Book Image

SAP on Azure Implementation Guide

By : Nick Morgan, Bartosz Jarkowski
Book Image

SAP on Azure Implementation Guide

By: Nick Morgan, Bartosz Jarkowski

Overview of this book

Cloud technologies have now reached a level where even the most critical business systems can run on them. For most organizations SAP is the key business system. If SAP is unavailable for any reason then potentially your business stops. Because of this, it is understandable that you will be concerned whether such a critical system can run in the public cloud. However, the days when you truly ran your IT system on-premises have long since gone. Most organizations have been getting rid of their own data centers and increasingly moving to co-location facilities. In this context the public cloud is nothing more than an additional virtual data center connected to your existing network. There are typically two main reasons why you may consider migrating SAP to Azure: You need to replace the infrastructure that is currently running SAP, or you want to migrate SAP to a new database. Depending on your goal SAP offers different migration paths. You can decide either to migrate the current workload to Azure as-is, or to combine it with changing the database and execute both activities as a single step. SAP on Azure Implementation Guide covers the main migration options to lead you through migrating your SAP data to Azure simply and successfully.
Table of Contents (5 chapters)

Choosing the right migration method

To a large extent the migration method will depend on whether the migration is homogeneous or heterogeneous. In general, the migration is much easier if it is homogeneous and there are multiple different ways of performing the migration depending on the downtime window available. Heterogeneous migrations are always more complex, and if you need to minimize downtime then specialized tools may be required.

Homogenous migration

A homogenous migration is the easiest to execute, as the operating system, DBMS, and hardware platform remain the same and no data conversion is required. The database files use the same format and therefore they can be copied and attached to the new database. The simplest form of homogenous migration is a backup/restore, but, depending on the database size, this can be quite slow. An alternative can be to use DBMS replication to live replicate the database into Azure.

Migration using backup/restore

One of the...