MCSG/SAP

[Joe Short]

I am planning a new cluster to protect an SAP environment. Is the SAP toolkit a requirement?
It is quite expensive, and I would like to avoid the cost if at all possible.

[Geoff Wild]

It will save you a lot of scripting.

I use it and it is worth the expense - after all - if you can afford SAP / Oracle then you can afford the tool kit! :)

It will also give you a standard set of functions/scripts that are supported by HP.

Rgds...Geoff

[Joe Short]

List price $50K US!!! That's not so cheap.

[Geoff Wild]

Wow - don't remember paying that much - talk to your HP Account Rep - he should be able to get you better than that.

Rgds...Geoff

[Joe Short]

Is the scripting really that difficult?

[Geoff Wild]

It's not that difficult - just time consuming - a lot of it depends on what you want to do.

It would be quite easy to write a package script that only starts up/shuts down Oracle and SAP....

If you have APP servers, then you will have to add remsh commands to start/stop them as well...

Same thing for NFS...

If you need to monitor processes - then you will have more of a challenge.

Rgds...Geoff

[PeterWolfe]

software.hp.com says Serviceguard Extensions for
SAP is $30K. However, I'm guessing that the Joe
will consider that similarly too expensive.

> Is the scripting really that difficult?

It's not that it's difficult, but you'd need an
intimate knowledge of SAP to pull it off. Not to
mention really good Serviceguard skills. When you
were done you'd have something that no one but you
could possibly support. There are many many
engineering months put into the development and
qualification of Serviceguard Extensions for SAP.
Even if you aren't going to use all the
features (listed here:
http://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=T2803BA)
such as Metrocluster or Continental cluster
support, it's still a large chunk of work.

Take a look at the latest documentation
here:
http://docs.hp.com/en/T2803-90002/index.html
and hopefully that will help you gauge the
magnitude of the task.

[John Bigg]

I'd be very surprised if you could re-create the SGeSAP product without a serious amount of development. Huge amounts of effort have gone into the product and HP have worked closely with SAP during this time. Even if you have good SAP and SG skills I'd be surprised if you easily emulate the parts of SGeSAP you require.

How much downtime will you need before you have lost more than the cost of the product in lost business?

And as has already been mentioned, you will not be able to get support for anything you develop yourself other than from yourself :)

[Joe Short]

What is so difficult about integrating SAP? I've done dozens of clusters around Oracle, and other products. What makes SAP so difficult?

[Ian Vaughan]

Howdy,
Is the SAP cluster going to be in regular HP-UX partitions/servers or have you thought about Integrity Virtual Machines?
If you went for the IVM option you could SG the VM's rather than SG-ing the SAP applications and have SG style failover of the whole VM guest onto a redundant host.

This would negate the need for the SGeSAP scripts although you would need enough MCOE or MCSG PCL's to cover the hosts. Have a chat with your re-seller.

Cheers
Ian

[Joe Short]

Thread Closed

[PeterWolfe]

Joe,

Out of curiosity, did you try to roll your own here or end up springing for the toolkit?

[Joe Short]

Rolled my own.