not even understand the question, SAP Support Netweaver experts do not even know what is a BO Audit schema.

Most of the time Netweaver specialists do not understand BI4 questions and vice versa.

You might have some ideas on both those questions ?

[former_member136842]

Hello,

1. Yes it is true that there lots of information about increasing the Tomcat performance within SAP BI 4.x. The Java 7 Option is only one of it. I personally recommend to my customers to use the Tomcat Web AS over the NW Web AS.

Also there is a lot more documentation available for the Tomcat as for the NW.

2. As far as i know BO acts as a "third party" Application here and therefore this is not supported.

As a fazit i would recommend to you as well to use the Tomcat Web AS and not the NW Web AS.

Regards

-Seb.

[former_member186487]

Hi,

As stated by Sebestian -

2. As far as i know BO acts as a "third party" Application here and therefore this is not supported.

Is BO a third party application fro SAP?

Please clarify.

Thank you,

SS

[TammyPowlas]

We went with the default TomCat that came with the installation - I don't recall if there are any best practices on this topic

[Former Member]

I've used Tomcat as well and its worked nice. However I thinking about running BW Java component on the same server as well.

Any thoughts?

[TammyPowlas]

I am not using the BI-Java where I currently work...so I am not sure about this.  Hopefully someone else will respond

[former_member183777]

We are running BI 4.0 SP6 on Netweaver running on Solaris. It runs fine for the most part. We currently do have some issues we are working through. It is hard to say if they are because of Netweaver or other factors. I don't have experience with other configurations to give you a good comparison, but I will say that even now the OSS support and general information in the community is limited when you talk about using Netweaver instead of Tomcat. So if you can get more information from SAP on the recommended best practice, it will be helpful.

[former_member136842]

Hi,

i agree with Vineet. Official Documents, How- Tos, Best Practices, Guides etc. often reference to the Tomcat Web AS. Especially the SAP Notes.

Often our Support Engineers are well more trained on the Tomcat WebAS as of other Java Web Application Servers.

If SSO will be a functionality that you want to use in the future i recommend you choose the Tomcat as it is much easier to configure SSO there.

If i have to make a guess i would say that about 70 % of the productive installations are using the shipped Tomcat Web AS as there Web Application Server.

Do yourself a favor and go for the Tomcat.

Regards

-Seb.

PS: Just to be clear here. All functions/features within SAP BI 4.x are independent of the Web AS. If they work on the Tomcat they also work on SAP NetWeaver. But it is often harder to configure.