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SAP now supports 64-bit Windows on VMware
December 12, 2007
Virtualization is the future. And the near future belongs to the kind of virtualization where you take a machine image as-is, and instead of running it directly on the bare metal, you run it within a VM host. In other words, you don’t change the configuration of the hosted operating system (OS), or of the applications it’s running, at all.
Contrast that arrangement with two other approaches.
The first alternative is this: some folks ask why the industry doesn’t instead push for scalability by running multiple instances of an application within a single instance of the OS. That arrangement is ‘virtual’ in that each instance of the app should believe that it’s the only thing running. Such apps are designed with the fundamental assumption that every resource (disk, RAM, CPU) is virtual.
That model is a great one to shoot for in the long term. But in the short run, the problem is that so few of the critical line-of-business applications are designed that way. Many such apps are designed with the fundamental assumption that there can only be a single instance.
The second alternative is based on the following question: if we’re going to run all of these instances of some OS on a single piece of hardware, why not just collapse them into a single instance which runs all of the applications? The answer is that, in the IT world, each server ideally has a single role. The mantra has been: get this machine to do one thing correctly, and then don’t mess with it again. Note here that virtualization isn’t typically an end unto itself, but rather a means to greater efficiency, greater resource utilization.
Thus, the quickest way to achieve higher resource (power consumption, primarily) utilization is to take multiple existing server instances and run them, unchanged, on a single piece of more powerful and efficient hardware.
Anyway, check out this link. In summary, SAP now fully supports its applications on 64-bit Windows, running on VMware infrastructure.
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