SAP HANA (Formerly Known as FAQ 1619)

Sizing Guidelines

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• Overview
• Change Summary
• Certified Configuration Settings
• Additional Host Settings
• A Three HANA Node Setup
• Sizing Recommendations
• Fibre Channel Connection Matrices
• Previous Changes

Overview

This guide provides SAP HANA storage sizing guidelines for DataCore SANsymphony-managed storage hardware. DataCore SANsymphony can be installed in front of any SAP HANA certified storage device using Fibre Channel (FC) connections and serve highly available storage to SAP HANA certified compute nodes.

Fundamental SAP HANA administration skills and understanding of SAP-specific terminology are assumed as well as DataCore SANsymphony terminology and configuration.

Change Summary

Refer to DataCore FAQ 838 for the latest version of the FAQ.

Changes since April 2025

Refer to Previous Changes for a list of earlier updates to this FAQ.

Certified Configuration Settings

The Storage Array

This is the storage connected to the DataCore Server that will be used for DataCore SANsymphony disk pools managing SAP HANA virtual disk (vDisk) storage sources. The storage must use Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity and meet SAP HANA certified storage requirements. Refer to the SAP HANA Hardware Directory for details.

The DataCore Server

Server Hardware

The DataCore Server must be a physical machine. DataCore SANsymphony instances running in virtual machines (VM) are not supported for SAP HANA deployments. For a complete list of SAP-certified vendors providing server hardware that can be used for DataCore Servers, visit the official SAP website.

Operating System

Only Windows ‘Standard’ or ‘Datacenter’ editions are supported. Other Windows editions (‘Essential’ or ‘Storage Server’) are not supported for SAP HANA. For more information, refer to the Prerequisites section.

DataCore recommends the use of ‘vanilla’ Windows operating system deployments although a server hardware vendor’s own ‘OEM’ installation is allowed only if it is either a ‘Standard’ or ‘Datacenter’ edition.

DataCore SANsymphony Software

DataCoreDataCore SANsymphony 10.0 PSP12 or later.

Server Ports (FC SCSI Only)

FC SCSI only. iSCSI and NVMe/oF ports are not certified. Any front-end (FE) and mirror (MR) ports used by SAP HANA hosts for their vDisks must not be used by any other hosts that are not running SAP HANA. This also includes not using any back-end (BE) ports used to connect to storage of DataCore SANsymphony disk pools that are used for the SAP HANA host’s storage sources.

Disk Pools

Disk pools used for any type of storage source used by SAP HANA hosts must not be used by any other host. This includes storage sources for vDisks, logstores, mapstores or history logs. Disk pool encryption is supported although the performance of encrypted vDisks will be slightly lower than unencrypted it will still be in the range of SAP HANA’s performance requirements. The disk pool ‘Capacity Optimization’ feature is not supported.

Virtual Disks

Dedicated DataCore Servers are not a requirement if SAP HANA vDisks have their designated disk pool(s) for all their vDisk’s storage sources and their dedicated server ports for all mappings (see Server Ports (FC SCSI Only) section). vDisk encryption is supported (see Disk Pools section).

The SAP HANA Host

Operating System and HANA Version

SUSE Linux and HANA versions must match those listed in SAP note 2235581 - SAP HANA: Supported Operating Systems.

Server Ports (FC SCSI Only)

FC SCSI only. ISCSI and NVMe/oF ports are not certified.

SCSI Disk Timeout

This should be set to 80 seconds for all SCSI devices created from SANsymphony virtual disks. The timeout for a given SCSI device can be checked using the ‘cat’ command.

Example:

There are two methods that can be used to change the SCSI disk timeout for a given device.

• Use the ‘echo’ command – this is temporary and will not survive the next reboot of the Linux host server.
• Create a custom ‘udev rule’ – this is permanent but will require a reboot for the setting to take effect.

Using the ‘echo’ Command (will not survive a reboot)

Set the SCSI Disk timeout value to 80 seconds:

echo 80 > /sys/block/[disk_device]/device/timeout

Creating a custom ‘udev’ Rule (permanent but requires a reboot)

Create a file called ‘/etc/udev/rules.d/99-datacore.rules’ with the following settings:

SUBSYSTEM=="block", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{vendor}=="DataCore", ATTRS{model}=="Virtual Disk ", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 80 > /sys/block/%k/device/timeout'"

Refer to the KB article for more information.

ALUA Settings

Hosts must be configured for ALUA. hosts without ALUA configured are not certified. Refer to Registering Hosts for more information.

Multipath Configuration

The 'defaults' section

Add or modify the polling_interval to a value of 60 (seconds).

defaults { polling_interval 60 }

This tells the host how often to check for access on a previously failed virtual disk path. A smaller setting will interfere with host performance. Do not add this parameter to the 'device' section of the multipath configuration file (see below) as it will prevent the polling from working as expected.

