Vmware Adapter for sap landscape Management Administration Guide for LaMa Administrators OpenTopic

Following are the key benefits of deploying VMware Adapter for SAP Landscape Management:

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Greater operational continuity through centralized management, visibility and control of your entire

SAP landscape using a single console

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Increased operational agility by accelerating application life-cycle management operations and faster

response to workload fluctuations

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Reduced time, effort and cost to manage and operate your SAP systems through automation of SAP

BASIS tasks and leveraging adapter's functions such as VMware vSphere Storage vMotion, network

migration and linked online clone and copy

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Increases SAP BASIS and IT admin productivity by automating manual operational tasks and enabling

self-service capability

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Lowers total cost of ownership since reduced OpEx leads to increased cost savings

Reference Architecture

The following diagram illustrates the components of a VLA execution environment and their relationship to

one another:

Figure 2

‑1.  VLA Execution Environment

The key components in this diagram are :

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SAP Systems – Each of these systems consist of software running on one or more machines (bare metal,

or in the case of VLA environments, virtual machines [VMs] hosted on VMware vSphere™ products

[ESXi systems managed by vCenter Server™]) that perform some business function, such as order

processing, accounts payable, general ledger, inventory management, etc. Each SAP System consists of

one or more components. When all of the components are up and running, the SAP System is running.

When all of the components are stopped, the SAP system is stopped. If some systems are running and

some are not, the SAP system is in an intermediate state.

VMware Adapter for SAP Landscape Management Administration Guide for LaMa Administrators

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The SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) VM – The SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) application runs

on ABAP or Java stack in a Linux based guest OS. It provides a web-based user interface for SAP BASIS

administrators to create / destroy / configure / and otherwise operate on and provision SAP Systems

and their underlying machinery (bare metal or virtualized).

The SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) has an extensible architecture that allows SAP and third-party

vendors, for example VMware, to create plugins to extend certain features.

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The VMware Adapter for SAP Landscape Management — This is a plugin to LaMa that extends how

LaMa integrates with the underlying systems virtualized with VMware vSphere (see next bullet),

optimizing and extending the functionality for certain operations, such as activating (powering on) and

deactivating (powering off), copying and cloning systems, and automation of these copying and cloning

operations.

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ESXi and vCenter Server (collectively called vSphere) – ESXi is VMware’s premier hypervisor product.

VI administrators typically install it on bare-metal server-class computers, with VMs running guest

operating systems (OSes) with SAP Systems as applications within the guests. vCenter Server is

VMware’s premier product for managing environments virtualized with ESXi. Collectively called

vSphere, these products provide an enterprise-class environment with features for creating clusters,

load balancing VMs between host systems (ESXi instances), fault tolerance, virtual networking, virtual

storage, and more. In VLA environments, the VLA appliance (next bullet) runs in a VM on this

infrastructure.

Note   It is possible to run ESXi in a nested environment. In this case, VI administrators install ESXi in a

VM running in a vSphere environment. For more information on vSphere Templates, see 

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.hostclient.doc

%2FGUID-F40130B0-0194-4A41-91FA-1A967721924B.html

. For more information about vApps, see 

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.powercli.ug.doc%2FGUID-

CFCCBEAC-74DD-4259-9D9D-1FCCCB185218.html

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VMware vRealize Orchestrator™ – This VMware product helps VI administrators automate their

environments by creating work flows (essentially scripts) that perform VI administrative actions,

including complex actions that may take multiple steps, involve loops, conditions, etc.

VMware vRealize Orchestrator workflows can handle exceptions automatically or can pause waiting for

a VI administrator to mitigate an issue. See the next bullet for how VLA uses

VMware vRealize Orchestrator.

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VMware Landscape Management Appliance (VLA) – This part of the VLA product is a virtual

appliance. Collectively, it consists of one or more web services that accepts commands from (previously

discussed) LaMa VLA Adapter and take appropriate actions to implement the commands, typically

with the help of the (previously discussed) VMware vRealize Orchestrator. For example::

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When a SAP BASIS administrator activates (powers on) a SAP System via LaMa, the VLA Adapter

sends commands to the 

vla-service

 (discussed later in this topic) to power on the underlying

VMs. The 

vla-service

 in turn invokes a VLA-specific workflow on the

VMware vRealize Orchestrator to turn on the VMs in the underlying vSphere infrastructure. An

analogous action occurs when a SAP BASIS administrator deactivates (powers off) a SAP System.

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When a SAP BASIS administrator copies a SAP System, the VLA Adapter sends commands to the

vla-service

 which in turn invokes a VLA-specific VMware vRealize Orchestrator workflow to

create vSphere copies of the VMs on which the SAP Systems reside, configuring the VMs according

to the parameters provided by the SAP BASIS administrator in the LaMa web user interface.

The VLA Appliance contains several components, including:

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A purpose-configured and hardened operating system (OS)

Chapter 2 Overview of VMware Adapter for SAP Landscape Management: Purpose, Benefits, Architecutre and Components

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