Detail

A blueprint for SAP deployment

from HPE and Red Hat

Introduction
Many companies have moved workloads to the public cloud to capitalize on the following advantages:

• A transition from capital to operating expenses

• Enhanced deployment automation

• Simplified life-cycle management

• Scalability

However, this move can also lead to conflicts around key factors such as client-defined security,
data sovereignty, and network latency. Companies are therefore seeking to combine the perceived
benefits of public cloud with the architectural control and data governance inherent in on-premise
approaches. HPE offers a pay-as-you-go consumption model via HPE GreenLake, complementing
this approach with advanced automation features, simplified life-cycle management, and scalabil-
ity. Of the 437,000 customers using SAP®,1 many want to deploy SAP HANA® and SAP S/4HANA in
an environment that delivers a public cloud-like experience with the key capabilities of on-premise
solutions.

HPE and Red Hat each have nearly 2 decades of experience in certifying SAP solutions, including
those for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA. HPE sells, implements, and supports the Red Hat software
stack to run and manage these SAP-certified systems. HPE services teams are trained to deploy and
support a variety of SAP solutions with Red Hat software. Advances in automation, management, and
systems technologies have allowed HPE and Red Hat to provide new options for on-premise deploy-
ment and life-cycle management and to offer further choice in deployment models, including the
ability to automate SAP HANA deployment on- or off-premise.

This paper reviews a joint HPE and Red Hat solution that unites management technologies from HPE
with automation and management from Red Hat and HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure (an
ideal platform for powering the SAP application tier as well as equipping service providers), combin-
ing the experience of public cloud with the advantages of on-premise deployment. By embedding
SAP deployment expertise within the solution (via Ansible® Playbooks for SAP HANA deployment),
businesses can minimize errors and speed deployments. Novel management technologies—such
as Red Hat® Insights, Red Hat Satellite, and HPE InfoSight—allow organizations to build reliable and

facebook.com/redhatinc
@RedHat
linkedin.com/company/red-hat 1 SAP corporate fact sheet, April 2020.

redhat.com
 robust infrastructures for SAP HANA that ensure greater uptime while remaining flexible and scalable.
This approach allows organizations to precisely, reliably, and easily match capacity to demand and
save costs throughout the operational lifetime of SAP solutions. Businesses may wish to use this solu-
tion as a model to benchmark their existing approaches to deployment automation and experience,
maintenance requirements, and management costs.

Motivation
Time to market can be the difference between success and failure in a rapidly changing economy.
Organizations capable of deploying SAP applications and supporting infrastructure quickly will have
a natural advantage over those deploying manually. A well-organized and well-engineered approach
that automates the undifferentiated heavy lifting and incorporates SAP expertise can accelerate
deployment and helps organizations focus on and achieve business objectives sooner.

Operational responsiveness is also important. Capital expenditures, and their typically longer
approval process, can risk a mismatch between design capacity and real demand at the time of execu-
tion. In other words, longer timescales diminish the accuracy of demand predictions—leading to either
excess capacity and capital expense or insufficient capacity and unmet demand. The cloud approach
shortens this timescale, allowing organizations to more closely match their needs and do so with
greater speed and efficiency.

Challenges and design considerations

While the motivations may be clear, the mechanisms for achieving cloud-like ease of use on-premise
are less immediately obvious. How do organizations achieve rapid deployment and operational flex-
ibility when faced with the complexity of managing hardware, virtualization platforms, and application
stacks—all while simultaneously satisfying business, reliability, security, and performance objectives?
Automation is essential, but where and how should it be used? Hardware and software architecture
matters, but what matters most?

A cloud-like, on-premise infrastructure solution for SAP HANA must include:

• Scalable, modular pools of hardware.

• Automated provisioning of hardware and virtual machines.

• Automated deployment and configuration of operating systems and application stacks.

• Closed-loop and online monitoring of infrastructure health.

• Simplified license management.

• Reliability features.

• A centralized and easy-to-use control plane.

• Security-conscious design.

