Chapter 2. How business continuity is achieved with SAP Solutions
Chapter 2. How business continuity is achieved with SAP Solutions High availability and disaster recovery solutions for SAP are essential. Tier-1 application outages are costly and disruptive to the business. Even short periods of planned downtime for maintenance events such as software updates or hardware upgrades can negatively impact the end-user, IT productivity, as well as critical business processes. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions subscription provides high-availability SAP solutions as well as SAP HANA tested in-place upgrades and live patching capabilities for critical and important Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). 2.1. Red Hat Update Services for SAP Red Hat Update Services provides up to four years of support, including security patches and critical fixes for select minor releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When you upgrade to the minor release, binary compatibility and kernel stability ensure that your system remains stable and that both SAP and custom applications continue to execute smoothly. 2.2. Red Hat Insights dashboard for SAP Red Hat Insights analyzes IT infrastructure against Red Hat's constantly expanding knowledge base to provide real-time assessment for risks related to performance, availability, stability, and security. Previously an independent service offering, Red Hat Insights has further evolved into a family of proactive monitoring services and is included into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. RH Insights will help customers gain better operational efficiency and support in security and compliance risk management. For more information on Red Hat Insights, see Red Hat Insights product page. RHEL for SAP Solutions customers will gain the following benefits by using Red Hat Insights for monitoring your SAP environment: Auto detection and profiling of SAP workloads Intuitive grouping by SAP SystemID or within SAP dashboard SAP application specific recommendations, facts, and filter rules Support of automated remediation through corresponding Ansible playbooks for SAP Support of configuration drift analysis and policies based e.g. by SAP System ID Additional resources Red Hat Insights dashboard provides automatic discovery, health and security assessment for SAP HANA on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability solutions for SAP Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-on provides all the necessary packages for configuring a pacemaker-based cluster that provides reliability, scalability, and availability to critical production services. In addition, the components for the Red Hat High Availability solutions for SAP NetWeaver, S/4HANA and SAP HANA RHEL for SAP Solutions also provides the components required for support of the SAP HA interface. The interface allows customers to manage SAP ABAP application servers, which are controlled by the Red Hat HA solutions for SAP that uses SAP management tools like SAP MMC or SAP Landscape Manager. Additional resources For more information on Red Hat supported SAP HA scenarios, see the Red Hat HA Solutions for SAP HANA, S/4HANA and NetWeaver based SAP Applications . 2.4. Kernel Live Patching Kernel live patching allows customers to patch a running RHEL kernel with selected critical and important CVEs without rebooting the system. This provides operational efficiency to support mission critical infrastructure underpinning SAP business applications, where downtime is not an option, and security responsiveness is required. For more information about the kernel live patching solution and how it works, see the Red Hat Knowledgebase solution: For RHEL 7 Applying patches with kernel live patching For RHEL 8 Applying patches with kernel live patching Note Kernel live patching is supported starting with version 7.7 and 8.1 and above 2.5. In-place operating system upgrades As part of the RHEL for SAP Solutions subscription, Red Hat provides validated in-place upgrades of underlying operating system in context of SAP workloads. An in-place upgrade offers upgrading the RHEL system to a later major release of RHEL by replacing the existing operating system without removing applications. Doing so can greatly reduce the costs, for example, highly expensive hardware for an SAP HANA in-memory database does not need to be purchased twice. Additional resources For more information, see How to in-place upgrade SAP environments from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 .