Arne Wolf & Dario Faggioli: SAP HANA on KVM @ SUSE
Running SAP HANA inside a KVM virtual machine and meeting SAP's performance requirements is a rather challenging piece of research and work. Yet for a few years, thanks to a joint effort between SAP and our own Virtualization experts (and, recently, even with the help of external partners, such as Fujistu and Intel) we've managed to put together a detailed best practice guide that explains how to meet all the expectations, for the different versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. In this session, we will give an overview of what are the various scenarios that we have addressed so far and are currently targeting (single or multiple VMs, storage solution, OS versions, hardware generations, etc) and of what's required for making SLES a validated KVM hypervisor platform for SAP HANA. We will also explain the technical details of how both the host and the guest need to be configured and tuned. And last but not least, we will discuss which ones have been (and are being!) the toughest challenges and indulge on some pain points we have faced (and are facing!).