SAP Adaptive Computing Interface for Hyper-V

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SAP Netweaver Adaptive Computing Controller 7.2 which has finished it’s ramp-up phase in May 2010 brought a very interesting capability for virtualized landscapes. Via a web service client, ACC can now detect and control virtual machines as platforms for its operation. Let’s have a look how this capability can be used for Hyper-V.

SAP Adaptive Computing is an interesting technology available since many years. The basic idea of SAP ACC is to separate a SAP application (or better its technical components) from an operating system. The SAP Adaptive Computing landscape consists of an Adaptive Computing controller, a pool of servers and a storage subsystem. SAP applications are installed into this storage subsystem and can be activated on demand at any pool node. This kind of application virtualization gives a lot of freedom in changing server roles for workload balancing but also for avoiding downtime for maintenance. Migration of server hardware or replacements are literally as easy as pushing a button. This whole concept worked since years with pools of physical servers and has now been extended to work also with virtual machines.

The basic idea with VM’s is, to allow SAP ACC to determine if there are VM’s available, start, stop or migrate VM’s in a Live Migration environment. At the Hyper-V side, all this functions are available inside the System Center Virtual Machine Manager. While normally these tasks would be executed inside the SCVMM GUI, they are also exposed via PowerShell cmdlets for programmatic use. Here is the point where the ACC Interface to Hyper-V comes into place. This interface is basically a Web Service provider which receives the Web Service calls from SAP ACC and translates them into PowerShell cmdlets being executed. The output of the respective cmdlet is than taken back to SAP ACC. The picture below illustrates this setup.

 

 

 

 

We plan to make soon a prototype of this interface available. If you want to program your own Web Service provider, you'll need the SAP ACC Web Service API specification (available from SAP) and the SCVMM cmdlet specification available at MSDN.

- Josef