Compute design

IBM Cloud® for SAP provides SAP-certified infrastructure by using the latest Virtual Servers or Bare Metal Server. These servers are available and offered in different profiles that define CPU and RAM combinations suitable and certified for SAP workloads.

It's critical that the appropriate profiles are chosen, since SAP certifies only specific VSI and Bare Metal Server profiles in IBM Cloud®. The range of HANA certified profiles available on Virtual Servers for VPC cover 90% of customer use cases for the HANA database service.

Multiple SAP certified VSI and Bare Metal Server profiles are available for deployment of SAP NetWeaver and HANA on IBM Cloud VPC that can be found by going to the following IBM Cloud® docs:

• NetWeaver VSI profiles

• NetWeaver Bare Metal profiles

• HANA VSI profiles

• HANA Bare Metal profiles

For more information, see Sizing process for SAP Systems.

Choose a SAP Bare Metal Server or VSI profile from the list of certified servers in the IBM Cloud® catalog with the appropriate SAP image. You can't make changes to Bare Metal Server servers.

HANA is an in-memory database, so memory sizing must be taken into consideration. If a HANA database size exceeds 5.6 TB of memory for VPC VSI and 6.1 TB for Baremetal for VPC, PowerVS (with a range of profiles up to 30.5 TB) is the recommended landing zone and is covered in SAP on PowerVS.

For a distributed SAP installation, it's best to have all nodes in the same location (for example, the same availability zone or data center). Deviation from this setup can cause latency and timeouts, which render your SAP system unresponsive. Due to this, SAP does not support the application layer and database to be deployed across different zones; the application and database layers must exist in the same availability zone. Therefore, if the required memory for HANA targets a PowerVS deployment, the application layer must also be on PowerVS and not on VPC.

Databases typically experience growth over time so database size and expected data growth rates should be taken into consideration when planning database deployments.