SUSE’s Vision is to Simplify, Modernize, Accelerate the business of our customers.
Maintaining a competitive advantage often depends on how quickly new services can be delivered into a business. SAP applications are designed to help analyze data to anticipate new requirements, and rapidly deliver new products and services.
When SUSE first released SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, it already included automated installation features for the SAP software stack. Over the last 10 years, the SUSE SAP LinuxLab and development engineers have introduced several additional features to automate routine system administration. Based on this experience, SUSE worked on rework the deployment wizard capability to a modern framework.
- Simplify
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the deployment of an SAP Landscape in the public cloud for development, test, and production.
- Modernize
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customer environments by taking advantage of the benefits of the public cloud.
- Accelerate
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customer deployments and migrations to the public cloud.
Building the infrastructure to run SAP Applications can be complex and demand significant effort, especially if a manual deployment method is used. When delivering multiple environments, for multiple engagements, reproducing the deployment can be tedious and error-prone.
Highly available infrastructure configurations raise additional complexities that further delay time to value.
When deploying and managing a large number of systems in an SAP Landscape, there is often a secondary need, getting an overview of what is happening in the environment after the installation is complete.
The major motivation is to improve, simplify, and unify the installation of the SAP Landscape on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, clearly standardize deployments, and allow customers to use one level of tooling in various ways – through a Command Line interface, through some GUI driven processes, and through SUSE Manager or other automation framework.
To achieve this, SUSE has adopted a more modern approach, infrastructure-as-code, which helps customers reduce effort and errors during deployments.
In recent years, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and many other SUSE products ship with a universal configuration management solution, this is used as the foundation for the new automation capability.
This configuration management system is called Salt (from SaltStack) and provides a highly scalable, powerful, and fast infrastructure automation and management, built on a dynamic communication bus. Salt can be used for data-driven orchestration, remote execution for any infrastructure, configuration management for any application stack, and much more.
Combining this configuration management system with an infrastructure deployment solution, such as Terraform (from Hashicorp), makes it possible to do a hands-free and error-free setup of an SAP Landscape. Once the deployment is complete, administrators can log in to start customizing the SAP System.
As part of the deployment, SUSE added the ability provide insights into the SAP Landscape with comprehensive dashboards, realtime and historic views, and active alerts and reporting, based on flexible and powerful open-source projects, Prometheus and Grafana. The deployment automation can also be configured to set up a monitoring environment for the SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver clusters.