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Create the persistence of production SAP HANA VMs by adding disks for data and log from the vSAN storage pool. The VMware best practice is to use a dedicated SCSI controller for the SAP HANA data and log devices. With vSAN 6 and vSAN 7 versions, the VMware best practice was to use PVSCSI controllers. With vSAN 8, however, the VMware best practice is to use NVME controllers instead of PVSCSI controllers.
Configure the SCSI controller as VMware Paravirtual. The example in the following figure uses SCSI Controller 0 for the system devices, SCSI Controller 1 for the data devices, and SCSI Controller 2 for the log devices:
As of vSAN 8, the VMware best practice is to use a dedicated NVME controller for the SAP HANA data and log devices.
Configure the SCSI controller as NVME controller. The example that is shown in the following figure uses NVME controller 0 for the system device, NVME controller 1 for the data devices, and NVME controller 2 for the log devices:
The following figure shows an example of using NVME Controller 2 for the hana log persistence (hard disk 3):
Use the SAP Quick Sizer tool to determine the required capacity for the SAP HANA data and log devices.
If the sizing details are not available, configure the sizes of the data devices and log devices based on the memory size of the SAP HANA VM. For data devices, configure 2 x RAM. For log devices, configure 0.5-1 x RAM (up to a maximum of 512 GB).
Add the capacity of the data and the log device to get the total capacity required for the SAP HANA persistence of the VM.
Define a storage policy for the SAP HANA physical devices that are deployed on the vSAN data store. While the default vSAN storage policy is adequate for the system device, the SAP HANA persistence devices must have a dedicated storage policy to meet the SAP performance requirements. The following figure shows the rules that we defined in the storage policy for the SAP HANA persistence:
The vSAN storage policy requirements are:
This option provides best performance on vSAN compared to RAID 5/6, which is mainly optimized for space utilization.
This setting defines the number of disk, host, or fault-domain failures that a storage object can tolerate.
This setting defines the number of disks across which each replica of a storage object is striped.
Note: With RAID 1, each storage object has two replicas.
The optimal number depends on the number of available disk groups and capacity disks. The minimum (default) is 1 and the maximum is 12.
Defines that the devices will be thick-provisioned.
This option applies only to hybrid vSAN deployments—NVMe or SSD for cache and HDDs for capacity.
During read/write operations, vSAN checks the validity of the data based on the checksum. If the data is not valid, vSAN takes the necessary steps to either correct the data by retrieving a new copy from another replica or report the issue to the user for action (nonrecoverable errors).
If this option is ON, the object is provisioned even if the policy specified in the storage policy is not satisfiable with the resources that are available in the cluster.
After the SAP HANA VM starts, you must format and mount the persistence before you install the SAP HANA software.
How the configured hard disks are presented to the host as Linux devices for data and log depends on the controller that the VM uses:
mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb ; mkfs.xfs /dev/sdc
mkfs.xfs /dev/nvme1n1 ; mkfs.xfs /dev/nvme2n1
mkdir -p /hana/data /hana/log
and then mount the hana data and log devices by running:
mount /dev/sdb /hana/data;mount /dev/sdc /hana/log
Alternatively, run the following command:
mount /dev/nvme1n1 /hana/data ; mount /dev/nvme2n1 /hana/log