Certification
Besides the NetWeaver certification, SAP requires a special certification for SAP HANA to support SAP HANA on certain infrastructures, such as Azure IaaS and BareMetal Infrastructure.
The core SAP Note on NetWeaver, and to a degree SAP HANA certification, is SAP Note #1928533 – SAP applications on Azure: Supported products and Azure VM types.
The certification records for SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances can be found in the SAP HANA certified IaaS Platforms site.
The SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances) types, referred to in SAP HANA certified IaaS Platforms site, provides Microsoft and SAP customers the ability to deploy:
- Large SAP Business Suite
- SAP BW
- S/4 HANA
- BW/4HANA
- Other SAP HANA workloads in Azure.
The solution is based on the SAP-HANA certified dedicated hardware stamp (SAP HANA tailored data center integration – TDI). If you run an SAP HANA TDI-configured solution, all the above SAP HANA-based applications work on the hardware infrastructure.
Compared to running SAP HANA in VMs, this solution offers the benefit of much larger memory volumes.
Key concepts
To enable this solution, you need to understand the following key aspects:
- The SAP application layer and non-SAP applications run in VMs that are hosted in the usual Azure hardware stamps.
- Customer on-premises infrastructure, data centers, and application deployments are connected to the cloud platform through ExpressRoute (recommended) or a virtual private network (VPN). Active Directory and DNS also are extended into Azure.
- The SAP HANA database instance for HANA workload runs on SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances). The Large Instance stamp is connected into Azure networking, so software running in VMs can interact with the HANA instance running in HANA Large Instance.
- Hardware of SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances) is dedicated hardware provided in an IaaS with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux preinstalled. As with virtual machines, further updates and maintenance to the operating system is your responsibility.
- Installation of HANA or any other components necessary to run SAP HANA on units of HANA Large Instance is your responsibility. All respective ongoing operations and administration of SAP HANA on Azure are also your responsibility.
- You can also install other components in your Azure subscription that connect to SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances). For example, components that enable communication with the SAP HANA database, such as:
- Jump servers
- RDP servers
- SAP HANA Studio
- SAP Data Services for SAP BI scenarios
- Network monitoring solutions.
- As in Azure, HANA Large Instance offers support for high availability and disaster recovery functionality.
Next steps
Learn about available SKUs for HANA Large Instances.