In addition to being SAP-certified, server hardware for cloud-like, on-premise infrastructures must be
modular and support flexible provisioning of storage, compute, and network resources. Flexible allo-
cation options enable fungible treatment of these resources. This flexibility makes it faster and easier
to add or remove resources to accommodate demand changes or hardware failures. The net result is
shorter downtimes and better matching of capacity to demand.

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 HPE and Red Hat considered the solution’s life cycle from deployment up to day 2 management.
Preexisting Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform roles for the SAP domain (e.g., SAP HANA deploy-
ment automation) allow fast development and adjustment of deployment automation; update,
upgrade, and patching automation; and configuration changes. Many of these roles are now packed
into and supported with Red Hat Enterprise Linux® for SAP Solutions. Additional roles are available
via Ansible Galaxy for the SAP domain and also for the broader enterprise. Roles aggregate discrete
tasks required to achieve an objective. This packaging makes for easier consumption or reuse, and it
provides flexibility in playbook creation. For example, the Network Time Protocol role will install the
software package, configure the service, ensure automatic start, and launch the service immediately,
combining 4 tasks into one role. While Red Hat ships system-related roles within Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, many more roles can be found in Ansible Galaxy. Ansible roles and playbooks will then be used
for day one deployment, covering automation from the hardware through the infrastructure software,
such as a SAP HANA database.

Moving to day 2, continuous monitoring and predictive analyses become key to avoiding outages and
downtime. Red Hat Insights and HPE InfoSight utilize the complete knowledgebase of Red Hat and
HPE to predict issues and provide remediation options, often by providing Ansible Playbooks.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides the needed mechanisms to facilitate remediation,
automate updates, and deploy patches and upgrades. The aforementioned roles will be reused to
create the required playbooks. Ansible Automation Platform allows the predictable, reproducible out-
comes of these changes with minimal downtime. In addition, control interfaces present subscription
management, security, and general patch status as well as life-cycle management capabilities align-
ing with SAP life-cycle environments. These combined capabilities allow IT teams to quickly execute
maintenance or upgrades and assist in meeting infrastructure availability, performance, and
security objectives.

Security and compliance cannot be afterthoughts in on-premise, cloud-like infrastructures. Any solu-
tion must be able to meet client-defined security objectives and SAP requirements and must incor-
porate generally accepted industry best practices, such as auditability, role-based access control
(RBAC), and user management. In addition, a robust solution requires mechanisms for security-
related updates to operating systems and application stacks.

A key feature of the cloud experience is the centralized self-service dashboard and control. Capturing
this benefit on-premise requires minimizing the number of control surfaces and ensuring they are
intuitive, easy to use, and capable of automated provisioning and deployment. Centralizing status
and control—especially when augmented with analytics, compliance, and policy features—mediates
common risks such as misconfiguration, hardware failure, and lapses in security updates.

Ultimately, a solution for SAP deployment and infrastructure management must satisfy all of these
goals concurrently. It makes little sense to achieve scalability but sacrifice security, incorporate
system health monitoring without remediation support, or build around automation that requires
more effort than the equivalent manual process. Thus, the cloud-like experience necessarily derives
from well-thought-out automation across the infrastructure and application stack paired with
modular, scalable hardware, closed-loop monitoring, hands-off remediation, and license management
with SAP expertise built in.

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 Blueprint

SAP
SAP HANA Platform, SAP NetWeaver, S/4HANA, BW/4HANA, and more
applications

Ansible Ansible CLI

Playbooks & CI systems
Admins

Role-based Knowledge Scheduled &

Red Hat access control & visibility centralized jobs
Ansible
Users Tower
Simple user interface Ansible Tower API

Red Hat Open source module library

Ansible
Engine Plugins Python codebase

Red Hat Satellite Public cloud

Provisioning, patching, life-cycle management, reporting of OS infrastructure

Red Hat Virtualization Bare metal

HPE OneView (with unified API)

IaaS
HPE PaaS
Composable bladed Composable rack
Composable
infrastructure infrastructure
Infrastructure HPE Synergy HPE ProLiant DL

HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity: as-a-service consumption option

Figure 1. Blueprint technology overview

The blueprint pairs HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure with several HPE and Red Hat tech-
nologies to create an automated, cloud-like infrastructure for SAP deployments. HPE Synergy
Composable Infrastructure—optionally with GreenLake Flex Capacity—provides modular, bladed
capacity for storage, compute, and network resources. Red Hat Virtualization provides the efficient
resource allocation benefits of virtual machines. The blueprint uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP
Solutions as the operating system. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform automates many aspects
of the blueprint, while HPE OneView, Red Hat Insights, and Red Hat Satellite provide provisioning,
predictive maintenance, and subscription management, respectively. The blueprint’s SAP application
stack includes SAP components and SAP-powered business applications, such as SAP HANA and
SAP S/4HANA.

