This guide provides an overview of how SAP Business One works with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and provides details that you can use when planning the implementation of a new SAP Business One system.
For more information about how to deploy SAP Business One on GCP, see the SAP Business One deployment guide.
SAP supports Business One on GCP with either SAP HANA or Microsoft SQL Server.
This guide, as well as the SAP Business One Deployment Guide, covers Business One with SAP HANA only.
SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database that provides high-performance analytics and real-time data processing. SAP Business One is a business management software designed for small and medium-sized enterprises.
When running SAP Business One and SAP HANA on GCP, customers can leverage the ease of provisioning, high scalability, and redundant GCP infrastructure capabilities to run their business-critical workloads cost-effectively. GCP provides a set of physical assets, such as computers and hard disk drives, and virtual resources, such as Compute Engine virtual machines (VMs), located in Google data centers around the world.
When you deploy SAP Business One and SAP HANA on GCP, you deploy to VMs running on Compute Engine. Compute Engine VMs provide persistent disks, which function similarly to physical disks in a desktop or a server, but are automatically managed for you by Compute Engine to ensure data redundancy and optimized performance.
For information from SAP about SAP Business One, see the SAP Help Portal.
GCP consists of many cloud-based services and products. When running SAP products on GCP, you mainly use the IaaS-based services offered through Compute Engine and Cloud Storage, as well as some platform-wide features, such as tools.
See the GCP platform overview for important concepts and terminology. This guide duplicates some information from the overview for convenience and context.
For an overview of considerations that enterprise-scale organizations should take into account when running on GCP, see best practices for enterprise organizations.
Interacting with GCP
GCP offers three main ways to interact with the platform, and your resources, in the cloud:
Important: If you are using the gcloud command-line tool, always make sure that you are using the latest version of the GCP SDK. To install the latest version of the GCP SDK, see the gcloud install instructions.
GCP services
SAP deployments typically utilize some or all of the following GCP services:
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Service |
Description |
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Connects your VM instances to each other and to the Internet. Each instance is a member of either a legacy network with a single global IP range, or a recommended subnet network, where the instance is a member of a single subnetwork that is a member of a larger network. Note that a network cannot span GCP projects, but a GCP project can have multiple networks. |
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Creates and manages VMs with your choice of operating system and software stack. |
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Persistent disks are available as either standard hard disk drives (HDD) or solid-state drives (SSD). |
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Browser-based tool for managing Compute Engine resources. Use a template to describe all of the Compute Engine resources and instances you need. You don't have to individually create and configure the resources or figure out dependencies, because the Cloud Console does that for you. |
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You can back up your SAP database backups into Cloud Storage for added durability and reliability, with replication. |
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Provides visibility into the deployment, performance, uptime, and health of Compute Engine, network, and persistent disks. |
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Provides unified control over permissions for GCP resources. Control who can perform control-plane operations on your VMs, including creating, modifying, and deleting VMs and persistent disks, and creating and modifying networks. |
Pricing and quotas
You can use the pricing calculator to estimate your usage costs. For more pricing information, see Compute Engine pricing, Cloud Storage pricing, and Stackdriver pricing.
GCP resources are subject to quotas. If you plan to use high-CPU or high-memory machines, you might need to request additional quota. For more information, see Compute Engine resource quotas.
VM types
The following VM types are officially supported by SAP for production use on GCP.
|
GCP Instance Type |
vCPU |
Memory(GiB) |
Operating System |
CPU Platform |
|
n1-highmem-32 |
32 |
208 |
SLES 12 SP1 |
Intel Broadwell |
|
n1-highmem-64 |
64 |
416 |
SLES 12 SP1 |
Intel Broadwell |
The operating system you choose must be compatible with the version of SAP Business One you plan to install. For more information see the SAP product availability matrix. For more information about different instance types and their use cases, see the machine types documentation.
Storage configuration
SAP HANA is an in-memory database, so data is mostly stored and processed in memory. Protection against data loss is provided by saving the data to a persistent storage location.
To achieve optimal performance, the storage solution used for SAP HANA data and log volumes should meet SAP's storage KPIs. Google has worked with SAP to certify SSD persistent disks for use as the storage solution for SAP HANA workloads, as long as you use one of the supported VM types. VMs with 32 or more vCPUs and a 834 GB volume for data and log files can achieve up to 400 MB/sec for writes, and 400 MB/sec for reads.
Storage for SAP HANA backup is configured with standard HDD persistent disks. Standard HDD persistent disks are efficient and economical for handling sequential read-write operations, but are not optimized to handle high rates of random input-output operations per second (IOPS). SAP HANA uses sequential IO with large blocks to back up the database. Standard HDD persistent disks provide a low-cost, high-performance option for this scenario.
The SAP HANA backup volume size is designed to provide optimal baseline and burst throughput as well as the ability to hold several backup sets. Holding multiple backup sets in the backup volume makes it easier to recover your database if necessary.
Memory configuration
See the supported VM types table.
Operating system configuration
See the supported VM types table.
Running SAP Business One and SAP HANA on GCP requires you to bring your own license (BYOL). For more information about SAP licensing, contact SAP.
For the purpose of this guide, you can follow the steps to create your VM instance, and apply your existing license to the instance before the grace period ends.
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