Beyond Uptime: Managing Modern SAP Operations

So much goes into running SAP well–from patching without disruption, through managing high availability and navigating the shift to containers, all the way to staying ahead of technical debt before it catches up with you. That’s a lot to carry, and most SAP environments do it all… until something goes wrong.

In the latest episode of SUSE’s podcast, The Future is Open, we sit down with Al Kalafian, a SAP Specialist at SUSE with 31 years of experience in the SAP ecosystem. Kalafian started at IBM’s SAP Competence Center when SAP was still a small operation, spent time at SAP’s partner port in Walldorf, Germany and has lived through virtually every major shift in the SAP industry firsthand. In this conversation, Kalafian gets specific about what it takes to run SAP well in 2026 and beyond.

If you’re navigating the transition to S/4HANA or working through what containerized SAP workloads mean for your teams, this episode is worth the listen.

What you’ll learn

• Best practices to streamline the operations
  • Trento, included with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications at no extra cost, continuously validates cluster configurations and tells you not just what’s wrong but how to fix it.
  • About 95% of kernel patches applied through live kernel patching no longer require a reboot, and SUSE’s Live Patching now extends that coverage to glibc and OpenSSL, both direct dependencies for SAP HANA.
• New market trends
  • SAP’s Process Integration and Process Orchestration products reach end of mainstream support in 2027. The migration path is SAP Integration Suite, and for a lot of customers there is the need for Edge Integration Cell for a local runtime environment.SUSE Rancher for SAP Applications gives teams a purpose-built stack to handle that transition.
  • As of November 2024, SUSE fully supports running SAP HANA in production on KVM, a native hypervisor built directly into the Linux kernel, offering organizations a viable alternative as they rethink their virtualization spend.

Eliminating the high-availability headache

High availability in SAP environments is one of those things that works perfectly on day one, and then slowly drifts. Configurations set correctly at installation get altered over time as service packs are applied and changes accumulate. Then, when a failover actually needs to happen, it doesn’t go as planned.

In this podcast episode, Kalafian talks through how Trento, a feature included with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, changes that story. Rather than waiting for something to break, Trento continuously checks dozens of Pacemaker and Corosync parameters, flags issues before they cause downtime and tells you exactly how to fix them. 

Trento has expanded significantly since it launched. It now handles Scale-Up, Scale-Out, Performance Optimized and Cost Optimized configurations, as well as Central Services clusters. It integrates with SUSE Multi-Linux Manager for patch visibility, with saptune for OS tuning notes, and it recently added an AI assistant that lets you query your SAP landscape in plain language. At SUSE, all of this is included with your Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications license, at no additional cost.

In contrast, Kalafian shares real-world examples of clusters that drifted out of alignment and left teams spending hours trying to figure out what changed. That kind of troubleshooting, which used to eat up entire afternoons, is exactly what Trento is built to cut short.

Keeping HANA secure without rebooting it

Rebooting a HANA system takes a long time. When you’re running mission-critical workloads, the pressure to avoid those reboots is real, and the costs of taking a system down to apply patches add up fast.

SUSE’s Live Patching has expanded beyond the Linux kernel to now cover Glibc and OpenSSL, both of which are direct dependencies for SAP HANA. According to Kalafian, about 95% of kernel patches applied through live kernel patching no longer require a reboot. Extending that same coverage to glibc and OpenSSL means customers can keep their HANA systems secure without the downtime a traditional patching cycle brings.

He also walks through how SUSE Multi-Linux Manager’s lifecycle management features let teams package OS updates, filter out patches that need a reboot and move those packages through the SAP environments in a structured way: from development to QA to production. The parallel to how SAP’s own R3TRANS tool handles ABAP program updates is one of the more practical analogies in the episode, and it’s a useful frame for any SAP SysAdmin thinking about how to modernize their patching approach.

SAP containers and the edge integration challenge

SAP’s Process Integration and Process Orchestration (PI/PO) products are reaching end of mainstream support in 2027, and customers will need to migrate to the SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP. The SAP Edge Integration Cell, which runs on Kubernetes, is a key part of that shift, letting teams run integration workloads on-premises or in private cloud environments while still connecting to cloud data. This matters for organizations with regulated data that can’t move to the public cloud and for those looking to cut down on ingress and egress costs.

But Kubernetes is new territory for many SAP teams. Traditional security and observability tools don’t carry over, and getting SAP and DevOps teams working together on shared infrastructure takes real coordination. Some organizations already have Kubernetes in place but have never had to integrate it with SAP, while others are starting from scratch.

This is where SUSE Rancher for SAP Applications can help. Kalafian walks through the full stack: SUSE Rancher Prime for centralized Kubernetes management across multi-cluster deployments, RKE2 as the certified Kubernetes distribution for SAP workloads, SUSE Linux Micro as the lightweight immutable OS designed for secure minimal-footprint environments, SUSE Storage for persistent volumes and SUSE Security for container-level vulnerability scanning and runtime protection. SUSE Observability rounds out the stack with monitoring, alerting and performance insights built for containerized environments, including the ability to trace back exactly where an issue originated.

A lower-cost path for virtualizing SAP HANA

In this podcast episode, you’ll also hear Kalafian talk about a significant update you might find interesting: as of November 2024, SUSE fully supports running SAP HANA on KVM in production environments. For organizations evaluating the cost of their VMware footprint, KVM now offers a viable, supported alternative. Current capabilities include multiple HANA systems on a single server, socket spanning and live mobility for the application server tier, with HANA certification also in progress. To learn more about KVM for SAP, check out this SAPInsider webinar coming up on March 11. 

Listen to the episode

The full conversation with Al Kalafian is available now on The Future is Open podcast. Whether you’re working through an S/4HANA migration, thinking through your SAP containerization strategy or just trying to get more out of the tools you already have, you’ll find something useful here.

Listen to the episode

Keep the conversation going

If you want to see what SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications or SUSE Rancher for SAP Applications can do for your environment, reach out to the SUSE team to start a conversation.