Infrastructure
HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure

HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure supports current and future SAP applications across
diverse infrastructure requirements and service-level objectives. HPE Synergy is designed for infra-
structure automation and incorporates extensible management through a unified application pro-
gramming interface (API), providing support for today’s IT workloads and emerging technologies over

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 the next decade. With composable bladed infrastructure options for any SAP workload, HPE Synergy
improves on traditional infrastructure by embracing software-defined infrastructure concepts,
making the hardware layer an extension of the software layer. 2

The HPE Synergy architecture consists of servers, storage, network fabric, and the Synergy frame
itself. The frame holds the other components and provides embedded management. HPE Synergy
compute nodes with flexible input/output (I/O) options provide compute for demanding work-
loads. For networking, HPE Synergy supports converged networks via its proven Virtual Connect
technology.

HPE Synergy GreenLake

HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA—an optional component of this blueprint—is an on-premise hardware
subscription service with pay-as-you-use pricing. In contrast to traditional on-premise infrastructure,
HPE GreenLake readily scales to meet fluctuating demand, and businesses pay only for the capacity
used, not the capacity deployed. Installed and monitored by HPE Pointnext Services, HPE GreenLake
for SAP HANA can simplify initial deployment even further than the blueprint could otherwise, and
may be an attractive alternative for enterprises or businesses with capital expenditure limitations.

Software
Red Hat Virtualization

While bare metal servers are ideal for high-performance SAP applications such as SAP HANA, other
components in this blueprint are best deployed to virtual machines. The blueprint uses Red Hat
Virtualization as the virtualization provider, offering more effective utilization of hardware resources,
greater flexibility, and a straightforward user interface. Moreover, the incorporated representational
state transfer (REST) API enables programmatic access and facilitates integration with IT automation
and orchestration tools.

HPE Synergy Composer with HPE OneView

Frame
- HPE Synergy 12000 frame
- Auto-integration, scaling at rack/row

Compute
- HPE Synergy 480 compute model (up to 3TB)
Composer - HPE Synergy 660 compute model (up to 6TB)
powered by OneView - Number of processors: 2 and 4

- Software-defined infrastructure
- Self-discover, auto-integrate Fabric
- Scale from racks to rows - HPE Virtual Connect SE 40Gb F8 module
- Traditional L2/L3 CLI switch options available
- Wire-once connectivity integrates with existing network

Storage
- HPE Primera 600 SAN storage
- Shareable across compute modules

Figure 2. HPE Synergy Composer overview

2 Lowe, Scott, and Lawrence Miller. “HPE Synergy for Dummies, 2nd ed.” John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017.

redhat.com Detail A blueprint for SAP deployment from HPE and Red Hat 5
 HPE Synergy Composer provisions HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure hardware. Powered by
HPE OneView, Synergy Composer uses a template-driven approach to deploying and provisioning
compute, storage, and network resources, as shown in Figure 2. This approach minimizes human inter-
action and provides consistent deployment.

HPE InfoSight

HPE InfoSight uses artificial intelligence to synthesize and analyze sensor information from HPE
Composable Infrastructure to proactively monitor for hardware failures. This feature allows HPE to
predict failures and even ship replacement hardware before hardware faults occur, which helps avoid
critical service interruptions and keeps on-premise infrastructure online.

Red Hat Satellite

Red Hat Satellite provisions operating systems to bare metal or virtual machines via preboot exe-
cution environment (PXE) or discovery images. It is also capable of provisioning to public cloud
instances. Once a server is provisioned, Red Hat Satellite takes care of subscription management,
patching, and updating according to the host’s life-cycle stage.

