Hit the Cloud Running

To help control IT costs and boost business agility, many SAP customers turn to virtualization and cloud computing. When they do, businesses tend to invest in a hybrid approach that allows them to provision software in on-demand infrastructures that are hosted on-premise. This on-demand/on-premise hybrid approach is known as “cloud enabling.”

SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management software, released in general availability June 1, provides management capabilities for this enabling technology, helping SAP customers deploy and manage existing on-premise SAP applications in virtualized data centers and cloud infrastructures.

The new product rounds out SAP’s virtualization and cloud management program.

An expert explains SaaS, PaaS, IaaS

“When we talk about cloud at SAP, there are two distinct areas,” says Dr. Markus Winter, chief product owner. “There are new applications built specifically for the cloud; this is Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service.”

“Then we have a very large installed customer-base that has our classic on-premise software,” Winter continues. “With SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management, we help our installed customer base on the transformation journey from their existing, traditional, physically installed systems to an environment that offers a cloud-like, on-demand experience, consuming Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud technology. We help them virtualize their systems. We help them centrally manage SAP landscapes in hybrid physical, virtualized or private/public cloud environments.”

SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management targets SAP Basis administrators, IT professionals responsible for configuring the SAP environment. It provides central management of an entire SAP landscape, bridging the gap between SAP application management and infrastructure management, and automates many routine administration tasks, including system cloning, copying, and refreshing.  This is cumbersome manual work, especially post-processing. Automating such routine tasks can significantly reduce operational costs.

Automatic virtualization for on-premise software

“Customers were spending a lot of time, and wading through 100-page manuals, to create system copies,” says Winter. SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management automates most of that. “We see customers who used to spend up to ten days going through a long process chain to perform such a system copy. With LVM, we eliminate waiting times and streamline the process. So our ramp up customers only needed a couple of hours. And, in our labs, we can do this now in less than an hour.”

Read on the next page: Future releases to bring further automatication

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