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Installation of SAP HANA on Azure virtual machines

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Introduction

This document helps in pointing you to the right resources for deploying HANA on Azure virtual machines, including documents that you need to check before installing SAP HANA on Azure VMs. The aim is to ensure you are able to perform the right steps to achieve a supported configuration of SAP HANA on Azure.

Note

This guide describes deployments of SAP HANA into Azure VMs. For information on how to deploy SAP HANA on HANA large instances, see How to install and configure SAP HANA (Large Instances) on Azure.

Prerequisites

This guide also assumes that you're familiar with:

Step-by-step before deploying

In this section, the different steps are listed that you need to perform before starting with the installation of SAP HANA in an Azure virtual machine. The order is enumerated and as such should be followed in the order listed:

  1. Although technically possible, some deployment scenarios will not be supported on Azure. Therefore, you should check the document SAP workload on Azure virtual machine supported scenarios for the scenario you have in mind with your SAP HANA deployment. If the scenario is not listed, you need to assume that it has not been tested and, as a result, is not supported.
  2. Assuming that you have a rough idea of the memory requirement for your SAP HANA deployment, you need to find a suitable Azure VM. Not all the VMs that are certified for SAP NetWeaver, as documented in SAP support note #1928533, are SAP HANA certified. The source of truth for SAP HANA certified Azure VMs is the website SAP HANA hardware directory. The units starting with S are HANA Large Instances units and not Azure VMs.
  3. Different Azure VM types have different minimum operating system releases for SUSE Linux or Red Hat Linux. On the website SAP HANA hardware directory, you need to click on an entry in the list of SAP HANA certified units to get detailed data of this unit. Besides the supported HANA workload, the OS releases that are supported with those units for SAP HANA are listed.
  4. As of operating system releases, you need to consider certain minimum kernel releases. These minimum releases are documented in these SAP support notes:
  5. Based on the OS release that is supported for the virtual machine type of choice, you need to check whether your desired SAP HANA release is supported with that operating system release. Read SAP support note #2235581 for a support matrix of SAP HANA releases with the different Operating System releases.
  6. When you have found a valid combination of Azure VM type, operating system release and SAP HANA release, you will need to check the SAP Product Availability Matrix. In the SAP Availability Matrix, you can verify whether the SAP product you want to run against your SAP HANA database is supported.

Step-by-step VM deployment and guest OS considerations

In this phase, you need to go through the steps deploying the VM(s) to install HANA and eventually optimize the chosen operating system after the installation.

  1. Choose the base image from the Azure gallery. If you want to build your own operating system image for SAP HANA, you need to know all the different packages that are necessary for a successful SAP HANA installation. Otherwise it is recommended using the SUSE and Red Hat images for SAP or SAP HANA out of the gallery. These images include the packages necessary for a successful HANA installation. Based on your support contract with the operating system provider, you need to choose an image where you bring your own license, or choose an OS image that includes support.

  2. If you choose a guest OS image that requires you to bring your own license, you will need to register this OS image with your subscription to enable you to download and apply the latest patches. This step is going to require public internet access, unless you set up your private instance of, for example, an SMT server in Azure.

  3. Decide the network configuration of the VM. You can get more information in the document SAP HANA infrastructure configurations and operations on Azure. Keep in mind that there are no network throughput quotas you can assign to virtual network cards in Azure. As a result, the only purpose of directing traffic through different vNICs is based on security considerations. We trust you to find a supportable compromise between complexity of traffic routing through multiple vNICs and the requirements enforced by security aspects.

  4. Apply the latest patches to the operating system once the VM is deployed and registered. Registered either with your own subscription. Or in case you chose an image that includes operating system support the VM should have access to the patches already.

  5. Apply the tunings necessary for SAP HANA. These tunings are listed in the following SAP support notes:

  6. Select the Azure storage type and storage layout for the SAP HANA installation. You are going to use either attached Azure disks or native Azure NFS shares. The Azure storage types that are supported and the combinations of different Azure storage types that can be used are documented in SAP HANA Azure virtual machine storage configurations. Take the configurations documented as starting point. For non-production systems, you might be able to configure lower throughput or IOPS. For production systems, you might need to increase the throughput and IOPS.

  7. Make sure you have configured Azure Write Accelerator for your volumes that contain the DBMS transaction logs or redo logs when using M-Series or Mv2-Series VMs. Be aware of the limitations for Write Accelerator as documented.

  8. Check whether Azure Accelerated Networking is enabled on the VMs deployed.

Note

Not all the commands in the different sap-tune profiles or as described in the notes might run successfully on Azure. Commands that would manipulate the power mode of VMs usually return with an error since the power mode of the underlying Azure host hardware can not be manipulated.

Step-by-step preparations specific to Azure virtual machines

One of the Azure-specific preparations is the installation of an Azure VM extension that delivers monitoring data for the SAP Host Agent. The details about the installation of this monitoring extension are documented in:

SAP HANA installation

With the Azure virtual machines deployed and the operating systems registered and configured, you can install SAP HANA according to the SAP install instructions. A good starting point is this SAP website: HANA resources

For SAP HANA scale-out configurations using direct attached disks of Azure Premium Storage or Ultra disk, read the specifics in the document SAP HANA infrastructure configurations and operations on Azure

Additional resources for SAP HANA backup

For information on how to back up SAP HANA databases on Azure VMs, see:

Next steps

Read the documentation: