In the most general form, an SAP system landscape consists of SAP instances (installations of the SAP database and application software) and SAP servers. Various design and planning approaches tend to come into play in one manner or another across all SAP implementations. The desire to simplify and standardize emerges as important drive. Consolidation of instances is also becoming quite common in SAP customer environments today.
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What is your current SAP Landscape and systems in scope for the move to Azure?
Please provide a landscape diagram, Operating system details and database details of the SAP environment.
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What are the driving factors for moving to Azure?
Determine the customer experience in current environment and expectations in Azure.
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What is your future environment roadmap and plans for move to S/4 Hana?
Projects which are planned in future along with moving to Azure. We can look at overall transformation strategy for SAP Landscape.
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Where are you hosting your systems? In which region you are planning to host in Azure?
Sizing means determining the infrastructure requirements of an SAP application, such as the network bandwidth, memory, CPU processing power, and I/O capacity. The size of the servers and database is influenced by both business aspects and technological aspects. This means that the number of users using the various application components and the data load they put on the server must be taken into account.
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Can you provide the current sizing and exiting hardware specifications?
SAPS value for the current hardware and SAP quicksizer report will be helpful to determine the target system configuration.
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Can you provide the SAP Early Watch Reports and any other performance data (Compute, Storage, Network & Application) ?
SAP Early Watch Report provides system usage and performnace statistics to estimate the SAP system design on Azure.
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What is the current database size of each of the systems and average monthly growth?
Database size will be helpful in determining infrastructure requirement like Storage and VMs for the target design.
SAP systems runs mission critical business application and any outage causes disruption in business flow and processes which in turn is loss in business value and its capabilities. Successful HA prevents downtime and data loss to eliminate single point of failure. Disaster Recovery is not just IT requirement, but it is also Business requirement. Production environment must be available in case of any disaster with minimum data loss and completely recoverable at different location. Failover should be completed as soon as possible with minimum impact to end users and sub systems.
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What are the availability SLAs. Can you explain the current High Availability design?
Refer to the High Availability & disaster recovery concepts for SAP on Azure.
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Can you explain the present disaster recovery setup. What will be recovery time objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)?
Azure Site recovery will be recommended approach to setup DR for SAP application layer. For the Database layer, DB specific setup will be required (like HSR for SAP HANA DB and SQL AlwaysOn for SQL server DB)
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Can you explain the process for the Failover in case of a Disaster and what is the frequency of disaster recovery testing?
Process to test the disaster recovery, test plans and team involved to perform the activities.
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What are the performance related SLAs?
SAP application servers carry on constant communications with the database servers. For performance-critical applications running on any database platforms, including SAP HANA, consider enabling Write Accelerator to improve log write latency. To optimize inter-server communications, use Accelerated Networking. Note that these accelerators are available only for certain VM series.
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Are there Scalability requirements?
SAP application servers and the Central Services clusters can scale up/down or scale out by adding more instances. The database VMs can scale up/down with limitations on maximum size(4TB) of the VM. If your workload exceeds the maximum VM size, Microsoft also offers Azure Large Instances for SAP HANA.
As part of data management and availability, we need to regularly back up our operating system and database to restore the SAP system, if required. To use an appropriate back up and restore method is one of the most important tasks of the system and database administrator. Data archiving is used by companies with two main goals in mind: reducing data volumes in the system and complying with legal data retention requirements. Both goals are obtained using the same processes, which together make up this variant: Monitoring, Analyzing and Categorizing, Archiving and Post Processing.
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What is the Current Backup Strategy?
Determine the type and frequency of backup in current SAP environment. It is strongly recommended to schedule regular data backups from the data area of your SAP HANA database to a secure location. SAP system on Azure Backup guide provides detailed information.
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What is the Data Archiving Strategy?
Determine if data archiving is done on a regular basis and how archived data is selected and stored. What is the tool used for data archiving.
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Are you planning to change the operating system and database of the systems during migration to Azure?
Homogeneous migration can be performed if database and operating systems remains same in new platform, alternatively heterogenous migration needs to be performed if there are changes in the operating systems OR database.
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Have you started planning for system migration and is the partner for the project delivery identified?
Organizations need a consistent and reliable methodology that enables them to plan, design, migrate and validate the migration. Solid migration planning can help identify potential problems and how to avoid them or, if problems are unavoidable, help IT define mitigation strategies. While the amount of planning depends on the size and scope of the migration, the planning process generally should involve determining the requirements of the migration, identifying the current and future environment, and creating and documenting the migration plan. The importance of clear and complete documentation coupled with ongoing communications to the technical team as well as the business team can not be over emphasized.
Effective Security design is achieved by the convergence of SAP security organizational structure & governance, Security processes, Ongoing management and monitoring of the Security Environment.
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What is the current Governance model? How do you control access to the different infrastructure resources? What is the process for segregation of duties?
Azure policy and RBAC provides granular level access control for resources.
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What are the proactive steps taken in ensuring the security of the environment?
For infrastructure security, data is encrypted in transit and at rest. The "Security considerations” section of the SAP NetWeaver on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) – Planning and Implementation Guide begins to address network security. The guide also specifies the network ports you must open on the firewalls to allow application communication.
Monitoring SAP is a daily routine activity in which your IT SAP team is checking all processes, databases, servers, instance performance, system-wide performance, logs, users, batch jobs, dumps and many other elements, to see what is running, waiting, stopped working or just behaving weird. The smallest of things, say a long-running system backup, can cause performance issues, leading to delayed run times and eventually a system overload or failure. Early detection of a failure can prevent major incidents in the systems.
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How do you monitor different layers of the systems? System monitoring processes at application, database and infrastructure layers.
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How do you determine if there is an outage and the alerts that have been setup?
Azure provides several functions for monitoring and diagnostics of the overall infrastructure. Also, enhanced monitoring of Azure virtual machines (Linux or Windows) is handled by Azure Operations Management Suite (OMS).
To provide SAP-based monitoring of resources and service performance of the SAP infrastructure, the Azure SAP Enhanced Monitoring extension is used. This extension feeds Azure monitoring statistics into the SAP application for operating system monitoring and DBA Cockpit functions. SAP enhanced monitoring is a mandatory prerequisite to run SAP on Azure.
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What processes are automated for the overall management and operations?