While creating and publishing the SAP HANA scripts , I wanted to bring some of the excellent design aspects of Pure Storage® products to customers running SAP HANA on FlashArray//X. Some of these excellent design aspects include a very well defined and easy to use REST API , the software developer kits (SDK’s) for Powershell and Python which consume the REST API and all of the data services offered as a part of the Purity operating environment.
I am very pleased to announce that with the latest revision of the SAP HANA scripts for Powershell , Pure Storage can help you with there is now the capability of creating and recovering application consistent storage snapshots for SAP HANA systems deployed on VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols).
vVols bring a number of benefits to any virtual environment. However, the benefit I find most important is that they remove much of the abstraction between applications running on virtual systems and the underlying storage. This concept ensures that the focus moves away from the infrastructure and focuses more intently on the application running in the virtualized environment.
In this blog post I discuss how a deployment of an SAP HANA scale out system can be done using vVols.One interesting aspect stands out. Other than the configuration of the virtual environment to enable things like SCSI bus sharing, the process of installing the system was exactly the same as installing it on bare metal servers, down to the storage API connector used (fcClient).
How it works
In previous versions of the Powershell scripts, to create an SAP HANA Scale Up storage snapshot (for a bare metal system) ,the following command line arguments were used:
New-StorageSnapshot -HostAddress <IP address of host> -InstanceNumber <InstanceNumber (00)> -DatabaseName <Database Name (HN1)> -DatabaseUser <DBUser> -OperatingSystemUser <OS-User> -PureFlashArrayAddress <Pure FlashArray IP or hostname> -PureFlashArrayUser <pure FA User> -DatabasePort <Port>
The difference with using a virtual SAP HANA system that is deployed on vVols is only 3 more command line arguments:
- vCenterServer – the VMware vSphere vCenter Server managing the ESXi host(s) on which the virtual SAP HANA instance is deployed.
- vCenterUser – the vCenter user who has read access to the virtual machine on which the SAP HANA instance is deployed and read permissions on the vVol datastore.
- vCenterPassword(Optional – the execution will prompt to ask for this in secure text if not entered as a command line argument).
New-StorageSnapshot -HostAddress <IP address of host> -InstanceNumber <InstanceNumber (00)> -DatabaseName <Database Name (HN1)> -DatabaseUser <DBUser> -OperatingSystemUser <OS-User> -PureFlashArrayAddress <Pure FlashArray IP or hostname> -PureFlashArrayUser <pure FA User> -DatabasePort <Port> -vCenterAddress <vCenter hostname or IP> -vCenterUser <vCenter User> -vCenterPassword <vCenter users password>
Here is the list of everything which can be done using the Powershell scripts with SAP HANA systems deployed on vVols
- Create an Application Consistent storage snapshot (Scale Up)
- Create an Application Consistent storage snapshot (Scale Out)
- Create a Crash Consistent storage snapshot (both log and data – Scale Up)
- Create a Crash Consistent storage snapshot (both log and data – Scale Out)
- Recover from an application consistent storage snapshot (Scale Up)
These scripts are exceptionally useful in scenarios where system , backup or storage administrators need to focus on core business issues and automate risk reduction scenarios such as business continuity and data protection. If any one of these issues is an issue your organization faces , try out both FlashArray and the scripts to solve them!
Other Resources
Cody Hostermans Blog Post on PowerCLI and vVols Part II: Finding vVol UUIDs
Blog Post – New! SAP HANA Scripts for Automating Storage Operations
Blog Post – Updated! SAP HANA Scripts with recovery automation