Course Introduction
AWS Storage
Amazon S3
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Introduction to Amazon EFS
EFS in Practice
Amazon FSx
Optimizing Storage
Running Operations with the Snow Family
Storage for SAP on AWS
The course is part of this learning path
In this section of the AWS Certified: SAP on AWS Specialty learning path, we introduce you to the various Storage services currently available in AWS that are relevant to the PAS-C01 exam.
Learning Objectives
- Identify and describe the various Storage services available in AWS
- Understand how AWS Storage services can assist with large-scale data storage, migration, and transfer both into and out of AWS
- Describe hybrid cloud storage services and on-premises data backup solutions using AWS Storage services
- Identify storage options for SAP workloads on AWS
Prerequisites
The AWS Certified: SAP on AWS Specialty certification has been designed for anyone who has experience managing and operating SAP workloads. Ideally you’ll also have some exposure to the design and implementation of SAP workloads on AWS, including migrating these workloads from on-premises environments. Many exam questions will require a solutions architect level of knowledge for many AWS services, including AWS Storage services. All of the AWS Cloud concepts introduced in this course will be explained and reinforced from the ground up.
Hello, and welcome to this lecture, where I will be discussing file system storage using Amazon EFS and FSx for SAP workloads on AWS. In this lecture, you’ll learn about the different options in AWS for shared file system storage. Now as you’ll recall, EBS volumes may also contain file system storage, but can only be attached to a single EC2 instance at a time.
Shared file system storage is required when multiple EC2 instances must access the same volume of data at the same time. In SAP applications such as NetWeaver or S/4HANA, locations for shared file storage include the SAP mount (/sapmnt, /usr/sap) and SAP global transport (/usr/sap/trans) directories, which may be used by all systems in a transport group. These directories are used by SAP scale-out instances and therefore need to be mounted across all instances in your SAP deployment.
AWS makes it easy to set up scalable, durable, and highly available shared file storage using Amazon EFS for Linux and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. With both EFS and FSx, you don’t need to provision any storage capacity in advance, you only ever pay for the storage you use, and you never have to worry about a storage volume running out of space. These shared file systems may be accessed across multiple VPCs or AWS accounts. They can also be accessed across AWS Regions through the use of either VPC peering or AWS Transit Gateway, or even between on-premises instances and the AWS Cloud.
File systems may scale up to petabytes in size, and throughput and IOPS will scale along with the size of your file system. So let’s start by taking a look at Amazon EFS.
Amazon EFS is a fully-managed shared file system that can be accessed from your Linux-based instances via the Network File System, or NFS protocol and is recommended for your Linux-based SAP workloads.
Now in order for an SAP deployment to be highly available, AWS recommends configuring an ABAP SAP Central Services, or ASCS server in one Availability Zone and an Enqueue Replication Server, or ERS server in a different Availability Zone. These servers both require shared access to the /sapmnt file system as well as some ASCS-specific subdirectories within the /usr/sap directory. To achieve high availability, you must create a mount target in each availability zone where you will have EC2 instances connecting to the shared file system. From there, your instances can connect to the mount target and have shared access.
If your SAP deployment spans multiple VPCs, you can share the SAP transport file system by creating a mount target in one availability zone, just as we saw in the previous example. From there, you can leverage the EFS Mount Helper to connect to this mount target from your peered VPC.
For more information on Amazon EFS and accessing shared file systems via the EFS Mount Helper, I encourage you to check out this course:
Now just like EFS, Amazon FSx offers a fully-managed shared file system. However, unlike EFS, FSx offers a Windows file server for SAP workloads running on Microsoft Windows. FSx file systems are accessible via the Server Message Block, or SMB protocol and are recommended for your Windows-based SAP workloads. For more information about Amazon FSx, I encourage you to check out this course:
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.