Best Practice 15.1 – Follow operating system guidelines for SAP performance

SAP provides specific guidance on how best to tune for optimal performance for each of the operating systems that are supported for the SAP software you are deploying. Be sure to read all of the relevant SAP documentation on the operating system on which you are deploying both to understand the relevant tuning parameters and to take advantage of any operating system-specific options to make performance tuning easier and more dynamic.

Suggestion 15.1.1 – Review operating system-related SAP notes prior to installation, version update, or infrastructure change

When building or updating your operating system (through automation or manually) confirm that the appropriate performance settings specific to your combination of SAP software and operating system version are applied.

Suggestion 15.1.2 – Evaluate operating system vendor-supplied SAP tuning

Red Hat and SUSE provide images and repositories which contain tools and configuration optimized for running SAP. These are available in the AWS Marketplace or in a bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) model.

Vendors are invested in ensuring that their operating systems are optimised for the SAP application. Using vendor-supplied tuning tools such as saptune or the (Ansible) system roles for Red Hat Enterprise Linux can assist in defining a known baseline for performance tuning. While this does not preclude tuning the operating system to best accommodate your specific SAP workload, these tools can reduce the effort associated with researching, calculating and applying the most common requirements. Configuration associated with the tuned daemon can also adjust dynamically using information it gathers from the system, including CPU count and available memory.

Suggestion 15.1.3 – Apply relevant network parameters to the operating system

SAP system performance can be seriously impacted by network misconfiguration, particularly in SAP HANA scale-out database designs as well as in communication between different application server instances and the database instance in a system environment. While in many cases in AWS, the maximum network throughput of an instance is dictated by the instance family and size, tuning of the network settings at the operating system level and in the SAP software itself can have an impact.

Refer to the following AWS and SAP recommendations: