When provisioning datastores for SAP HANA, create a separate datastores for the data and log volumes. Ensure the volumes for the datastores are connected to a host group with each ESXi host the vHANA virtual machine.
Example: There are 4 SAP HANA virtual machines in a vSphere cluster made up of 8 ESXi hosts.
8 volumes are created and connected to the ESXi hosts, host group.
This process assumes the deployment is using Raw Device Mappings or VMFS.
For vVol based deployments, all of the virtual disks will be added to the vVol datastore. For more information about vVols see the Virtual Volumes Quick Reference.
Follow the same sizing guidelines as physical HANA for the log and data volumes, but assume the sizing will apply to the virtual disk (vmdk) and provision enough VMFS space to accommodate the capacity required.
Each volume is then formatted with VMFS and a datastore created on each.
- Use dedicated Paravirtualized SCSI controllers for OS , data and log volumes to seperate disk I/O streams.
Example: For a single virtualized SAP HANA system there is a Hard disk added for the operating system (Hard Disk 1), a Hard disk added for the SAP HANA data volume (Hard Disk 2) and a Hard Disk added for the SAP HANA log volume (Hard Disk 3).
Upon initial set up the virtual machine should already have a Hard Disk and SCSI controller.
Add 2 additional SCSI controllers, ensure they are of type "VMware Paravirtual":
Add new Hard Disks to the virtual machine for the log and data volumes. Set the Location of the Hard Disk to the relevant datastore, ensure the Virtual Device Node is set to use one of the new SCSI controllers, and set the Disk Provisioning to use "Thick Provision Eager Zeroed" to avoid the initial write penalty.
Data Volume:
Log Volume: