Using SAP with HP Virtualization and Partitioning

Introduction
Today’s choices in computer systems and hardware consolidation technologies provide a multitude of
options when deploying robust business critical software solutions.
Given all these choices for deploying various SAP systems, it is not necessarily trivial to match the
right partitioning or virtualization technology to a given SAP system. In the following sections,
recommendations and heuristics are provided to aid in choosing the right technology for SAP system
deployments.
Overview of Virtualization and Partitioning Technologies
Physical Servers
The traditional model for deploying software applications has been to use one or more stand-alone
computer systems, each of which runs a single operating system. As the power and capacity of
individual hardware components – processing cores, network interfaces, and mass storage
peripherals – has increased, the actual utilization of these hardware components has, in many cases,
decreased. An immediate result of this combination is the desire to consolidate more than one
software application or workload on the physical server. This practice is generally referred to as
hardware consolidation. To address this desire for efficiency, HP provides a broad spectrum of
hardware partitioning and sharing technologies.
Grouping hardware components of a physical computing configuration into subsystems or partitions is
one approach to hardware consolidation. Because these partitions contain entire hardware
components, they provide dedicated access to those components.
Providing a means of sharing hardware components within a physical server or partition can be
performed in many different ways.
As part of its Virtual Server Environment (VSE) suite of products, HP provides a broad spectrum of
solutions for hardware partitioning and sharing in its partitioning continuum as illustrated in Figure 1.