Solution Testing in the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center

Surgient and Microsoft's joint solution has been tested in Microsoft’s Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) in Redmond, Wash., against a complex, multi-tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture. For the implementation, Microsoft and Surgient IT professionals were challenged with the traditional issues surrounding test environment deployment: underutilized compute capacity, difficult setup and teardown, and limited cloning and replication. To address these challenges, existing physical infrastructure and content was quickly virtualized using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and then registered with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform. The combination of Microsoft virtualization and Surgient automation resulted in: a dramatically improved deployment process, further resource consolidation, simultaneous deployment of identical multi-machine SAP configurations, and a self-service experience for end users.

EEC Test Scenario


The Challenge:
Easily replicate, reserve, deploy, use, archive, and tear down multi-tier SAP NetWeaver deployments on shared, virtualized infrastructure for development & testing.

For this validation exercise, a traditional multi-tier SAP NetWeaver architecture was selected to illustrate the solution from Microsoft and Surgient. Traditionally, it can be extremely challenging to easily replicate, reserve, deploy, use, archive, and tear down this kind of complex application for use in development, testing, and production environments, especially when multiple environments are needed to support the efforts of multiple development, test, and QA professionals.

The traditional implementation of this service for use in Dev/Test looks something like the following illustration (Figure 1). Four physical servers, each with a specific tier of the service: Clients, Central Services, Application, and Database. This traditional implementation on non-virtualized infrastructure suffers from underutilized compute capacity and a difficult setup and configuration process, even as a unique instance.


Figure 1: Traditional Multi-Tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture

Challenges with the traditional non-virtualized, unmanaged implementation:

The Solution
In the lab, we used Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to convert the existing physical resources and their content into Microsoft Hyper-V hosts and VMs and used Surgient to further automate the deployment process. Figure 2 (below) shows the actual result of our validation exercise. In a relatively load-free environment, we were able to consolidate all four servers into a single Hyper-V host, freeing up the remaining three.


Figure 2: Virtualized & Automated Multi-Tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture with Maximum Consolidation

Naturally, with additional load added to the application, they might not all fit on the same machine… in that case, Surgient offers industry-leading cross-host fencing and isolation that enables you to actually split the IT Service across multiple hosts while maintaining network isolation. If we were to extend our example using this technology, you would get a scenario like the one show below in Figure 3. In this case, we’ve split the services across three hosts, but we’ve also added a second full instance running simultaneously… and we still have hardware to spare.


Figure 3: Virtualized & Automated Multi-Tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture under Load with Cross-Host Fencing

How We Did It

In this section, we'll break down the individual activities necessary to achieve the results described above. Read the descriptions and view the short video snippets to learn more.

SYSTEM SETUP

In the setup phase, we were able to easily leverage Microsoft virtualization technology to convert the existing physical resources & content into Hyper-V hosts with Hyper-V-based VMs. These resources were simply registered with the Surgient Platform, at which time they became available in the Surgient Library for deployment.

Setup Steps:


Figure 4: Convert Physical Servers to VMs & Deploy VMs on Hyper-V Hosts



Figure 5: Register Hosts & VMs with Surgient

SYSTEM EXECUTION

1. Log In, View Application and Server Configurations, and Deploy | View Demo Clip

In the execution phase, the user simply selects, reserves, and deploys the service, or multiple copies of the service, directly from the Surgient Library. If the user wishes to launch it right away and capacity is available, it is immediately provisioned and provided to the user. If instead the user makes a guaranteed reservation for sometime in the future (as show in the multiple video clips), Surgient logs the reservation, and when the time comes, it automatically provisions the system and makes it available for the moment the reservation begins, giving users ultimate flexibility in how they manage testing schedules.

Overall, both users and administrators gain significant benefits from this solution, including management of resources across globally distributed teams, automatic provisioning and cloning of complex, multi-tier IT services, seamless archiving and state transition, and detailed insight into how and when resources and capacity are being used.

In this demo clip:

2. Access Deployed Service, Take Snapshot, and Transition to Development

3. Access Snapshot for Analysis and Debugging | View Demo Clip

In this demo clip: