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Support matrix for backup of SAP HANA databases on Azure VMs

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Azure Backup supports the backup of SAP HANA databases to Azure. This article summarizes the scenarios supported and limitations present when you use Azure Backup to back up SAP HANA databases on Azure VMs.

Note

The frequency of log backup can now be set to a minimum of 15 minutes. Log backups only begin to flow after a successful full backup for the database has completed.

Scenario support

Scenario Supported configurations Unsupported configurations
Topology SAP HANA running in Azure Linux VMs only HANA Large Instances (HLI)
Regions Americas – Central US, East US 2, East US, North Central US, South Central US, West US 2, West US 3, West Central US, West US, Canada Central, Canada East, Brazil South
Asia Pacific – Australia Central, Australia Central 2, Australia East, Australia Southeast, Japan East, Japan West, Korea Central, Korea South, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central India, South India, West India, China East, China East 2, China East 3, China North, China North 2, China North 3
Europe – West Europe, North Europe, France Central, UK South, UK West, Germany North, Germany West Central, Switzerland North, Switzerland West, Central Switzerland North, Norway East, Norway West, Sweden Central, Sweden South
Africa / ME - South Africa North, South Africa West, UAE North, UAE Central
Azure Government regions		 France South, Germany Central, Germany Northeast, US Gov IOWA
OS versions SLES 12 with SP2, SP3, SP4 and SP5; SLES 15 with SP0, SP1, SP2, SP3, SP4, SP5, and SP6

RHEL 7.4, 7.6, 7.7, 7.9, 8.1, 8.2, 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 9.0, 9.2, and 9.4.
HANA versions SDC on HANA 1.x, MDC on HANA 2.x SPS 04, SPS 05 Rev <= 59, SPS 06 (validated for encryption enabled scenarios as well), and SPS 07.
Encryption SSLEnforce, HANA data encryption
HANA Instances A single SAP HANA instance on a single Azure VM – scale up only Multiple SAP HANA instances on a single VM. You can protect only one of these multiple instances at a time.
HANA database types Single Database Container (SDC) ON 1.x, Multi-Database Container (MDC) on 2.x MDC in HANA 1.x
HANA database size HANA database of size upto 40 TB (this isn't the memory size of the HANA system).
Backup types Full, Differential, Incremental and Log backups, Snapshots
Restore types Refer to the SAP HANA Note 1642148 to learn about the supported restore types
Cross Subscription Restore Supported via the Azure portal and Azure CLI. Learn more.
Number of full backups per day One scheduled backup.

Three on-demand backups.

We recommend not to trigger more than three backups per day. However, to allow user retries in case of failed attempts, hard limit for on-demand backups is set to nine attempts.
HANA deployments HANA System Replication (HSR)
Special configurations SAP HANA + Dynamic Tiering
Cloning through LaMa
Compression You can enable HANA Native compression via the Backup policy. See the SAP HANA document.
Multi-streaming backup You can increase your streaming backup throughput from 420 MBps to 1.5 GBps. Learn more.
File System types File Systems ext3 and xfs are supported for SAP HANA database instance snapshots backup. Other File Systems aren't supported.

Note

  • Azure Backup doesn’t automatically adjust for daylight saving time changes when backing up a SAP HANA database running in an Azure VM. We recommend you to modify the policy manually as needed.
  • You can now monitor the backup and restore jobs (to the same machine) triggered from HANA native clients (SAP HANA Studio/ Cockpit/ DBA Cockpit) in the Azure portal.

Support for multistreaming data backups

  • Parameters to enable SAP HANA settings for multistreaming:

    • parallel_data_backup_backint_channels
    • data_backup_buffer_size (optional)

    Note

    By setting the above HANA parameters will lead to increased memory and CPU utilization. We recommend that you monitor the memory consumption and CPU utilization as overutilization might negatively impact the backup and other HANA operations.

  • Backup performance for databases: The performance gain will be more prominent for larger databases.

  • Database size applicable for multistreaming: The number of multistreaming channels applies to all data backups larger than 128 GB. Data backups smaller than 128 GB always use only one channel.

  • Supported backup throughput: Multistreaming currently supports the data backup throughput of up to 1.5 GBps. Recovery throughput is slower than the backup throughput.

  • VM configuration applicable for multistreaming: To utilize the benefits of multistreaming, the VM needs to have a minimum configuration of 16 vCPUs and 128 GB of RAM.

  • Limiting factors: Throughput of total disk LVM striping and VM network, whichever hits first.

Learn more about SAP HANA Azure Virtual Machine storage and SAP HANA Azure virtual machine Premium SSD storage configurations configurations. To configure multistreaming data backups, see the SAP documentation.

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