All you need to know about SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA High Availability

All you need to know about SAP Business One, version for SAP

All you need to know about SAP Business One, version for SAP: High Availability is a set of techniques, engineering practices and design principles for Business Continuity. This is achieved by eliminating single points of failure (fault tolerance), and providing the ability to rapidly resume operations after a system outage with minimal business loss (fault resilience).

Understanding SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA High Availability

With SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA High Availability solution we focus on High Availability for SAP HANA Database Server which is installed on two different servers (as shown in the graphic below) and SAP Business One components which are installed on a third server.

SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA currently offers the following two High Availability solutions:

1. Manual Failover High Availability

This can be implemented over SUSE Linux Enterprise image for SAP Business One (SLES for Business One).

In Manual Failover implementation user reports unavailability of SAP Business One to their system administrator and based on the scenario, the administrator triggers a failover script to switch from one database server node to another.

Following figure illustrates the landscape of the manual failover high availability environment.

For detailed information refer to the Admin Guide available at partner edge.

2. Automatic Failover High Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP Applications (SLES for SAP) image is required for Automatic Failover High Availability solution as it requires SAPHanaSR resource agent patch. Additionally, we require a shared storage of three blocks via an internal storage area network. These block devices are used as SBD (storage-based death) devices. (These blocks should not reside on any of the database servers)

In Automatic Failover implementation cluster manager monitors SAP Business One and SAP HANA Database service and triggers failover automatically in case if the database services are not available on the primary node.

Following figures illustrates the landscape of the automatic failover high availability environment.

For detailed information refer to the Admin Guide available at partner edge.

Benefits to opt for SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA High Availability

1. Business Continuity

Minimum disruption to customer business in case SAP HANA Database services not available, failover is triggered and customer can resume their business operations as normal, and in parallel Partner/SAP Support can work on broken node to get it up and running again.

2. Data Redundancy

Since system replication is running, because of any unforeseen circumstances (e.g. disk failure) if there is complete data loss, secondary node (which is a replica of primary node) can be used to recover all data.

Best Practices & Troubleshooting

For any issues related to execution of HA configuration script (ha.sh) you may refer to log file: /tmp/SBO_HANA_configure_.log

If you encounter any issues, you may use following commands to check the different components involved in SAP Business One High Availability (SAP HANA Database related commands should be executed as adm user and other commands should be executed as root/equivalent user):

1. Check SUSE cluster status: crm_mon -r
2. Status of hawk daemon providing web GUI for Pacemaker HA clusters: rchawk status
3. Check corosync daemon status: rcopenais status
4. Get HANA process list and status: sapcontrol -nr 00 -function GetProcessList
5. Shows status information about system replication site: hdbnsutil -sr_state
6. Check System Replication Status: cdpy; python systemReplicationStatus.py
7. List all allocated slots on SBD device, and messages: sbd -d /dev/sdh -d /dev/sdi -d /dev/sdj list
8. Clear reset status of the SBD devices on host1: sbd -d /dev/sdh -d /dev/sdi -d /dev/sdj message host1 clear

To know more about SUSE Cluster Manager configuration/management, you may refer to SUSE official documentation at link: https://www.suse.com/documentation/sle_ha/book_sleha/data/cha_ha_management.html

Additionally, we also have a high availability solution for our on-premise deployments, for the SAP Business One License Server as of version 9.2 PL03 and for SAP Business One Cloud Deployments the same is available over the SLD (System Landscape Directory) as of SAP Business One Cloud 1.1 PL07. More about these additional components for HA will be discussed in a follow-up article very soon.