SAP on Microsoft Azure

Architecture and Administration

Ravi Kashyap

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781493220175
• eBook ISBN: 9781493220182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Run your SAP system on Microsoft Azure with this guide to architecture design and system administration! Get to know Microsoft Azure and its prerequisites, service options, and supported SAP products. Plan and build your system to last with high availability and disaster recovery, and then see how to migrate and operate your system once it's live. Learn to configure and use encryption, backups, automation, compliance, and other key features. Make your cloud project painless! a. Designing Your System
Begin with design considerations: sizing, availability, security, cost, and more. Then understand Microsoft Azure's architecture and recommended practices for architecture design and service configuration. Walk through network architecture, storage options, and optimizations for your system.
b. Operating Your System
Make sure your system is operating at peak efficiency with tools like SAP Solution Manager and Azure monitor, and keep the bottom line in mind with cost management tools.
c. Protecting Your System
Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Make sure your system can run without significant downtime (high availability) and can be restored in the event of failure (disaster recovery). Leverage backup mechanisms, shared storage, and encryption to make your system resilient!
d. Preparing for Migration
Evaluate your migration readiness, preview the states of any migration project, and begin planning your migration.
1) Architecture
2) Deployment models and infrastructure
3) High availability and disaster recovery
4) Automation
5) Encryption
6) Governance and compliance
7) Backup and recovery
8) Migration
9) Operations and monitoring
10) Case studies

1 Introduction to Microsoft Azure

Cloud computing is more important than ever in this fast-changing world where businesses need to adapt quickly to changes in demand and customer preferences. Cloud computing comes in several shapes and forms, and Microsoft has become one of the leading providers with its extensive cloud service portfolio.

The term cloud has become synonymous with IT infrastructure, and a few older terminologies have been rephrased to take advantage of the cloud movement. What used to be called hosting is now called private cloud, making way for the term public cloud to refer to the computing services available over the Internet.

This chapter will walk you through various cloud models, the advantages of adopting the cloud service, and how services and service level agreements (SLAs) work in the context of the cloud service known as Microsoft Azure.

1.1 What Is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure, originally called Windows Azure, is a public cloud computing platform by Microsoft that provides hundreds of services for creating or hosting applications that range from simple websites to enterprise applications such as SAP. These services can be accessed either via the Microsoft Azure portal (using a web browser or desktop app) or an application programming interface (API).

For application folks, the location or connectivity to the data center traditionally hasn’t been as important, but if you’re an infrastructure person or just curious, imagine a remote location with several buildings hosting a massive number of servers with interconnected networks. Now think about being able to access these servers or services from anywhere in the world on demand and paying only for what you use. Now that’s powerful!

Throughout the book, we’ll talk about how this infrastructure and these buildings translate into Microsoft Azure services, that is, virtual machines (VMs) that are used to deploy and scale applications at the speed of the cloud.

1.2 Cloud Deployment Options

We mentioned that Microsoft Azure is a public cloud, but what does that mean: Is there a private cloud too? Can both public and private clouds be used together? This section discusses the deployment options of cloud services and addresses these questions.

1.2.1 Public Cloud versus Private Cloud

A public cloud makes IT infrastructure available over the Internet in the form of self-service, often in a pay-as-you-go model as opposed to a private cloud, where a long-term contract must be in place with a service provider furnishing the infrastructure.

Table 1.1 shows some of the common differences between a private cloud and a public cloud.

Public Cloud	Private Cloud
Billed per second (pay-as-you-go)	Monthly or yearly contract
Highly scalable on demand	Scale often comes with large lead times
Instant provisioning	No instant provisioning
Services configured by end user	Service configured by service provider
Use of multiple programming languages	Fewer or no programming languages available
Open-source tools integration widely used	Fewer integration with open-source tools
Service management and monitoring by organization	Service management and monitoring by service provider

Table 1.1 Public versus Private Cloud

1.2.2 Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud is an architecture where IT infrastructure (and workloads) span more than one environment. It may be a public cloud (e.g., Microsoft Azure) and on-premise, public cloud and private cloud, or two public clouds (sometimes also called multi-cloud).

Hybrid cloud has several use cases such as the following:

• Production system on-premise and nonproduction system in cloud
• Disaster recovery (DR) systems in cloud and primary systems on-premise, as shown in Figure 1.1
• SAP systems in private cloud ...

Table of contents

• Dear Reader
• Notes on Usage
• Table of Contents
•   Preface
• 1   Introduction to Microsoft Azure
• 2   SAP on Microsoft Azure
• 3   Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Offerings for SAP
• 4   System Design Framework
• 5   Governance and Compliance
• 6   Infrastructure Architecture Guidance
• 7   Resiliency
• 8   Backup Architecture and Mechanisms
• 9   Automation
• 10   Encryption
• 11   Migrating SAP to Microsoft Azure
• 12   Operations
• 13   Case Study
• 14   Outlook
• The Author
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes