Identifying an SAP HANA certified HCI solution

As part of the SAP HANA HCI certification requirements, SAP requires a method to detect if an SAP HANA VM is running in a hyperconverged environment on a vSAN data store. SAP HANA Studio and SAP HANA Cockpit cannot report the hardware vendor and hardware type when running under VMware; you must report to SAP that SAP HANA is running on a VxRail D560F, E560F, E560N, P570F, or P580N HCI.

One method of identifying a certified HCI environment is to identify the ESXi host model name (physical BIOS name). To identify the certified VxRail model, look up the name of the ESXi host in the Summary tab of the vSphere client. Only the VxRail D560F, E560F, E560N, P570F, and P580N models are certified as valid.

Enabling the VxRail model name to the SAP HANA VM

Ensure that you report the host model name from within each of the SAP HANA VMs by setting SMBIOS.reflectHost=TRUE for all SAP HANA VMs:

1. Select VM Hardware > Editing Settings > VM Options > Advanced > Edit Configuration.

2. Enter the following information:

Name: SMBIOS.reflectHost

Value: TRUE

3. Click Add.

Deploying a VMware script to detect vSphere and vSAN information

A script is available on the VMware website that must be deployed on every VxRail node.

The script checks if a VM has a device on the vSAN data store. If the device is found, the script adds the following parameters to the VM configuration file:

"guestinfo.vsan.enabled": True/False,

"guestinfo.SDS.solution": ESXi_version, which is also the vSAN release version

"guestinfo.vm_on_vsan": True/False

The SAP CIM provider and support tools such as sapsysinfo.sh use both the HCI model name and VMware information.

Note: The script sapsysinfo.sh provides a method for collecting Linux system information and sending it to SAP. This script is attached to SAP Note 618104: “sapsysinfo” – Compiling system information on Linux (access requires SAP login credentials). When reporting an issue to SAP, attach the file that sapsysinfo.sh generated.

Performing a health check with VxRail Manager

Before reporting a problem to SAP, check the physical health of the VxRail hardware. The health function in VxRail Manager is fully integrated into the vSphere client. The function provides details of any issues, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 12.    VxRail Manager health check report

Performing a health check with iDRAC

In addition, verify the health of the system by using the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) dashboard. The following figure shows an iDRAC health check report:

Figure 13.    iDRAC health check report (example)

Correct all hardware-related issues before reporting an SAP HANA problem to SAP Support.