Your experiences concerning Linux + SAP + OB2 +OVO

[Christoph Rothe_3]

Hi,

has anybody a similar configuration running ?

Linux (which do you use)
Oracle (Version ?)
SAP
Backup via Omniback II 4.01
System Mgmt via Openview Operations

What dificulties did you experience ? Does it run well ?

One of our customers would like such a configuration

C U,

Christoph

[Krishna Prasad]

Hello,

We are going to use Suse for SAP Business Connector.

What I have found out so far, is that I like HP-UX LVM a little better at this point. I don't like being limited to have 4 Partitions. However, it is still better the NT.

I have read that in other threads where people have better luck using the 32bit versions of linux. If this is true I would not run SAP or Oracle on linux because of memory management issues. (At least HP-UX has memory management issues when running in 32bit mode) However, I know there are 64bit version of linux available. What kind of hardware are you going to run linux on?

Also, if you go to www.suse.com you will see links that my.sap.com and Suse linux server has been certified. I also read on this site that most of the linux developement for SAP was done using Suse.

I know that there is an Omniback agent for linux. That will be on of my next tasks to work with.

I hope this helps somewhat... I am just getting started with linux myself.

We have been a HP-UX/SAP/Oracle shop for over 5 yrs with some NT mixed in for small applications.

Ron

[Christoph Rothe_3]

Hi Ron,

it seems to be the same with us. We made HP/UX + Oracle + SAP for years but our new customer wants us to use linux.

Personally I have no problem with that as I have been working with Linux for years. I just never used a linux system of THAT size.

We are going to use some Intel Platform Server (they will be bought in some month), eventually HP TC7100... HP says that there will not be any problems with some Gigs of Memory.

What is the problem with LVM exactly ? SuSE Linux provides LVM support (and we will need it, I think) the same way HP-UX does.
With it you do not have to use partitions, do you ?

As we have a little Linux server I can tell you, using Omniback is not that difficult. You must only enable rexec service (this was the most difficult task of the whole installation :-) and create an omniback-user (or use root, of course). Our Omniback II Version is 4.01.
Very interesting thing: HP does officially not support ext3 Filesystems, but they can be backed up without problems in our configuration. I attached a document showing compatibility issues of Hp Omniback II 4.1

Thanks for you answer!

Christoph

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hello Christoph and Ron,

I personally installed a Linux config that is running SAP/Oracle (I'm not SAP specialist). This configuration has been running on a production system since Jan 2, 2002. The customer subscribed a CSS contract (Critical System Support), 7/7 and 24/24.

Netserver LH6000r with 2 Xeon 700 and 2.5 Gigs of RAM.
Linux : RedHat 6.2 upgraded to kernel 2.2.19
Oracle 8.0.6
SAP ???

For the install, I followed SAP Guidelines. SAP recommended 2 distros at that time (18 months ago) : RedHat 6.2 and SuSE 7.0.
Customer required RedHat, so I installed RedHat.

Customer didn't know anything about LVM, so I created native partitions.

-----
At this point, I have some remarks for Ron :

* On an Intel/i386 machine, you can have up to 14 partitions per disk :

-> 4 primary partitions (1..4). One of these can be reserved to create an extended partition table that can help creating logical partitions.
-> 11 logical partitions (5..15)

* The LVM for Linux is implemented exactly the same way as LVM for HP-UX. One says that it was implemented by old HP-UX users, sponsored by SuSE.

One big difference is that with LVM for Linux, the physical volumes are mapped to partitions of a disk, not the entire disk. However, if you want, you can create one big partition per disk and then use it as a single Physical Volume.

Another difference : there is no mirroring software that can be added to LVM (just like Mirror/UX on HP-UX). If you want software mirroring, enable MD driver in kernel and use raidtools to create RAID0, 1, 4 and 5. This driver also support multipath I/O (alternate links on HP-UX).
With a Netserver, you have hardware RAID adapters, so software mirroring is not necessary.
-----

At customer site (NetRaid 4Si) we configured 4 LUNS :
* /dev/sda (18GB, RAID1, 7 partitions) -> Operating system and swap
* /dev/sdb (18GB, RAID1, 6 partitions) -> swap devices, Oracle/SAP binaries
* /dev/sdc (18GB, RAID1, 4 partitions) -> archive and redo logs (spread across 4 partitions)
* /dev/sdd (108GB, RAID5, 6 partitions) -> Database files


Time Navigator (Quadratec) was chosen as backup software, because Linux cannot run Omniback II cell manager.

OmniBack II 4.0 does not support SAP integration, however OmniBack II 4.10 does.

As an OmniBack consultant, I would say : no fear. OmniBack runs perfectly on Linux (of course you must have the latest patches :-)



To summarize : be confident that Linux will do the job. Of course we don't have the same experience as we have on Hp-ux, but don't forget that Hp-ux has been running for 15 years, where Linux has been running on business servers for only 5 years.


Good luck.

Kodjo

[Christoph Rothe_3]

Kodjo,

thanks for your answer. It sounds very encouraging what you are writing.

Only one thing: I think you do not need to use partitions as you also can use /dev/sda for LVM instead of /dev/sda1...x

Christoph

[Krishna Prasad]

Hello everyone,

I have figured out the differences and can make both work. There is just some small differences for LVM/Partiniong that really don't seem to be a big deal once you know what they are.

What aboout the 32bit vs 64bit issue? I know on HP-UX 32bit there is shared memory restrictions becuase HP-UX uses 4 memory quadrants with limits the size of your largest sharred memory segement. This is a big issue with large Oracle/SAP environments. Does linux use quadrants like HP-UX? or is this a HP-UX issue. These is why we use HP-UX 64bit for Oracle/SAP.