Technical Insights: Achieving SAP Workload Resiliency with Microsoft Azure & SUSE

SUSE and Microsoft Azure recently delivered a joint webinar focused on “Achieving SAP Workload Resiliency with Microsoft Azure and SUSE”. This webinar, now available on-demand, provided invaluable insights into designing resilient architectures, implementing best practices, and minimizing downtime for SAP workloads on the Microsoft Azure cloud. This blog post will highlight the key concepts discussed.

Key Pillars of SAP Resiliency on Azure

The webinar emphasized several key guiding principles for architecting SAP solutions on Azure:

• Comprehensive Support: Azure is designed to support a wide range of SAP-certified operating systems, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SLES for SAP Applications, and diverse SAP products, including SAP HANA and S/4HANA.
• Maximized Uptime: Azure continuously enhances its infrastructure and high availability options, such as availability zones, to ensure resilient SAP deployments. SUSE collaborates with Microsoft to optimize cluster stability and failover capabilities.
• Lowered Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Microsoft is committed to providing cost-optimized scenarios for SAP deployments on Azure, including support for multi-SID clusters.

Strategic Deployment Options for Resiliency

The webinar highlighted the importance of selecting the appropriate deployment model to achieve the desired level of resiliency for your SAP environment. 

• Availability Sets: While providing basic redundancy within a region, Availability Sets are an older technology.
• Availability Zones: Availability Zones offer higher resiliency by distributing SAP systems across physically separate locations within an Azure region.
• Virtual Machine Scale Sets: For new SAP deployments, Virtual Machine Scale Sets are the recommended approach. They provide benefits of Availability Zones with improved fault domain distribution.

Enhancing High Availability for SAP Components

The webinar provided specific guidance on configuring high availability (HA) for key SAP components.

• SAP HANA: Deploying primary and secondary HANA databases across Availability Zones with automated failover using SUSE Pacemaker cluster and the SAPHanaSR-angi resource agent is a recommended practice.
• SAP Central Services: Similar to HANA, deploying SAP Central Services across Availability Zones with the SimpleMount architecture enhances reliability and simplifies management.
• SAP Application Servers: Redundancy for SAP Application Servers is achieved by deploying multiple instances across different VMs and Availability Zones.

Optimizing Storage with Azure NetApp Files

For customers utilizing Azure NetApp Files (ANF), the webinar detailed how to leverage ANF Application Volume Group (AVG) in conjunction with Availability Zones to optimize storage and improve resiliency.

Proactive Maintenance with Azure Scheduled Events

The webinar emphasized the importance of proactive maintenance to minimize disruptions. Azure Scheduled Events notify VMs about upcoming maintenance, and tools like the Azure Events AZ resource agent can be utilized to automate responses to these events.

Disaster Recovery (DR) Strategies for SAP on Azure

The webinar also covered critical considerations for designing a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy for SAP workloads on Azure, and key components of a DR plan.

Minimizing Planned Downtime for SAP Maintenance

The webinar provided valuable techniques for reducing planned downtime associated with maintenance activities. These include:

• Leveraging Azure Scheduled Maintenance features.
• Performing HANA rolling updates.
• Utilizing SUSE’s Live Patching for the kernel and user space.
• Implementing best practices to avoid split-brain scenarios during cluster maintenance.
• Security hardening.
  

SUSE’s Commitment to SAP on Azure

SUSE is committed to providing robust solutions and long-term support for SAP customers on Azure. This commitment is demonstrated by:

• Extended lifecycle support for SLES for SAP Applications 15.
• Ongoing development of SLES for SAP 16 with new features and enhancements, including browser-based installation, Ansible automations, SELinux, and Trento improvements.
• Tools like Trento to simplify SAP landscape management.

Upgrade Considerations for SAP HANA

For customers considering upgrading to SAPHanaSR-angi, SUSE provides guidance on in-place upgrades.

Learn more 

To delve deeper into this topic, we invite you to watch our on-demand webinar.

Join SUSE at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference Orlando 2025.

Want to learn more or discuss your SAP on Azure strategy? Come meet the SUSE team in person at the SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference Orlando 2025. We will be at the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) in Orlando, Florida, from May 19-21. We look forward to seeing you there.

We hope this recap has provided valuable insights into achieving SAP workload resiliency on Microsoft Azure with SUSE.