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: