Bare Metal Server certified profiles on VPC infrastructure for SAP HANA

Bare metal servers for VPC - Storage Layouts

The following table shows the required physical volumes, related volume groups, logical volumes, and their characteristics:

Profile ux2d-metal-224x6144 is equipped with different set od disks, so jump directly to "Steps for setting up storage for the ux2d-metal-224x6144 profile".

Steps for setting up storage for the profiles up to 3,072 GiB

Note, that both volume groups vg0 and vg1 are not fully used. Remaining space can be used to extend the listed sizes, which are only minimum sizes, or can be used for other purposes. However, do not point I/O load at the remaining space since that impacts SAP HANA’s performance.

To ensure a higher level of availability and failure resilience, RAID10 logical volumes are built on-top the under-laying NVMEs, based on Linux’s logical volume manager.

These steps show a step-by-step guide for setting up the volume groups, logical volumes, and file systems. Size information differs and can be retrieved from the storage layout table.

1. Log in to the OS and install the lvm2 package, if not installed already.

   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# yum install lvm2
   

   This command applies to RHEL, on SLES use ‘zypper install’ instead.

2. Create the volume groups.

   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# vgcreate vg0 /dev/nvme0n1 /dev/nvme1n1 /dev/nvme2n1 /dev/nvme3n1
   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# vgcreate vg1 /dev/nvme4n1 /dev/nvme5n1 /dev/nvme6n1 /dev/nvme7n1
   

3. Create logical volumes on top of the volume groups.

   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# lvcreate --type raid10 -i 2 -m 1 -L 768G -I 64 -n hana_shared_lv vg0
   

   768G needs to be adapted to the hana_shared volume size specific to your memory size in the sizing table. Sizes for hana_log can be found there, too, and can be used in the lvcreate command as well.

   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# lvcreate --type raid10 -i 2 -m 1 -L 512G -I 64 -n hana_log_lv vg0
   

4. Create hana_data. Either modify the size with the -L option according to the sizing table, or the use the entire volume group with -l 100%FREE:

   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# lvcreate --type raid10 -i 2 -m 1 -l 100%FREE -I 64 -n hana_data_lv vg1
   

5. Create file systems on the logical volumes. In this example, XFS is used and is mounted by label. Mount by label is not a requirement and can be adapted according to your needs:

   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# mkfs.xfs -L HANA_SHARED -K /dev/mapper/vg0-hana_shared_lv
   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# mkfs.xfs -L HANA_LOG -K /dev/mapper/vg0-hana_log_lv
   [root@mx2d-metal-96x768 ~]# mkfs.xfs -L HANA_DATA -K /dev/mapper/vg1-hana_data_lv
   

6. Add the following lines to /etc/fstab and create the required directory paths with mkdir.

   LABEL=HANA_SHARED /hana/shared xfs defaults 0 0
   LABEL=HANA_LOG /hana/log xfs defaults,swalloc,inode64 0 0
   LABEL=HANA_DATA /hana/data xfs defaults,largeio,swalloc,inode64 0 0
   

7. You can now mount the file systems.

Steps for setting up storage for the ux2d-metal-224x6144 profile

To ensure a higher level of availability and failure resilience, RAID1 logical volumes are built on-top the under-laying NVMEs, based on Linux’s logical volume manager.

These steps show a step-by-step guide for setting up the volume groups, logical volumes, and file systems.

1. Log in to the OS and install the lvm2 package, if not installed already.

   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# yum install lvm2
   

   This command applies to RHEL, on SLES use ‘zypper install’ instead.

2. Create the volume group.

   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# vgcreate vg0 /dev/nvme0n1 /dev/nvme1n1
   

3. Create logical volumes hana_shared_lv and hana_log_lv on top of the volume group.

   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# lvcreate --type raid1 -i 2 -m 1 -L 6144G -I 64 -n hana_shared_lv vg0
   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# lvcreate --type raid1 -i 2 -m 1 -L 512G -I 64 -n hana_log_lv vg0
   

4. Create logical volume hana_data_lv.

   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# lvcreate --type raid1 -i 2 -m 1 -l 100%FREE -I 64 -n hana_data_lv vg0
   

5. Create file systems on the logical volumes. In this example, XFS is used and is mounted by label. Mount by label is not a requirement and can be adapted according to your needs:

   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# mkfs.xfs -L HANA_SHARED -K /dev/mapper/vg0-hana_shared_lv
   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# mkfs.xfs -L HANA_LOG -K /dev/mapper/vg0-hana_log_lv
   [root@ux2d-metal-224x6144 ~]# mkfs.xfs -L HANA_DATA -K /dev/mapper/vg0-hana_data_lv
   

6. Add the following lines to /etc/fstab and create the required directory paths with mkdir.

   LABEL=HANA_SHARED /hana/shared xfs defaults 0 0
   LABEL=HANA_LOG /hana/log xfs defaults,swalloc,inode64 0 0
   LABEL=HANA_DATA /hana/data xfs defaults,largeio,swalloc,inode64 0 0
   

7. You can now mount the file systems.

Check SAP Note 2777782 for RHEL and SAP Note 2684254 for SLES to adapt your OS configuration settings according to the requirements for SAP HANA.