Solaris 10
Containers is good for SAP BI PerformanceSAP Netweaver architecture is made of 3 instances categories: Database Instance (DB), Central Instance (CI) and Dialog Instance (DI). The application server (AS) and dialog instance (DI) are the same. A customer often wants to know, if it is better to install DB and AS instances on the same physical server rather than on distinct physical servers. Another of its concern is if it is better to create AS or no.
Install
DB and AS on the same physical server or No
This question depends on the Service Level Agreement of the SAP
application. Availability is the first reason to decide to design an
architecture with one or several physical servers. For a standard (no
high availability) SAP BI application, you could install DB/CI and AS
on the same physical server and isolate the different instances with
Solaris Containers (Zone + SRM). For high availability SAP BI
application, it is better to install one physical server for DB/CI
instances and another for AS instances. Concretely, I advise blades
server for AS instances and midrange or high end server for DB/CI
instance. This solution is optimized for flexibility, availability and
performance.
Create AS or No
Database (DB) and
Central Instance (CI) are mandatory when you install SAP application,
the Dialog Instance (DI) being optional . If you don't create a DI
instance, ETL and users processes share the CI instance. Performance is
managed by Solaris 10 and if you don't use advanced functionalities of
Solaris, it will not be possible to insure availability of resources
for one category of users for example. So, I advise to create several
AS instances to separate different users categeories (ex. users in
different countries of the world). After that, you can increase
isolation application processes by configuring Zones for each AS and
DB/CI instances. Flexibility will be better and you can manage
resources allocations with Solaris Resource
Manager (SRM).