Typical SAP landscapes have 2 or 3 preproduction environments in addition to the production envi-
ronment to test out SAP-related patches, develop proprietary code, repair SAP code, or mirror
upstream release stages. Red Hat Satellite adopts the same stages and promotes Red Hat software
through them to ensure robust life-cycle management and repeatable deployment.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform accelerates deployment of SAP services to provide a cloud-
like experience by reaching out to HPE OneView, Red Hat Virtualization’s REST API, Red Hat Satellite,
and the operating system itself to ensure proper installation and configuration of services and com-
ponents in the blueprint. While highly automated and standardized, this process allows enough flex-
ibility to be shaped by unique design objectives.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a foundation for building and operating automation across
an organization. The platform includes all the tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation,
including Red Hat Ansible Engine, a powerful, agentless automation framework for most IT environ-
ments, and Red Hat Ansible Tower, which helps teams manage complex multitier deployments by
adding control, knowledge, and delegation to Ansible-powered environments.

In addition, Automation Analytics runs analytics across multiple Ansible Tower clusters, analyzing
usage, uptime, and execution patterns across different teams running Ansible. Users can analyze,
aggregate, and report on data around their automation and how that automation is running in their
environment. Automation Analytics provides a visual dashboard, health notifications, and organi-
zational statistics across different teams using Ansible. These capabilities allow teams to analyze,
aggregate, and report on data for Ansible deployments, and to visualize automation status.

Red Hat Insights

Red Hat Insights rounds out the blueprint’s software with predictive analytics and reporting on issues
that affect performance, availability, stability, and security. Red Hat Insights integrates seamlessly
with Red Hat Ansible Tower and Red Hat Satellite to provide visibility and automated remediation of
detected issues.

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 Operations
Installation

Initial setup and preparation of the blueprint is straightforward:

1. Servers are racked and cabled.

2. IP addresses are assigned.

3. HPE Synergy blade systems’ networking and storage are configured.

4. Server profile templates are created.

5. Red Hat Virtualization is installed on 3 or more blade servers.

6. Virtualmachine templates are created in Red Hat Virtualization to enable rapid deployment of new
virtual machines.

7. Supporting services such as Red Hat Virtualization Manager, Red Hat Ansible Tower, and Red Hat
Satellite are installed on virtual machines.

8. Integrations for Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite are enabled in Red Hat Ansible Tower.

9. The remaining bare metal is then provisioned, when needed, using Red Hat Satellite.

Deployment

The process for deploying SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, or other SAP components follows a similar
progression. Depending on whether an organization is deploying to bare metal, virtual machines, or
a cloud instance, 3 the process will vary slightly in its initial steps but will converge for the last 3 steps

Install an SAP HANA system

Instantiate cloud instance

1a Prepare physical host 1b Create VM 1c (optional feature)

Install Red Hat Install Red Hat Install Red Hat Enterprise
2a Enterprise Linux 2b Enterprise Linux 2c Linux (optional feature)

3 Configure Red Hat Enterprise Linux

4 Install SAP applications (HANA, NetWeaver, S/4 HANA, etc.)

5 Configure SAP applications

Ansible-based Synergy-based
Main task
automation automation

Figure 3. SAP stack deployment operations overview

3 The blueprint does not include public cloud services, but management of public cloud instances can be easily integrated
into the environment.

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 (see Figure 3). This differentiation is only visible to the user when selecting a deployment option from
one of these 3 alternatives within the Ansible Tower web interface. The technical differences are
largely hidden from view and the user only sees that this process is automated.

Figure 3 depicts a simplified overview of the process for deploying SAP components. For bare
metal deployment, hosts are prepared using HPE Synergy Composer (1a). Alternatively, a virtual
machine may be created (1b), or a public cloud instance may be instantiated (1c). Afterwards, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux is installed at the request of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform either by Red Hat
Satellite or Red Hat Virtualization template image (2a, 2b, or 2c). The host’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux
operating system is configured in accordance with relevant SAP Notes (3) using Red Hat-provided
playbooks that translate the text descriptions of SAP Notes into usable automation. From there,
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses predefined playbooks for SAP to install (4) and configure
(5) SAP applications.

