SAP Hardware Sizing & Benchmark Measurement Tools

[Khurram Khan_2]

Hi,


Would appreciate it if anyone has any knowledge on SAP Hardware sizing, and also has experience on Benchmark Measurement Tools to measure the performance and growth of the SAP system.

Any related information would be helpful, thanks.


Regards



Khurram

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Khurram,

You should talk direct to HP. They have a large SAP competency team, and can provide extensive assistance in sizing a SAP environment - IIRC they send you a detailed questionaire to complete, and then size the system based on your responses.


HTH

Duncan

[Khurram Khan_2]

Hi,

We are already aware of the hardware partner route, but were hoping that there might be another option as well. We are currently using the HP tool called TVMS, which uses a ABAP to gather the information which is then passed on to HP for final sizing.


Secondly we would like to get some benchmark measurement figures of our currently LIVE system, so that we can build up some figures which would also help giving us a reasonable idea of size as well.



I hope anyone can add any docuemnts or procedures for benchmark measurement or hardware sizing.



Regards


KK

[melvyn burnard]

Have you contacted SAP regarding your query?
they have tools etc.
Check out what might be on http://www.sap.com
Also http://www.hp.com/go/sap

[Volker Borowski]

Hi KK,

if you have SAPNET access you could try

http://service.sap.com/quicksizing

Benchmarks are spread around the Internet, depending on who did win what :-)
i.E.

http://www-3.ibm.com/software/data/db2/benchmarks/101300.html

http://h40045.www4.hp.com/performance_optimization/server_performance_for_SAP.html

http://www.google.com
"SAP BENCHMARK HARDWARE DESCRIPTION" gives nice hits.

What ever you size, keep enough spare room for additional CPU and MEMORY and additional controller cards. You'll need it soon :-)

Hope this helps
Volker

[Khurram Khan_2]

Hi,

Currently we have approximately 4 CPU's on the N4000 servers which are 4 servers, each with 4 GB of memory with 1000 concurrent users. We are taking on a additional 500 users, buit when we use the SAP quick sizing tool it suggests that we need 7 additiona CPU's and additional 6GB of memory etc. Which frankly is rubbish, hence the need to find another more accurate tool or method to do the hardware sizing exercise.


Regards

Khurram

[Alzhy]

This is not SAP specific but BGS Best/1 did wonders for me to size an enterprise server that hosted an Oracle DB and ancillary apps. I think it is now a BMC product -- Patrol Predict and Peform. That this does is you take your current or test loads and apply loading scenarios -- it comes up with very factual recommendations on memory, cpu and io bandwidth requirements...

[Stuart Abramson_2]

I have used the SAP Quicksizer to size SAP system configuraitons. The QuickSizer output is only as good as the answers you give to the questions! Did you do the answers or did your SAP Basis Administrator do the answers? Maybe you should go back over the answers...

Why is the QuickSizer output "rubbish". You are increasing your user base by 500/4000 is 12.5%, so you think the cpu count can't go up by 7/16, which is 43%?

Maybe the new users are because of some new application module which has a higher transcation count than the older user applications... Newer versions of SAP have higher resource utilization.

[Tim Sanko]

Well, I am a paranoiac about capacity planning.

I do know that the N4000 maxes out at 8 CPUs

The trade in value is squat. rp8400s use 16 CPUs max. Domes go to 128. It seems you are on a question about going to 6 CPUs/BOX. 6X4=24 currently you are at 4X4 which is sixteen. You may not need to bump you ram, but I would think that knowing that efficiency goes down as you add CPUs beyond one. I would be careful to examine scalar benchmarks machine/machine. We were at 80% busy and occasionally had tens of second waits. We added 4 CPUs to our 12 way V2600 and now we get no waits and get virtually instant response unless there is a DB deadlock.

There was about a 400% increase in average idle percentage with a 25%increase in CPU MIPS added.

The visible time elapsed was reduced, but there was always IO for keyboard input Which was critically important by user perception...

Tim

[Khurram Khan_2]

Hi,

May be it was frustration that came out as we cannot work out our own hardware from the SAP quick sizing tool, sorry all for using the word 'R' which could have been avoided and didn't come across as being professional.

Currently we have approximately 4 CPU's on the N4000 servers which are 4 servers, each with 8 GB of memory with 1000 concurrent users.

We are taking on a additional 500 users, but when we use the SAP quick sizing tool it only suggests the category number e.g. 7 which is equivalent to 800 SD benchmark users. You then have to send these figures to your hardware vendor who will then tell you what hardware you require.

Surely there must be a way of calculating one's hardware requiremnts, secondly not too sure if HP charge for this service of specing the hardware.

Hope someone has another solution, thanks in advance.

Regards

KK

[Stuart Abramson_2]

Kurram:

HP does not charge! They are happy to meet with you. It's a marketing opportunity for them.

In fact, I don't know of any way to directly calculate hardware requirements without talking to the vendor. I just assumed that you already had.

Call them right now....

Stuart

[Volker Borowski]

Well,

since you already are productive, you can of course ask SAP for an Early Watch session.

They are not free of charge anymore (normally), but in your case I'd argue with the potentual License-fee increase they will get and I am sure you'll get the EW for free.
Tell the watcher about your plans to increase users and he can put this into his calculation.

If you plan to do an Upgrade or want to activate a new module, you could ask for a functional upgrade check or a going live check, which is free in general and covers a big part of the EW analysis as well.

In addition you might peek inside SAP yourself a little. Check transactions ST06 / ST03 and ST02 on all Instances. Esp. ST06 which covers the OS part should tell you, if you have MEM and CPU resources left. ST04 on the Database Server gives you some Information of the database performance.

Hope this helps
Volker