IBM® invented the virtualization technology starting in the 1960s on the mainframe, and the functionalities evolved and were ported to other platforms and improved the reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features. With virtualization, you achieve better asset utilization, reduced operating costs, and faster responsiveness to changing business demands. Every technology vendor in the SAP ecosystem understands virtualization as slightly different capabilities on different levels (storage and server hardware, processor, memory, I/O resources or the application, and so on). It is important to understand exactly what functionality is offered and how it supports the client's business requirements. In this IBM Redbooks® publication we focus on server virtualization technologies in the IBM Power SystemsTM hardware, AIX®, IBM i, and Linux space and what they mean specifically for SAP applications running on this platform. SAP clients can leverage the technology that the IBM Power Systems platform offers. In this book, we describe the technologies and functions, what they mean, and how they apply to the SAP system landscape.

Businesses are using IBM® Power Systems servers and Linux to consolidate multiple SAP workloads onto fewer systems, increasing infrastructure utilization; reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS); and scalability, and reducing cost. This IBM Redpaper publication describes key hardware and software components of an SAP solution stack. Furthermore, this book addresses non-functional items like RAS, security, and issue handling. Practical help for planning, implementation, configuration, installation, and monitoring of a solution stack are provided. This publication addresses topics for sellers, IT architects, IT specialists, and anyone who wants to implement and manage SAP workloads on IBM Power Systems servers. Moreover, this guide provides documentation to transfer how-to skills to the technical teams, and it provides solution guidance to the sales team. This publication complements documentation that is available at IBM Knowledge Center, and it aligns with educational materials that are provided by IBM Systems.

For organizations charting their way forward in today's digital economy, the clear imperative is to find better ways of extracting more value from data. By gleaning insight from data regarding customer preferences and business operations, organizations can respond to demand more effectively and better deliver the experiences that today's customers want. To this end, many organizations running SAP solutions seek to make the move to the SAP HANA database. SAP HANA offers the speed of in-memory data processing and the ability to combine transactions and analytics on a single platform for insight in real time. However, considerations at the level of IT infrastructure can make or break the success of an SAP HANA implementation. What the database runs on, in other words, matters significantly. This IBM® Redguide publication explores the value of deploying SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications and the IBM Power platform with IBM POWER9TM processors. Both offerings are optimized to help your organization reap the rewards of SAP HANA while also transforming IT service delivery more generally. Designed for enterprise-grade operations, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications offers an open-source software-defined infrastructure (SDI) that is optimized for SAP workloads. Reliable, fast, and secure, it also supports the automation that is needed to substantially free up IT staff from service deployment and management duties. Power Systems servers support SAP HANA implementations according to the SAP Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI) 5.0 specification. Optimized for scale-up and scale-out scenarios and built to support virtual persistent memory, Power Systems serves help you provision faster, scale affordably, and maximize uptime by persisting memory across virtual machines (VMs) and multiple SAP HANA instances. Both SUSE and IBM have partnered with SAP for decades to fine-tune these offerings. Together, SUSE and IBM solutions offer a way forward for deploying, optimizing, and running SAP HANA implementations that is proven to be successful. This publication looks at various aspects of this combined offering in greater detail.

Businesses are using IBM® Power Systems servers and Linux to consolidate multiple SAP workloads onto fewer systems, increasing infrastructure utilization; reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS); and scalability, and reducing cost. This IBM Redpaper Redbooks publication describes key hardware and software components of an SAP solution stack. Furthermore, this book addresses non-functional items like RAS, security, and issue handling. Practical help for planning, implementation, configuration, installation, and monitoring of a solution stack are provided. This publication addresses topics for sellers, IT architects, IT specialists, and anyone who wants to implement and manage SAP workloads on IBM Power Systems servers. Moreover, this guide provides documentation to transfer how-to skills to the technical teams, and it provides solution guidance to the sales team. This publication complements documentation that is available at IBM Knowledge Center, and it aligns with educational materials that are provided by IBM Systems.

This IBM® Redpaper publication describes practical experiences to run SAP workloads to take advantage of IBM Power Systems I/O capabilities. With IBM POWER® processor-based servers, you have the flexibility to fit seamlessly new applications and workloads into a single data center, and even consolidate them into a single server. This approach highlights all viable options and describes the pros and cons of each one to select the correct option for a specific data center. The target audiences of this book are architects, IT specialists, and systems administrators deploying SAP workloads, who spend much time and effort managing, provisioning, and monitoring SAP software systems and landscapes on IBM Power Systems servers.

This IBM Redpaper highlights the RAS and security features on the hardware, hypervisor, Linux, and SAP application levels. It highlights what is transparent, what needs enablement, and also the known prerequisites for the use of these features.

This IBM® Redpaper publication delivers SAP HANA architectural concepts for successful implementation on IBM Power Systems servers. This publication addresses topics for sellers, IT architects, IT specialists, and anyone who wants to understand how to take advantage of running SAP HANA workloads on Power Systems servers. Moreover, this guide provides documentation to transfer how-to skills to the technical teams, and it provides solution guidance to the sales team. This publication complements documentation that is available at IBM Knowledge Center, and it aligns with educational materials that are provided by IBM Systems.