Infrastructure deployment with HPE OneView templates

In this blueprint, HPE Synergy Composer with HPE OneView handles infrastructure deployment. HPE
OneView supports HPE’s broad portfolio of servers, storage, and networking solutions. Designed with
a modern, standards-based API, HPE OneView helps users deploy faster through integration into
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and integrations with a broad ecosystem of other third-party
management services and tools.

Define reusable HPE composable Use predefined SAP templates

server profile template settings
Template 1 - SAP HANA database
- Compute definitions and BIOS settings
- Firmware and drivers

- Local and external volumes Template 2 - SAP application server (ABAP)

- LAN and SAN networks

Template 3 - SAP application server (JAVA)

OS - Golden OS boot volume

- Role- and scope-based access control

Provision infrastructure automatically

Figure 4. HPE OneView offers infrastructure management automation via templates

HPE OneView takes a template-driven approach to deploying, provisioning, updating, and integrating
compute, storage, and networking infrastructure. This template-based approach simplifies the distri-
bution of configuration changes across the datacenter. When combined with the right management
tools, as in this blueprint, HPE OneView helps businesses better manage their core-to-cloud workloads.

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 Operating system deployment

Red Hat Satellite’s sophisticated provisioning tooling provides different levels of predefinition and
enables users to customize provisioning of each individual host. It includes an integrated PXE envi-
ronment for PXE-based deployment and discovery images when PXE-less deployment is preferred.
Keying host definition in Red Hat Satellite with host media access control (MAC) addresses creates a
reliable and fully automated workflow for creating virtual machines or provisioning bare metal servers.

In addition to Red Hat Satellite, operating systems may be installed quickly using Red Hat
Virtualization template images. These images are defined once and reused when deploying new
virtual machines. As with the Red Hat Satellite process, this enables rapid deployment of consistent
and repeatable operating environments in which to deploy SAP applications and related supporting
services and software.

Application deployment

Predefined Ansible roles and playbooks handle deployment of SAP applications, including SAP HANA
and SAP S/4HANA. IT administrators need only provide a few infrastructure details—such as cre-
dentials and IP addresses—and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform takes care of the rest. With
SAP Notes already factored in, these playbooks and roles consistently deliver fully compliant SAP
deployments.

Maintenance and continuing operations

Beyond initial deployment, this blueprint includes technologies that increase robustness, simplify
maintenance, and streamline operations throughout the deployment life cycle. HPE InfoSight and
Red Hat Insights provide proactive assessment of issues that affect security, performance, avail-
ability, and more using the extensive knowledgebases of HPE and Red Hat. Fueled by artificial intel-
ligence and active monitoring, HPE InfoSight and Red Hat Insights identify and eliminate many
common issues before they become problems. Red Hat Insights also incorporates SAP Notes recom-
mendations and requirements to remediate many issues. These tools complement SAP EarlyWatch
Alert, which provides monitoring of SAP software and components. The net effect of these tools is
a resilient SAP infrastructure monitored at many levels to reduce unnecessary downtime and avoid
issues with availability and performance.

Features and benefits

Scalability through composability and automation

This blueprint achieves cloud-like scalability through the partnership of Composable Infrastructure
with targeted automation. Hardware may be mixed and matched, torn down, and rebuilt repeatedly.
When hosts can be undeployed, reconfigured, regrouped, or redeployed in mere minutes, the entire
infrastructure becomes fluid and malleable. Demand and capacity mismatches become far less likely,
and maintenance of on-premise infrastructure acquires the ease of use of public cloud infrastruc-
ture. However, without both critical elements (composability plus automation), the cloud-like expe-
rience is difficult to achieve. This blueprint eliminates these scenarios by pairing HPE Composable
Infrastructure with the automation capabilities of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, HPE
OneView, and Red Hat Satellite.

redhat.com Detail A blueprint for SAP deployment from HPE and Red Hat 9
 Automation that is better together

Success requires that automation incorporate capabilities for deploying and configuring the entire
stack from initial deployment to eventual decommissioning. In the blueprint, this is made possible by
integrating multiple HPE and Red Hat management technologies with Red Hat Ansible Automation
Platform.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and HPE Oneview

