Please find the full blog post from here.

This is a good news for most of the ERP users especially when you have SAP running in your production environment.

(see SAP Note 1173954 for details):
1. Since Jan 13, 2009, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1

Read the full details from the official announcement.

According to VMware KB Article 51306

VMware has identified a problem with RHEL5, RHEL4 U4, RHEL4 U3, SLES10, and SLES9 SP3 guest operating systems. Their file systems may become read-only in the event of busy I/O retry or path failover of the ESX Server’s SAN or iSCSI storage.

This issue may affect other Linux distributions based on early 2.6 kernels as well, such as Ubuntu 7.04

The same behavior is expected even on a native Linux environment, where the time required for the file system to become read-only depends on the number of paths available to a particular target, the multi-path software installed on the operating system, and whether the failing I/O was to an EXT3 Journal. However, the problem is aggravated in an ESX Server environment because ESX Server manages multiple paths to the storage target and provides a single path to the guest operating system, which effectively reduces the number of retries done by the guest operating system.

And the solution is:

This is not an ESX Server bug. This Linux kernel bug has been fixed as of version 2.6.22.

Note: This article does not supersede the Guest Operating System Installation Guide, a guest operating system upgrade may require an ESX Server upgrade as well.

For RHEL5, the resolution is to upgrade to Update 1, also refereed to as RHEL5.1

For RHEL4 U3 and RHEL U4, the resolution is to upgrade to Update 5, also refereed to as RHEL 4.5.

For SLES10, the resolution is to upgrade to SP2. For more information, see Novell KB TID 3605538.

For SLES9 SP3, the resolution is to upgrade to SP4, or SP3 Maintenance Release build 2.6.5-7.286.
For more information, see TID 3584352 – Filesystem goes read-only in VMware

For Ubuntu 7.04, the resolution is to upgrade to 7.10

Beside that,  I would also suggest you check Novell Support @

• Ext3 filesystem goes read-only without the underlying storage reporting errors
• Filesystem goes read-only in VMware

Hope you won’t need to go through unnecessary step. Enjoy!

It also support the P2V conversion process for Windows Server 2008. VM converter version 4 do support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft.

VMware Converter 4 Beta

Click here if you do not have a VMware account

Below is step by step guide with screen captured from the VM (my test machine is running on SLES10 SP2):

Tip: It is best to do a snapshot before you start this task, incase anything goes wrong.

1) This is my test VM machine. It is having one disk at beginning.

2) I am adding a 2GB volume into the VM. Click OK to continue.

3) Rescan to detect the new volume just added in VM Properties Screen.

Tip: Run following as root.

In this screen I actually run following commands:

a)# cat /proc/partitions

This will show the current volume in the server, which is the first portion in the screen capture. What we have on the server is only /dev/sda.

b)# rescan-scsi-bus.sh

This command will do a scan for all the /dev/sdx you have on the server. The new volume that we just add will get detected and show as /dev/sdb in my case.

c)# cat /proc/partitions

This is just to show the volume on the server again to confirm I got the new volume detected.

4) run fdisk to create the new Linux volume.

5.1) Format the volume into EXT3 File System.

Or you are using reiserfs? Please refer to following screen capture:

5.2) Format the volume into ReiserFS.

6) modify /etc/fstab to make sure the server will boot up with the new volume.

Modify /etc/fstab by adding a line which point /dev/sdb1 (the new volume) to moint into /sles (your mount point). The screen capture is for ReiserFS. If you are using EXT3, you may replace the “reiserfs” to “ext3” in the same line.

And, your job is done. No reboot required. Have fun.

SAP always have their internal certify program which certify from software to hardware level to ensure their users are compliance with the application requirement for the SAP deployment. You will see a big range of choice you can choose from the certify list from Unix, Linux to Windows as an example. On my case, we choose Novell SUSE Linux as we have a good relation with Novell which require minimum amount of software subscription to run our environment. At the same time, the latest version of SAP are recommended to run on SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 64 bits with MaxDB 7.5. SUSE Linux 10 is perform as you need on VMware. The support from Novell and VMware both are committed to the VM which run the SUSE Linux. This had been the important point of why I am choosing SuSE linux over the rest of the operating system available.

Now we talk about the VM with SAP, I started with the environment in DR for our SAP. Our DR today are fully virtualized with the ESX machines we have and commission with the EMC SAN storage for our DR purpose. If I would have to stick with physical servers, I may require to purchase 10 units of physical server and the operating cost VS single ESX server we have today is too high. We run the DR SAP with RDM (Raw Device Mapping) to ensure in disaster cases, we will have the performance require to handle the production. Although we lose the features, but it is fine as DR doesn’t active most of the time. To run SAP on DR with VM, my experience can tell is absolutely workable.

Now we go to production, to fully virtualize the entire SAP, it only able to happen if the environment is very small. We currently virtualize the Apps server on SAP to our VM. VMware provide HA/DRS which is the features we need for our production. Beside that, we can also easily increase the amount of apps server to support the business requirement during the quater or month end closing. Front end on VM is just absolutely right choice for us to reduce the amount of server we require. We are currently looking at the DB servers to further analyze the possibilities for virtualize. 8 Vcpu per VM is on the way, and that will be another opportunitties for us to virtualize more DB servers. 6 cores processors is out, and it provide the processing power require by the virtualization, and I am strongly believe VM is a must for every DC today, and virtualize mission critical DB no longer a dream.