#NFS V4.1 HOW TO#

For instance, the SAP workload may experience higher than usual latency. While the storage layer fails over, the SAP application may experience вЂњdisturbanceвЂќ, depending on how long it takes for the NFS sessions to be redirected to a healthy zone. It is not necessary to re-mount the NFS shares to your Azure VMs after a zonal failure.

If using ZRS, in the case of a zonal failure, the NFS sessions are automatically redirected to a healthy zone, if using Private Endpoint to access the shares in the storage account. Two choices for data redundancy are offered: LRS (local, in zone synchronous data replication) and ZRS (synchronous replication of your data across all 3 availability zones). But that the storage latencies are sufficient for hosting SAP application layer shares in a very cost-effective manner.

Expectation on delivered storage latency is that it does not meet the level necessary for SAP databases. You only pay for the capacity of the deployed shares. The minimum size for a single NFS share on Azure Files is 100GB. Like ANF, Azure Files NFS eliminates the need to deploy, configure and maintain NFS clusters. As the name implies, it is based on Azure Files - Premium.

What about the new option Azure Files NFS v4.1 shares? This is a new Azure offering that is in a public preview stage. The minimum capacity pool size for ANF is 4 TiB, and such entry point is relatively high for customers with smaller requirements: for instance customers with smaller SAP Landscapes, only interested in using ANF for the SAP shared directories of the SAP application layer. If you are considering zonal deployment, keep in mind that ANF is not zone-aware, and data is not automatically replicated across Availability zones. ANF can deliver sub-milliseconds latency, and while this is not the topic of the blog, it is worth mentioning, that ANF is an excellent choice for deploying HANA DB as its latency and throughput characteristics meet SAPвЂ™s requirements for HANA deployments. Cross-region replication (in public preview) is a new ANF feature, based on SnapMirror, which allows cross-region replication of ANF volumes for DR purposes. ANF clusters have built in redundancy (within a single zone), and ANF comes with 99.99% availability SLA. When using NFS volumes on ANF, there is no need to deploy, configure and maintain NFS clusters. Cross-region replication for Disaster Recovery(DR) across availability zones is also to be configured and operated by you as a customer. If the SAP system is in a zonal deployment, the NFS cluster itself can also be deployed across Availability zones. On the other hand, because no specialized Azure components are required, such a solution can be deployed in any Azure region. That means that the TCO goes well beyond the cost of the Azure infrastructure components for such an NFS cluster. Once built, you are also responsible of all aspects of maintaining and operating the NFS cluster. When using highly-available NFS cluster, you are responsible for deploying and configuring these NFS clusters, including the HA configuration.

Highly available NFS cluster: either Pacemaker cluster with DRBD replication on SLES, or GlusterFS cluster on RHEL.

So far, when deploying highly available SAP ASCS/ERS instance on Linux VMs in Azure, you could deploy the sap shared directories on: What are the options for SAP shared directories?

#NFS V4.1 HOW TO#

You may be asking yourself, what are the differences and when should I use which option?В In this blog we explore the options and describe how to deploy highly available SAP system, using Azure Files NFS v4.1 shares, which recently entered public preview. On Azure, you have several different options for deploying вЂњsap shared directoriesвЂќ. Additionally, when deploying highly-available SAP system, file systems like /sapmnt/SID, usr/sap/SID/ASCS, also need to be protected and highly available. When deploying the SAP application layer of NetWeaver or S/4HANA, one of the requirements is to have directories like /sapmnt/SID, saptrans shared in the environment.

Nfs v4.1