Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > SAP HANA HCI Guides > SAP HANA Deployments on Dell XC Family Systems Using Nutanix AOS and VMware vSphere > Creating SAP HANA VMs
When you create SAP HANA VMs:
The following examples are based on a physical CPU with 20 cores (40 threads) and a Nutanix CVM running on NUMA node 0.
Note: The cores per socket distribution must align with the physical layout of the VMware ESXi host that is in use. You must configure a VM spanning two physical CPUs with two sockets and so on. Also, adjust NUMA node affinity to the correct NUMA node on the physical layout.
To set the numa.nodeAffinity parameter, select Edit settings > VM Options > Advanced > Edit Configuration > Add Configuration Params.
Example 1:
The following two figures show the settings for an SAP HANA VM with two CPU sockets using NUMA node.affinity. Each virtual CPU has 20 cores, including hyperthreads. These settings produce a VM with two virtual sockets, two NUMA nodes, and a total of 40 vCPUs.
Example 2:
The following two figures show the settings for an SAP HANA VM with one CPU socket using NUMA node.affinity. Each virtual CPU has 36 cores, including hyperthreads. These settings produce a VM with one virtual socket, one NUMA node, and a total of 36 vCPUs.
Enable the VM metrics host daemon as described in SAP note 2266266: Key Monitoring Metrics for SAP on VMware vSphere (version 5.5 u3 and higher) (access requires SAP login credentials).
To achieve optimal storage performance, set the following Linux kernel settings in the SAP HANA VM:
transparent_hugepage=never
numa_balancing=disabled
elevator=noop
vmw_pvscsi.cmd_per_lun=254
vmw_pvscsi.ring_pages=32
In a SUSE Linux VM, set these parameters by using yast2 and the System Bootloader settings for the kernel parameters. For more information, see the VMware Knowledge Base article KB2053145: Large-scale workloads with intensive I/O patterns might require queue depths significantly greater than Paravirtual SCSI default values.
A VMware best practice is to use a dedicated SCSI controller for the SAP HANA data and log devices. Configure the SCSI controller as VMware Paravirtual. The example in the following figure uses SCSI Controller 0 for the system device, SCSI Controller 1 for the LVM data devices, and SCSI Controller 2 for the LVM log devices:
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 and log devices based on the memory size of the SAP HANA VM. For data, configure 2x RAM. For log, configure 0.5-1x RAM
(512 GB maximum).
Add the capacity of the data and the log device to get the total capacity required for the SAP HANA persistence of the VM.