AZ-120 Microsoft Azure SAP – Validate Azure Infrastructure for SAP Workloads

1. Introduction and Load Testing Tooling

Hello and welcome back to the Microsoft Azure for SAP workloads course. In this section, we will be looking at how we validate our deployment of SAP infrastructure on Azure. So let’s get started. I’m your host, Nicolai capadesco, founder of reteam Labs. This course is brought to you in partnership with Sam Kadjar, senior Azure cloud solution architect at Microsoft. There are six sections in total in the course covering all of the AZ 120 exam objectives. The course will be focusing on the Azure and SAP related topics and any fundamental or prior knowledge will be assumed and referenced where appropriate. This current section six of the course will focus on the exam objective of running validation tests, post sap workload, migration or deployments. It will take you over tooling and processes that we tested and tried while running these migration and deployments of SAP projects for real customers.

So let’s proceed. This section builds on previous sections of the course, so please do make sure you understand the previous ones before continuing with SFA. During this section, we will be looking at load testing tools and at how they can be utilized. We will also be looking at running network and throughput checks using the SAP hardware configuration check tool Hwcct to verify deployed VMs on Azure, and we will be going over some of the Nedb requirements before finishing off with backup and snapshot management checks.

Load testing is an important process post migration or deployment of any newly architected workload. It determines if the hardware is built for purpose and if the infrastructure can handle the rear user loads. Post going live, this step could surface those issues that are hidden due to infrastructure limitations or improper SKU choice. Apache JMeter may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources. At the protocol level, it can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, a group of servers, a network, or on an object in order to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. It has a full featured test IDE that allows fast test plan recording from browsers or native applications, building and debugging. It also has a CLI mode command line mode that is previously called nonsuit or headless mode to load tests from any Java compatible OS. This includes Linux, Windows, macOS, etc.

Its full multithreading framework allows concurrent sampling by many threads and simultaneous sampling of different functions by separate thread groups. Meter is an open source tool with unlimited load generation. Results and reporting are both integrated in the product itself. Load Runner Professional supports performance testing for a wide range of application environments and protocols. This includes Web Mobile, Web services, HTML five, Web Sockets RDP database, remote terminal, emulators, Java, net, Oracle and SAP.

The scripting and debugging engine leverages data extensions and a correlation studio to reduce the time spent scripting. Load Runner helps you validate software performance, visualize your network, simulate workloads benchmark production system performance, and optimize your deployment of SAP Hana software. Load Runner has a license cost and it is limited in functionality compared to JMeter. It requires HP analysis to display reporting and results. Spiro Avalanche is a complete security and performance testing tool. It provides various features to mitigate against malware. It can test your deep network security and can also test your software defined network SD to ensure performance and reliability.

2. Verifying Network Performance

This. Upcoming parts will look at tools that can help you in verifying your network performance and throughput. Nipping is an SAP program to evaluate the network throughput and can be used post deployment to evaluate your network latency between the SAP application layer VM and the DBMS VM. You can use the results to compare latency against SAP guidance. Described an SAP node number 110-0926. The network latency should be within the moderate to good range. Ping is a Microsoft tool that runs over ICMP, which might be blocked on your network. Because Nipping uses TCP packets to test the network, we need client and server communication to run network tests. Nipping is not included with the OS, but gets installed when you install SAP programs and or SAP GUI. You could use the Nipping tool to test SAP router connections or other SAP connections.

3. Verifying Hardware Performance

We will now begin to look at the official tool used in verifying SAP hardware performance. The SAP Hana Hardware Configuration Check Tool allows you to measure the performance of your hardware components to ensure that they meet the criteria for running SAP Hana prerequisites. Please check that you are using the latest version of the tool set CSAP Note 194-3937. This is the hardware configuration check tool central. Note. Please check the SAP notes related to OS settings for suzi. Eleven and red hat. Six, five. These are SAP note 182-4819 and SAP Note 201-3638, respectively.

You should be able to run this tool as the root user when using the SAP Hana Hardware Configuration Check tool that is set to evaluate a distributed landscape. The binaries should be available from a shared directory so that every server can execute it. This means that the same version of the tool must be installed on each server in the system. Please check that you have libnum. One v two installed. Please check that you have already exchanged SSH keys between the different hosts so that the workflow can take place without passwords. Check that hostname resolution should work in both directions for fully qualified domain names. Finally, SAPCAR is needed to extract binaries.

4. Verifying AnyDB Disk Performance

On the DBMS side of things, there are certain requirements that need to be in place in order for it to perform optimally. There is tooling that can help you check for storage performance, which we will explore. Now installed. Under Linux. By default, the DD command can be used for simple sequential IO performance measurements.

DD can be used for simplified copying of data at the low level. Device files are often accessed directly. Please be aware that, erroneous usage of DD can quickly lead to data loss. Flexible IO tester is considerably faster because it allows multithreaded reads. The typical use of this tool is to write a job file matching the I O load one wants to simulate.

5. Performing Operational Readiness Checks (Part One)

In this last part of this section, we will go through how we can run our operational checks by looking at backup and restore. VMs hosting SAP applications can be backed up using Azure backup. When backing up SAP workloads by using Azure backup, please keep in mind the limitations resulting from the network consumption of backup operations. Azure backup app agents support Throttling throughput utilized during backups and restores. You also have the option of applying compression. However, such approach increases CPU usage, and the additional CPU consumed by the compression process can adversely impact performance of SAP workloads. For Windows VMs, the backup service coordinates with VSS to take an app consistent snapshot of the VM disks.

