Powering SAP NetWeaver on RHEL 8

SAP NetWeaver marks the technical foundation for many of the SAP Business Applications. SAP and Red Hat have worked jointly to deliver timely support of SAP technology stack on Red Hat’s latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SAP officially announced the support for SAP NetWeaver based applications including SAP Business Suite, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 in production environments on February 27th. This adds to the existing SAP support for its major database products on RHEL 8, including SAP MaxDB, SAP ASE on Intel 64, and SAP HANA- on Intel 64, and also IBM's Power 9 platform. 

Whether it's supplier relationship management (SRM), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management (PLM), or enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP NetWeaver is at the core of making it possible to integrate these applications and deliver a unified business experience. 

With the certification of SAP NetWeaver on RHEL 8, customers can now benefit from RHEL 8's stable, flexible, and highly available OS foundation across their entire production SAP landscape. Customers may find further details and configuration best practices at SAP Note 2772999.

So, why should you consider RHEL for SAP Solutions in your NetWeaver deployments? 

Record-setting performance

When it comes to running NetWeaver on RHEL 8, high-performance application response time is an important performance characteristic to consider. 

Administrators using the sap-netweaver profile can tune RHEL for running SAP NetWeaver-based applications and improve performance. For example, one of the several variables that the sap-netweaver tuned profile adjusts is related to shared memory. For the SAP NetWeaver application server, shared memory is important for buffering database table data, and for handling data objects shared in the cross-transaction ABAP application buffer (using commands like EXPORT TO SHARED MEMORY / SHARED BUFFER). This can result in faster application response times. 

Enhanced high-availability

Since SAP NetWeaver is at the heart of many critical business applications, downtimes are costly for the business. To help provide high-availability for SAP NetWeaver environments, RHEL offers pacemaker-based cluster resource agents (SAPDatabase and SAPInstance). These resource agents are compatible with Standalone Enqueue Server version 1 (ENSA1), used with SAP NetWeaver deployments, and Standalone Enqueue Server version 2 (ENSA2), used with S/4 HANA 1809 or newer.

To learn more about setting up a highly available SAP NetWeaver deployment check out the Deploying Highly Available SAP NetWeaver-based Servers Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA add-on with Pacemaker knowledge base article for guidelines.

Efficient, proactive management and security tools

When deployed at scale, efficient and proactive management and security tools are needed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions includes Red Hat Smart Management and Red Hat Insights to meet these requirements. 

Red Hat Smart Management combines Red Hat Satellite with Red Hat Cloud Management Services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Together they can help you to provision, patch, configure, and control your development, test, and production systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, regardless of where they are running. 

When operating at scale, system management could be a challenge. With Red Hat Smart Management, you can more easily check that your systems have the latest security patches and quickly remediate configuration drift. Additionally, you get auditing capabilities and can report on the historical state of your systems.

Red Hat Insights delivers predictive operating system analytics that help you rapidly identify and remediate threats to availability, security, stability, and performance. Proactive, automated, targeted issue resolution helps your environment operate optimally and avoid problems and unplanned downtime. Red Hat Insights includes more than 1,000 rules, including many specific to SAP system configuration requirements and best practices, to identify vulnerabilities before they impact critical operations.

Enterprise-class stability

Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the RHEL for SAP Solutions subscription offers Red Hat Update Services for up to four years from general availability — including important and critical security patches and fixes — for select minor releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This means that when it comes to building a stable foundation for your critical SAP workloads including SAP NetWeaver, Red Hat has you covered.

World-class support

With Red Hat, support is simple and hassle-free. Red Hat works with SAP and certified hardware and cloud providers to deliver integrated support for your entire environment. Support teams across Red Hat and SAP work together to identify the underlying issue and resolve the problem quickly and efficiently.

To meet the evolving needs of modern businesses, SAP Netweaver continues to serve as a foundation in the SAP technology stack. When powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, customers choose an infrastructure platform that lets them focus on their SAP business environment, while relying on an SAP optimised OS platform and a trusted vendor to support them on the journey towards the Intelligent Enterprise.

Ready to get started with SAP Netweaver on RHEL? Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles for SAP NetWeaver (For example, sap-netweaver-preconfigure) can be used to assist with the OS-specific configuration and setup of SAP NetWeaver. Check out the blog here or email us at sap@redhat.com!