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.
Assessing your current SAP landscape is essential for a successful, no surprises deployment and migration to Azure. Assessment consists of what and how much. Is your existing landscape comprised of servers, operating systems, and databases supported on Azure? If they are supported, will you be upgrading them as part of the migration? Whether upgrading or not, the landscape's size, meaning the number of nodes and size of the data, will impact the final deployment's infrastructure choices and cost. The size and nature of the existing landscape will have a bearing on which migration strategy is most appropriate.
Within SAP, there are several tools, functions, and transactions that will help you map your landscape's composition and size. They include KPI metrics from the DBA cockpit, SAP Quick Sizer, SAP Solution Manager, and the SM51 and OS07N transactions.
Determining your database's size has important implications in terms of database and backup storage and the compute product you can use. The use of virtual machines for SAP HANA are size constrained.
Azure Migrate: Server Assessment is a Microsoft tool that can be run as an agent or agentless on your current infrastructure to determine your current hardware and operating system configurations. Like some of the SAP options, it also enables you to manually record your infrastructure's server components in a structured format.
Knowing your SLA and resiliency commitments will help you determine which high availability Azure services to deploy and the related network design. Security obligations will also impact network design.
Accurately knowing your current SAP landscape is a case of - to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
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.