To take up consistent snapshots of Linux VMs, please use the Linux Prescript and Postscript framework to write your own custom scripts in order to ensure consistency. Backup is typically performed by DBMS specific methods to facilitate point in time restore. Then you need to look at taking full and differential database backups in addition to transactional log backups. In general, you can replace backup with storage snapshots, but they don’t replace transactional log backups. Although snapshot based point in time restore is available with SQL Server 2016 or newer, transaction log backups remain important to restore the database to a certain point in time or to empty the logs from already committed transactions. Story snapshots can accelerate recovery by quickly providing a roll forward image of the database.

File snapshot backups are extremely useful for SAP administrative tasks such as applying SAP support packs. The backup and restore time are typically measured in seconds. As a best practice, backup your SAP applications before applying support packs and upgrades or before performing other major data operations such as archiving. A common backup scheduling strategy described in the Hana Administration Guide involves the following backups storage snapshot daily complete data backup using file or backend format once a week automatic load backups SAP Hana configuration files are not part of a standard Hana backup. They are not essential to restore a system.

The Hana configuration could be changed manually after the restore. In case one would like to get some custom configuration during the restore process, it is necessary to backup the Hana configurations files separately. SAP Hana offers encryption of data and logs. If SAP Hana data and logs are not encrypted, then the backups are also not encrypted. It is up to the customer to use some form of third party solution to encrypt the SAP Hana backups. On Microsoft Azure. A customer could use the IAS VM encryption feature. For example, one could use dedicated data disks attached to the VM which are used to store SAP SAP Hana backups, then make copies of those disks. The Azure backup service can handle encrypted VM disks. Another option would be to maintain the SAP Hana VM and its disks without encryption and store the SAP Hana backup files in a storage account for which encryption was enabled.

6. Performing Operational Readiness Checks (Part Two)

It is important to estimate the backup size of SAP Hana. This estimate helps to improve performance by defining the max backup file size for several backup files. Due to parallelism during the file copy, one must also decide whether to do a full backup or a Delta backup incremental or Differential. Fortunately, there is a simple SQL statement that estimates the size of the backup files. This is select Star from Backup size estimations. You have several possibilities to backup SQL Server by using the following ways performing conventional SQL Server backups onto directly attached Azure Disks this approach has the advantage that you have the backups available swiftly for system refreshes and build up of new system as copies of existing SAP systems. It is also well known and applied in many cases in on premises scenarios. On the other hand, it still requires implementing a longer term backup solution. You must either use Azure Backup Services or another third party backup recovery tool that includes access and retention management for your backups.

SQL Server backup to URL, starting with SQL Server 2012 Cu Four, the native SQL Server backup can designate an Azure Storage URL as its destination. Automated backup V Two for Azure VMs. This solution uses the SQL Server IAS Agent extension to automatically configure managed backup to Azure storage. This is for all existing and new databases on an Azure VM running SQL Server 2016 or 2017 Standard Enterprise or Developer Editions. SQL Server backup in Azure VMs. This particular solution uses Azure Backup Windows Workload VM extension, which leverages the SQL native APIs to backup your SQL databases into Azure Site Recovery vaults.

File snapshot backups for database files in Azure Blob storage. This particular method only works when your SQL Server data and log files are located on Azure Blob storage using Azure Snapshots. SQL Server file snapshot backups provide nearly instantaneous backups and restores for database files stored using the Azure Blob storage service. This capability enables you to simplify your backup and restore policies, and it supports Point in Time Restore. This feature is available in SQL Server 2016 or later. Let’s now cover some of the limitations of the SQL Server backup. Backup to premium storage is not supported. SQL Server limits the maximum backup size supported using a page blob to 1 can issue backup or restore statements by using TSQL SMO PowerShell command lets. SQL Server Management Studio backup or Restore Wizard? Creating a logical device name is not supported, so adding a URL as a backup device using SP Dump Device or through SQL Server Management Studio is not supported. Appending to existing backup Blobs is also not supported.

Backups to an existing Blob can only be overwritten by using the width format option. However, when using File snapshot backups using the Width file snapshot argument, the Width format argument is not permitted. To avoid leaving orphaned file snapshots that were created with the original file snapshot backup. Backup to multiple Blobs in a single backup operation is only supported using block blobs and using a shared access signature token rather than the storage account key. For the SQL credential, specifying block size is not supported. For page blobs, specifying max transfer size is also not supported for page blobs, specifying backup set options, retain days and expired dates are also not supported. SQL Server has a maximum limit of 259 characters for a backup device name the backup to URL. Consumes 36 characters for the required elements used to specify the URL, leaving you with 223 characters for account container and blob names. Put together the latest version of SAP Software Provisioning Manager available at the time of authoring.

This course does not support creating data files directly on Azure Blobs. However, if the target SAP database is created before running SAP Inst, the installer detects the database and installs it normally effectively. To use this approach, it is necessary to create the target SAP database with data files on blobs before running SAP Ins for a backup restore functionality. The Sapbr tools for Oracle are supported in the same way as they are in on prem scenarios. Oracle Recovery Manager rman is also supported for backups to Disk and restores from disk for Windows VMs. You can also use Azure backup to run an application consistent VM backup. The Oracle DBMS releases that are supported on Azure by SAP can leverage the VSS functionality for backups.

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