Ansible Playbook
A sequence of provisioning/collection/update tasks
Ansible Playbook (consumer)
Automatically provision entire stack from bare Ansible modules for
metal through application in minutes
HPE Composable Infrastructure

Request Provide

HPE OneView unified API

HPE Synergy Composer Node

OneView API (provider) template
Provision and update bare metal with one
line of code, in the same way as virtual and
cloud resources

Resource
pool

Figure 5. Automation flow with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and HPE Synergy

Tight integration between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and HPE Synergy Composer with
HPE OneView creates a cloud-like deployment and management experience. HPE OneView deliv-
ers a unified API that provides a single interface to discover, catalog, configure, provision, update,
and diagnose Composable Infrastructure in a heterogeneous environment. This fully programmable
interface integrates into Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform through a series of HPE-maintained
Ansible modules. Combined with predefined HPE OneView templates for SAP, this arrangement
enables rapid deployment of entire SAP application stacks on SAP-certified hardware.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite

Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform integrate in 2 primary ways. First, Red Hat
Satellite acts as a dynamic inventory provider, meaning that it enables Red Hat Ansible Tower to dis-
cover hosts provisioned or known to Red Hat Satellite. Second, Red Hat Satellite provides provision-
ing callback functionality that lets Red Hat Satellite provisioning trigger (via callbacks) the execution
of Ansible Playbooks to deploy software to the newly provisioned host.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Insights

Red Hat Insights integrates with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to provide issue visibility and
remediation from directly within the Red Hat Ansible Tower user interface. Administrators may create
“scan project” job templates, run those jobs, and view scan results on a host-by-host basis, either

redhat.com Detail A blueprint for SAP deployment from HPE and Red Hat 10
 from directly within the Red Hat Ansible Tower user interface or through a link to the Red Hat Insights
web portal. It is possible to remediate identified issues for the entire inventory or for individual hosts
through the Red Hat Ansible Tower user interface.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and HPE InfoSight

HPE InfoSight may be integrated with Red Hat Ansible Automation using HPE InfoSight’s RESTful
API. This integration allows businesses to craft fault-tolerant architectures that automatically migrate,
reprovision, or redistribute workloads to healthy hardware. This type of self-healing architecture
strengthens infrastructure against occasional failures, reducing expensive downtime.

Simplified management interfaces

While this blueprint includes several self-sufficient front ends, such as HPE OneView, Red Hat
Insights, HPE InfoSight, Red Hat Satellite, and Red Hat Ansible Tower, the elegance of the solution is
that these functionalities are all integrated and may be accessed through Red Hat Satellite or
Red Hat Ansible Tower. This capability reduces the number of control surfaces to a couple of easy-to-
use interfaces for all deployment and ongoing maintenance operation, bringing one of the core ben-
efits of public cloud to on-premise infrastructure.

Better economics

When including optional HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA, this blueprint may offer better economics
than public cloud deployment. Combined with the HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA hardware subscrip-
tion service, this blueprint allows companies to deploy on-premise infrastructure on demand through
a pay-per-use model.

Certified and trustworthy SAP expert support

This blueprint comes with SAP expert support that businesses can trust, benefiting from 20- and
30-year SAP partnerships and co-innovation to ensure a smooth experience during initial deployment
and throughout the infrastructure’s lifetime. HPE and SAP have shared a collaborative partnership for
30 years, and 46% of all SAP licenses run on HPE hardware.4 This blueprint is fully tested, fully SAP-
certified, easy to start, easy to maintain, and backed by proven technologies from market leaders:
Red Hat, which accounts for 78% of Linux operating systems and subsystems functional market
revenue, and HPE. 5

Extending this blueprint

High availability, disaster recovery, and zero downtime

Organizations can easily extend this architecture to provide high availability and disaster recov-
ery features. The high availability functionality of Red Hat Virtualization will cover many use cases
easily. SAP system replication, in combination with Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability or HPE
Serviceguard, provides robust high availability service. The setup can also be integrated into the
automated deployment process, providing yet another level of uptime without manual hassle.

