SAP NetWeaver High Availability Cluster 7.40 for IBM Power

All good things come in threes!

Over the last three months, SUSE has enhanced the IBM Power architecture for SLES with three new features.

1) SUSE Manager Server now Supported on IBM Power Systems

2) Launch of SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching for IBM Power

and now brand-new:

3) SAP NetWeaver High Availability Cluster 7.40 for IBM Power

What is behind this and what innovations are involved?

SAP provides new API commands supporting new functions for SAP NetWeaver landscapes. The certification ensures that
the cluster supports all these functions. Intended and unwanted scenarios are also tested and evaluated. Here is the direct
link to the certification web page for all certified solutions for SAP NetWeaver and high availability:

SAP Certified Solutions Directory

The sap-suse-cluster-connector API version 3 supports the following new functionality:

• Integration of the cluster with the SAP start framework sapstartsrv to ensure that SAP maintenance procedures do not break the cluster stability,
• Rolling Kernel Switch (RKS) awareness,
• Standard SAP installation to improve support processes,
  

  

The administration and maintenance of a cluster-based SAP NetWeaver landscape is thus considerably simplified and,
thanks to new functions, more reliable and flexible. We used for the certification SLES 12 Service Pack 2 on IBM POWER8 with SAP HANA 2.0.

You can find more information about the certification and some background details in these two SCN articles
High Availability Partner Information and Certified HA-Interface Partners.

By the way, we have also updated the Best Practices for Mission-Critical SAP Applications with some small POWER-specific
remarks, but the steps for the SAP NetWeaver installation are more or less the same as for x86-64. The updated
documentation will be published very soon.

That’s all for today. Thank you for reading. See you soon.
This is Fabian Herschel and Bernd Schubert blogging live from the SAP LinuxLab St. Leon-Rot,
where we’ve just added more POWER to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.