Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > SAP HANA HCI Guides > SAP HANA Deployments on Dell XC Family Systems Using Nutanix AOS and VMware vSphere > Design considerations and caveats
Certain parameters require consideration when you design production SAP HANA systems on XC Family HCI systems:
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 outlined in the following table:
Platform |
VMs |
CPU/memory sockets per VM |
Notes |
XC740xd |
1 |
1 |
Example: 56 vCPU and 768 GB of RAM on an Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor |
XC940 |
3 |
1 |
3 VMs with 1 socket’s worth of CPU and memory |
XC940 |
2 |
1 or 2 |
1 VM with 1 socket’s worth of CPU and memory 1 VM with 2 sockets’ worth of CPU and memory |
XC940 |
1 |
3 |
Example: 168 vCPU and 4.5 TB of RAM on an Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processor |
Follow these rules to configure memory for SAP HANA production VMs:
For nonproduction SAP HANA database systems, Dell Technologies supports:
Note: For nonproduction databases, it is not necessary to follow the strict memory and NUMA configuration rules.
For your XC cluster design:
Scale-up (single-node) and scale-out (multinode) SAP HANA deployments are supported on XC HCI certified models. Scale-up deployments are supported on the dual-socket (XC740xd) systems and the quad-socket (XC940) systems.
In accordance with SAP requirements, SAP HANA scale-out deployments on XC nodes are supported only with quad-socket scalable servers (XC940) and three-socket wide VMs that use all available CPU resources. Up to eight worker nodes are possible, plus one or more nodes for VMware HA. 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. With this new sizing method, SAP application performance standard (SAPS) requirements for specific customer workloads are used 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 minimum recommended number of nodes for an SAP HANA cluster with production systems is four (three active and one stand-by) to ensure sufficient resources in the event of maintenance issues or failures. Dell Technologies recommends using VMware HA to achieve HA for the VMs.
Use the following best practices for networking:
When sizing the usable storage on XC clusters, 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 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.