The 'device' section

All the following entries listed are DataCore-required values. See the notes section for more specific technical details.

device {
    vendor                  "DataCore"
    product                 "Virtual Disk"
    path_checker            tur
    prio                    alua
    hardware_handler        "1 alua"
    failback                10
    rr_weight               priorities
    no_path_retry           fail
    dev_loss_tmo            60
    fast_io_fail_tmo        5
    rr_min_io_rq            100
    path_grouping_policy    group_by_prio
}

Additional Host Settings

Mount Points

Mount Point Settings for HANA 2.0

No additional settings are required. Those previously required for HANA 1.0 (see below) are now the default for HANA 2.0.

Mount Point Settings for HANA 1.0

An example showing the /hana/data mount point:

su <SID>adm
cd /usr/sap/<SID>/HDB<Instance> source hdbenv.sh
hdbparam --paramset "fileio[DATA].async_write_submit_active=on" hdbparam --paramset "fileio[DATA].async_write_submit_blocks=all" exit

The global.ini Setting for SCSI Reservations

Add the following line to the ‘storage’ section:

partition_*_* prtype = 5

Example:

[communication]
listeninterface = .global

[persistence]
basepath_datavolumes = /hana/data/DB1
basepath_logvolumes  = /hana/log/DB1

[storage]
ha_provider          = hdb_ha.fcClient

partition_*_* prtype = 5

partition_1_data wwid = 360030d907e291103a3c283134157aaa9
partition_1_log  wwid = 360030d90538713038ae1199202243cd1

partition_2_data wwid = 360030d9096461203895975bb29a0891c
partition_2_log  wwid = 360030d90032e1403ee45492f24105626

[trace]
ha_fcclient = info

In the example above, the mount points are identified by their WWID but identifying mount points by an alias is also supported.

A Three HANA Node Setup

Diagram of a three-node HANA setup showing two active nodes and one standby node.In this example, two of the HANA nodes are active, and the third node is standby.

Active Server – host1

Sizing Recommendations

In a highly-available configuration, when DataCore virtual disks (vDisks) are mirrored between a pair of DataCore Servers, I/O load will be shared between the pair. This means that when one of the DataCore Servers is unavailable – for any reason – the remaining DataCore Server must be able to manage the entire load from all active HANA Nodes.

The minimum configuration for a pair of DataCore Servers, with 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) connections, is up to 4 ‘active’ HANA nodes with any number of ‘standby’ nodes. The same configuration using 16 or 32 Gbit/s FC connections can manage up to 8 active HANA nodes with any number of standby nodes.

There is no limit to the amount of HANA nodes that can be served virtual disks by DataCore SANsymphony, but only a maximum of 768 HANA nodes can be ‘active’ at any time.

HANA nodes that are not ‘active’ (i.e., they are in a ‘standby’ role) technically will still have access to any virtual disk served to it but will only be considered as ‘active’ if another active node fails and the HANA application changes the role of the standby node to an active one.

Fibre Channel Ports

The number of FC ports in the DataCore Server will affect the sizing calculation. A DataCore Server must have at least one of each of the following dedicated port roles.

• Front-end (FE) – the port the HANA nodes connect to as a SCSI Target Mode connection.
• Back-end (BE) – the port the HANA certified storage connects to as a SCSI Initiator.
• Mode connection.
• Mirror (MR) - the port(s) each pair of DataCore Servers connects to between themselves for mirroring the HANA data as both SCSI Initiator and Target connections.

CPU Cores and Sockets

There needs to be enough CPU sockets to support the PCIe bus lanes of all fibre channel adaptors in the DataCore server. A minimum of two sockets are suggested.

While dual-ported adaptors will reduce the number of PCIe buses needed, DataCore do not recommend using quad-port adaptors as the PCIe slot bandwidth requirements for these devices are usually oversubscribed which will affect performance.

Each FC port should, ideally, have a CPU core available for it to scale the I/O in parallel. Hyper-threaded, virtual cores are recommended only if they are Intel Skylake or AMD Epyc CPU’s (or later).

With two socket systems, this will allow a scaling-up of the DataCore Servers to six FE ports, each using 16 Gbit/s connections, allowing up to 24 active SAP HANA nodes per pair of highly available DataCore Servers.

Memory Cache

Allow at least 200 MB of system RAM for each vDisk presented to a HANA node.

Key Performance Indicator Requirements

The following Key Performance Indicators (KPI) need to be met:

• SAP Note 2493172 - Refer to HANA HW CLOUD OPTIMIZATION TOOLS 2.0.
• SAP Note 1943937 - Refer to Hardware Configuration Check Tool 1.0 - Central Note.

Fibre Channel Connection Matrices

16 Gbit/s or Faster Connections

The following table shows what the minimum DataCore SANsymphony components are required for a specific number of active HANA nodes when using 16 Gbit/s (or faster) Fibre Channel (FC) connections.

8 Gbit/s Connections

The following table shows what the minimum DataCore SANsymphony components are required for a specific number of active HANA nodes when using 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) connections.

For configurations with more than 16 active HANA nodes at a time, contact DataCore Software directly to discuss your requirements.

Previous Changes