4 HPE website, “HPE|SAP alliance page.” Accessed May 2020.

5 IDC, “The business value of Red Hat solutions and cost relationship to unpaid alternatives.” Sponsored by Red Hat.
Document #US45045719. July 2019.

redhat.com Detail A blueprint for SAP deployment from HPE and Red Hat 11
 The HPE Primera storage incorporated in this blueprint allows users to build out storage reliably and
with strong uptime guarantees. Redundant power, flash storage, and fabric eliminate all single points
of failure. In addition, online maintenance procedures remove downtime and disruption. Disaster
recovery is simplified with multisite replication, and risk of data loss is reduced to almost zero.

HPE Pointnext Services has extensive experience in deploying highly available SAP infrastructures
and can quickly guide businesses to the right solution for their high availability and disaster
recovery concerns.

Scaling up, not out, with HPE Superdome Flex

For many applications, scaling usually means scaling out by adding more servers. For high-perfor-
mance SAP software such as SAP S/4HANA, scaling up individual servers is preferable. Rather than
add more complete compute units, users would add more central processing unit (CPU) sockets
and memory. With traditional infrastructure options, this means buying a new server with more CPU
sockets or memory slots and the CPUs and memory modules to accompany them.

HPE Superdome Flex presents another alternative designed for business-critical environments. HPE
Superdome Flex is a uniquely modular x86 platform that delivers an unmatched combination of per-
formance, flexibility, and availability. The server supports 4 to 32 sockets in 4-socket increments and
768GB to 48TB of memory. The platform acts as a single logical node and provides an incremental
pathway to scaling up rather than scaling out. When incorporated into the blueprint, this intrinsic
scalability accommodates every deployment size from small proofs of concept up to enterprise-
level behemoths.

Automate everything: Extending Ansible to the rest of the enterprise

While the primary role of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in this blueprint is to deploy infra-
structure and SAP applications, it may also be used to deploy custom applications or automate other
IT operations. With rich out-of-the-box capabilities provided by core modules and community con-
tributions, Ansible Automation Platform easily automates most IT tasks. Bringing the full stack under
the management of a single tool further minimizes the number of control surfaces IT teams need to
manage while helping to streamline IT operations.

Conclusion
This automated, on-premise SAP deployment blueprint from Red Hat and HPE enables rapid, effi-
cient deployment of a fully certified SAP infrastructure. With a software-defined infrastructure,
organizations can quickly scale and adapt to changing conditions. The collective SAP expertise and
collaborative investments that HPE and Red Hat have built into this blueprint simplify operations
across the life cycle of the deployment and bring the cloud experience to on-premise datacenters.
Completing the solution with HPE GreenLake for SAP HANA, businesses can better match capacity
with demand and achieve cloud-like cost scaling on site.

This blueprint serves as a flexible foundation, easily adapting to suit business needs of any scale.
Using HPE Composable Infrastructure, it readily accommodates a range of needs, from smaller busi-
nesses that require just a few HPE ProLiant servers all the way up to large enterprises with perfor-
mance-critical workloads running on HPE Superdome Flex. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
scales equally well, ensuring fast and flexible deployment on single servers and
large clusters.

redhat.com Detail A blueprint for SAP deployment from HPE and Red Hat 12
 Detail

Ultimately, the blueprint gives businesses more choice in how they meet their SAP objectives,
supporting the deployment of SAP technologies and other applications to bare metal, virtual
machines, or even public cloud depending on application and business requirements. Through
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the blueprint offers integration with a wide array of exist-
ing public cloud resources or private infrastructure. With this blueprint based on SAP-certified
offerings from Red Hat and HPE, customers can grow efficiently and innovate quickly.

Get started

To see how this blueprint could help your business, contact [email protected]. To learn more about
the alliance between HPE and Red Hat, visit redhat.com/hpe.

Additional resources on the technologies used in this blueprint:

• H PE Composable Infrastructure

• Red Hat Satellite

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions

• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

• H PE OneView Ansible modules repository

• H PE OneView Ansible modules documentation

• SAP Ansible roles

• Red Hat Insights

• H PE OneView

• H PE InfoSight

About Red Hat

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