Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > SAP HANA HCI Guides > SAP HANA Deployments on Dell XC Family Systems Using Nutanix AOS and AHV > Design considerations and caveats
When designing production SAP HANA systems on XC Family HCI systems, take the following parameters into account:
Note: For online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads, a restriction applies to Class M for up to 4.5 TB. Customers must size accordingly.
For production SAP HANA database VMs, adhere to the resource combinations that are shown in the following table:
Platform |
VMs |
CPU memory sockets per VM |
Notes |
XC740xd |
1 |
1 |
Example: 56 vCPU and 768 GB RAM on an Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor |
XC940 |
3 |
1 |
3 VMs with allocation of CPU and memory for 1 socket |
XC940 |
2 |
1 or 2 |
1 VM with allocation of CPU and memory for 1 socket 1 VM with allocation of CPU and memory for 2 sockets |
XC940 |
1 |
3 |
Example: 168 vCPU and 4.5 TB RAM on an Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor |
To configure memory for SAP HANA production VMs:
Note: For nonproduction databases, it is not necessary to follow the strict memory and NUMA configuration rules.
For your XC cluster design:
When you size usable storage on the cluster, assume the following requirements:
In accordance with SAP requirements, SAP HANA scale-out deployments on XC nodes are supported only with four-socket scalable servers (XC940) and three-socket wide VMs that use all available CPU resources. Up to six worker nodes are possible with Nutanix AOS, plus one or more nodes for HA. Up to 4.5 TB of RAM per scale-out node (VM) of 27 TB (maximum) is supported. For more information, see SAP Note 2686722 - SAP HANA virtualized on Nutanix AOS (access requires SAP login credentials).
With SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) phase 5, SAP introduced customer-workload-driven SAP HANA system sizing. This method uses SAP application performance standard (SAPS) requirements for specific customer workloads to determine the type and number of processors that are required to run SAP HANA. You can use the SAP HANA Quick Sizer tool and sizing reports and share the results with Dell Technologies to determine the optimal number of XC Family nodes, CPU types, and memory sizes for your SAP HANA environment.
The recommended minimum number of nodes for an SAP HANA cluster with production systems is four (three active and one standby) to achieve high availability for the VMs.
Nutanix recommends planning for failover capacity in the form of N+1. Follow the steps in the Prism Web Console Guide to configure the cluster for high availability.
Use the following best practices for networking:
When sizing the usable storage on XC clusters, use the SAP Quick Sier tool to determine the required capacity for the SAP HANA data and log devices. If the sizing details are not available, configure the usable storage size based on the SAP HANA database memory footprint:
Note: Dell Technologies and Nutanix do not recommend enabling core data service features such as compression, deduplication, and EC-X on the storage container that holds the production database. Nutanix SAP Engineering has tested compression with SAP HANA workloads, and the tests do not show any noticeable performance impact or any reduction in the space the SAP HANA workload consumes. Enabling these features does not bring any additional savings.
SAP HANA installations require a file system to store the SAP HANA binary, trace, and configuration files. This file system is mounted under the /hana/shared mount point.
In SAP HANA scale-up (single-node) deployments, this mount point can reside on the local system device. SAP HANA requires approximately the same RAM memory capacity that is used for the /hana/shared file system.
SAP HANA scale-out deployments require a shared file system to be mounted on every SAP HANA node in the cluster. The file system stores the binary, trace, and configuration files. In physical environments, this file system is provided as a network file system (NFS) that is shared by storage systems with network-attached storage (NAS) capabilities, such as Unity XT, PowerStore, and PowerScale systems. If a NAS array is not available, a Linux VM (non-SAP HANA node) running an NFS server process provides the NFS share. The NFS server process exports a file system that is mounted on all the SAP HANA cluster nodes.