2055470 - HANA on POWER Planning and Installation Specifics - Central Note

Symptom

You plan or want to install SAP HANA on IBM Power Servers.

Other Terms

HANA on POWER, plan, install, central note, IBM, Linux, Hana-on-Power

Reason and Prerequisites

Plan and implement SAP HANA on IBM Power Servers.
Release specifics, minimum server requirements, documentation updates

Solution

Table of Contents:

• Requirements for SAP HANA on IBM Power Server
• IBM Power Server
• Infrastructure
• Linux Operating System
• Filesystems
• Tuning and Settings
• Non-Production relaxations of the requirements for SAP HANA on IBM Power Server

Requirements for SAP HANA on IBM Power Server
SAP HANA on POWER follows the Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI Phase 4)  approach.
1) The server selection is done based on a SAP sizing and an IBM hardware mapping. Currently the report attached to SAP note 1736976 does not deliver up to date information regarding SAP HANA on IBM Power in section 'MINIMUM SIZING RECOMMENDATION - CURRENT'. In particular the value of 'Phys. memory per node' might not be correct. Please ignore this value and the recommended value of  'Number of Nodes' until further notice. You must utilize nodes, such that

• Each node has a maximum RAM size below or equal to the maximum RAM allowed per LPAR. Please refer to SAP note 2188482 for details.
• The sum of total RAM of the nodes participating is equal or bigger than the value of  'Memory Requirement (Minimum Total)' from the sizing report. 

2) Verify the stack using the SAP Hardware Configuration Check Tool (HWCCT, SAP Note 1943937).
Detailed IBM Documentation can be found on IBM Techdocs in the "SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems and IBM System Storage - Guides" (http://www.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP102502).
IBM Power Server

• For production POWER8^TM Servers listed in SAP Note 2188482 must be used.
• HANA production partitions must be configured to run in dedicated or dedicated donating mode (workload remains with same CPUs).
• The partitions can be set up either in full partition mode or using the POWER LPAR technology provided by the PowerVM Hypervisor (SAP Note 2230704).
• DIMMs must be populated equally among nodes (uniform topology).

Infrastructure and Virtualization requirements for production 

• SAP generally recommends 10Gb connectivity between all components involved. 10Gbps connectivity is a requirement only for HANA scale-out systems. For more details please check the HANA Master Guide or the SCN article at http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-63221.
• External and internal disks can be used as long as they fulfill the requirements set by the HWCCT tool. See SAP Note 1943937 for details.
• Please see SAP Note 2230704 for details on the requirements with regards to LPAR configuration

Linux Operating System
SAP HANA on Power is supported on SLES 11 SP4. For details on how to configure SLES to run SAP HANA, please see SAP Note 2235581.
In addition, please install the service and productivity tools for Power available at https://www-304.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/lopdiags/suselinux/hmcmanaged/sles11.html (powerpc_utils)
Filesystem
For production xfs with multipathing has to be used.
Tuning and Settings:
Apply SAP Note 2240716 with the following power specific considerations:

• For SUSE SLES 11 ignore transparent huge pages and c-state information. These two have different technologies on IBM Power Servers.

SAP Note 1944799 mostly applies for HANA on Power deployments. This note reflects the experience gathered over years for the Intel Appliances. Please be aware of following:

• Upgrade of a SUSE SLES Service Pack:
  The allowed SUSE Service Packs for a specific SAP HANA SPS are initially documented in this note; the documentation will move into the SAP PAM. The SAP PAM supersedes this note.
• Install updates in the same SUSE SLES SP level:
  There are different SAP Notes listing additional packages to be installed on top. Always pick the highest documented version as a minimum level (higher versions are fine unless explicitly excluded).
• Please reflect the limitations in the context of SAP HANA Operations, OS and Power capabilities.
• If any doubts occur or incompatible statements are found, please open an SAP Incident.

Non-Production relaxations of the requirements for SAP HANA on IBM Power Servers:

• Allowed are all POWER8^TM and POWER7+^TM servers.
• There are no restrictions with regards to the maximum memory per HANA LPAR core.
• Storage size for SAP HANA data may be limited to 1 times the size of the memory available per HANA LPAR (see the Storage Whitepaper attached to Note 1900823 for recommendations for production systems). As a consequence the overall storage size for HANA data and log may be limited to 2 times the size of the memory available per HANA LPAR.
• The minimum core count per HANA LPAR is 2.
• HANA LPARS can be run in a shared processor pool running with a performance penalty (workload moves between CPUs)
• Standard Network Components are admitted.
• SAP HANA LPARS for test, development and quality assurance systems may run in parallel to other LPARs (for SAP HANA or other purposes) on a single physical Power Server as long as none of the participating LPARs runs a production SAP HANA system.
• Besides xfs also NFS, GPFS and ext3 filesystems are supported.

Other Attributes

Operating system	LINUX

Header Data

Released On	26.01.2016 22:09:37
Release Status	Released for Customer
Component	HAN-LM-INS SAP HANA Installation
Priority	Correction with high priority
Category	Consulting