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SAP Business One: Azure

SAP Business One is available not only on LiveApps but also announcements have shown that clients are free to deploy SAP Business One to various Cloud Service Providers.

Azure network infrastructure

Deploying infrastructure in Azure for SAP Business One

The network infrastructure you need to deploy in Azure depends on whether you deploy a single Business One system for yourself. Or whether you are a hoster who hosts dozens of Business One systems for customers. There also might be slight changes in the design on whether how you connect to Azure. Going through different possibilities, one design where you have a VPN connectivity into Azure and where you extend your Active Directory through VPN or ExpressRoute into Azure.

VPN%20Tunnel%20for%20SAP%20Business%20One%20Azure%201

The simplified configuration presented introduces several security instances that allow to control and limit routing. It starts with

  • The router/firewall on the customer on-premises side.
  • The next instance is the Azure Network Security Group that you can use to introduce routing and security rules for the Azure VNet that you run your SAP Business one configuration in.
  • In order to avoid that users of Business One client can as well see the server that runs the Business One server, which runs the database, you should separate the VM hosting the Business one client and the business one server in two different subnets within the VNet.
  • You would use Azure NSG assigned to the two different subnets again in order to limit access to the Business one server.

A more sophisticated version of an Azure network configuration is based on the Azure documented best practices of hub and spoke architecture. The architecture pattern of hub and spoke would change the first simplified configuration to one like  the image.

For cases where the users are connecting through the internet without any private connectivity into Azure, the design of the network in Azure should be aligned with the principles documented in the Azure reference architecture for DMZ between Azure and the Internet.

VPN Tunnel for SAP Business One Azure 1
  • Business One database server
  • SQL Server as DBMS
  • SAP HANA as DBMS
  • Business One client server

For the database type, SQL Server and SAP HANA are available. Independent of the DBMS, you should read the document Considerations for Azure Virtual Machines DBMS deployment for SAP workload to get a general understanding of DBMS deployments in azure VMs and the related networking and storage topics.

Though emphasized in the specific and generic database documents already, you should make yourself familiar with:

These documents should help you to decide on the selection of storage types and high availability configuration.

In principle you should:

  • Use Premium SSDs over Standard HDDs. To learn more about the available disk types, see our article Select a disk type
  • Use Azure Managed disks over unmanaged disks
  • Make sure that you have sufficient IOPS and I/O throughput configured with your disk configuration
  • Combine /hana/data and /hana/log volume in order to have a cost efficient storage configuration

For deploying SQL Server as DBMS for Business One, go along the document SQL Server Azure Virtual Machines DBMS deployment for SAP NetWeaver.

Rough sizing estimates for the DBMS side for SQL Server are:

 

Number of users

vCPUs

Memory

Example VM types

up to 20

4

16 GB

D4s_v3, E4s_v3

up to 40

8

32 GB

D8s_v3, E8s_v3

up to 80

16

64 GB

D16s_v3, E16s_v3

up to 150

32

128 GB

D32s_v3, E32s_v3

 

The sizing listed above should give an idea of where to start with. It may be that you need less or more resources, in which case an adaption on Azure is easy. A change between VM types is possible with just a restart of the VM.

Using SAP HANA as DBMS the following sections you should follow the considerations of the document SAP HANA on Azure operations guide.

For high availability and disaster recovery configurations around SAP HANA as database for Business One in Azure, you should read the documentation SAP HANA high availability for Azure virtual machines and the documentation pointed to from that document.

For SAP HANA backup and restore strategies, you should read the document Backup guide for SAP HANA on Azure Virtual Machines and the documentation pointed to from that document.

For these components, storage considerations are not the primary concern. nevertheless, you want to have a reliable platform. Therefore, you should use Azure Premium Storage for this VM, even for the base VHD. Sizing the VM, with the data given in SAP Business One Hardware Requirements Guide. For Azure, you need to focus and calculate with the requirements stated in chapter 2.4 of the document. As you calculate the requirements, you need to compare them against the following documents to find the ideal VM for you:

Compare the number of CPUs and memory needed to what is documented by Microsoft. Also, keep network throughput in mind when choosing the VMs.

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