VMware gets SAP certification

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SAP, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor has given its full support to VMware in a move said to counter Oracle and respond to growing customer demand in managing virtualised environments.

Servers from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM are now certified platforms for SAP applications to run in 64-bit Windows production environments on VMware Infrastructure.

The virtualisation vendor said that several Sun servers running Solaris x64 have also been certified, making VMware the only virtualisation software vendor with SAP-certified servers for production systems in Linux, Windows and Solaris x64 operating environments.

Mukesh Sharma, senior manager for VMware alliances in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region told IT PRO this is just the endorsement SAP customers have been looking for.

"This is a welcome announcement to those SAP customers who may have been holding back deploying virtualisation technology in their mission-critical SAP ERP environments," he said.

He said some were concerned the software might be resource intensive and slow to run and so would see the support certification as "a clear path to start to look at wider deployments of mission-critical applications in virtualised environments".

This was a view shared by enterprise architecture and virtualisation specialist, Neil Macehiter. The research director at analyst firm, Macehiter Ward-Dutton said the announcement was a clear sign that SAP recognised that virtual environments are a key operating platform for their applications.

"Given the fact that large-scale SAP ERP deployments can result in server sprawl as a result of user demand and application architecture, users can now have the confidence to exploit the server consolidation opportunities of virtualisation," he said.

He added that, in the longer term the tie-up has the potential to allow for dynamic workload provisioning, migration and optimisation: "But that's only if enough intelligence can be provided from within the SAP environment that would allow VMware to respond to workload changes win any kind of automated way," said Macehiter to IT PRO.

He also said the timing was marked given that Oracle recently at its annual conference made a number of announcements about its own Xen-based hypervisor technology.

Benno Weidmann, vice president of hosting infrastructure management at SAP Hosting said VMware had already been of internal benefit to SAP by automating internal business processes.

"Altogether, virtualisation helps us to lower costs, develop and automate user services, better manage hardware and software lifecycles and improve production and capacity planning across a more unified infrastructure."

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