The starting point with any migration project is determining what exactly is to be migrated. On the face of it, this may seem like a straightforward task. Moving from an on-premises or privately hosted environment to Azure is just swapping one infrastructure for another. However, migrating an SAP landscape to Azure presents some unique challenges that can only be adequately addressed if we accurately know the current source state, that is, the existing landscape.
Azure does not support all the hardware, operating systems, and database platforms that SAP runs on. Moving to a new OS or database platform adds another significant dimension to the migration process. This course investigates which landscape elements need to be considered and how they can affect the deployment design along with the migration strategy. We will also see what tools are available to help with assessing an SAP landscape.
Learning Objectives
- Understand why existing landscape assessment is important
- Learn ways to find landscape components
- Learn methods to determine landscape size and database size
- Understand how can Azure Migrate help with landscape assessment
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who is looking to migrate their SAP landscape to an Azure environment and wants to understand what to consider before doing so.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have a basic understanding of Azure and SAP.
When you move or migrate software systems from one platform to another, one of the most important, if not the most important, factor is knowing precisely what you are moving. Yes, this does sound like I'm stating the obvious, but when moving a complex system made up of many interdependent parts, this aspect is often underestimated. While assessing the current system may not seem like a very interesting or technically challenging task, it is vitally important.
Let me explain why by way of an analogy. You have to move to a new apartment after being in the current one for several years. Over the years, you have accumulated quite a lot of furniture and belongings that are very well suited to your current residence. For example, you have a corner lounge suite and a large two-sided home office desk that also fits into a room's corner as you work from home several times a week. You have a large tropical fish tank, a home gym, and an enormous collection of records that you like to play loudly on a high-end record player. As well as these large items, you have a multitude of kitchen appliances and draws and shelves, some of them built into the walls, storing clothes and knickknacks. You head out to look at prospective new apartments, keeping in the back of your mind an approximate mental inventory of all your stuff. There are quite a few factors you need to keep in mind when looking at a new property that is analogous to a migration scenario. With regards to the target environment, not only does it need to have the space to accommodate all your stuff, that is, storage and compute, but it needs to be able to meet unique storage requirements.
Are there corners for the lounge suite and desk? Compliance - Is the floor strong enough to take the fish tank's weight, and is it away from direct sunlight? Network – does the apartment internet connection have sufficient bandwidth for you to work from home? Backups – is there enough built-in shelving and storage for all your records and stuff? Security – does the apartment have sufficient soundproofing so you won't disturb neighbors with music or be disturbed by external sound when working. Yeah, I know I'm reaching a bit with that one. Next, we come to the move or migration itself. Without an accurate assessment of how much stuff you need to move, how will you know what size truck to hire and how many movers you will need to lift and carry? Does the new site have a service elevator to bring up the large items, or will you have to break them down, or worse, crane them in or leave them behind? Anyway, you get my point that not only is an inventory of the current state important, but it must be accurate both qualitatively, that is what exactly you have, and quantitatively – how much you have.
On the minus side of the inventory ledger, SAP systems are complex and made up of many securely interconnected nodes and components. On the plus side, SAP is very prescriptive from a hardware point of view, so sticking with certified components limits your chances of getting it too wrong. As I've alluded to, several elements make up an SAP system or elements that SAP is dependent on. We need to catalog database and application servers with their respective software versions. We will need a description of the network topology and associated security features such as firewalls, gateways, and proxies. What system and database backup functions are in place, and what is the nature of the high availability and disaster recovery mechanisms? For all these elements, we will need performance metrics to ascertain CPU and memory load, as well as storage requirements and network throughput and latency. These numbers will be instrumental in determining the new landscape size and design.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.