SAP HANA on vSphere 6.x on Intel Xeon Broadwell

Just on time for SAP TechED 2016 in Barcelona, I am happy to announce that we have finished the vSphere 6.x SAP HANA on Intel Xeon Broadwell CPU certification!

With this all SAP supported or certified SAP HANA Intel Xeon Broadwell based systems can get virtualized and can run SAP HANA VMs with up to 4 TB of vRAM.

For details please review SAP note “2315348 – Single SAP HANA VM on VMware vSphere 6 in production” and 2393917 – Single SAP HANA VM on VMware vSphere 6.5 in production or our SAP HANA on VMware vSphere WIKI page.

The table below summarizes the hardware configurations supported with VMware vSphere and SAP HANA:

Read moreProtecting Virtual SAP Landscapes with VMware vShield App – Part 1 of 2 Supported HW configurations for SAP HANA on vSphere*
	vSphere 5.5		vSphere 6.0 and 6.5**
	Supported in Production	No SAP Support, VMware best effort support	Supported in Production
Read moreSizing Virtual Machines for JVM Workloads – Part 2 Intel Xeon E7 CPU support	Ivy Bridge, Haswell		Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell (SPS12 or later)
E7 NUMA Nodes per server	4	8	up to 4 socket with Broadwell and Ivy / up to 8 with Haswell
Intel Xeon E5 CPU support	Ivy Bridge, Haswell	Broadwell	Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell (SPS12 or later)
E5 NUMA Nodes per server	2
Maximal RAM installed in server (host RAM)	up to 6 TiB		up to 12 TiB

*Only SAP HANA and VMware certified two-, four- and eight socket Intel E7 v2 (Ivy Bridge) and later Intel processor-based server systems and Intel Xeon E5 v3 and v4 based two-socket single node SAP HANA entry level systems, with a minimum of eight cores per CPU are supported.

**vSphere 6.5 only SAP HANA certified / supported 2 and 4 socket Intel E7 Broadwell EX or 2 socket Intel E5 Broadwell EP processor-based configurations in single-node, scale up configurations only, as of SAP HANA SPS12 or later.

Please note, VMware vSphere 5.5 as a platform supports 8 socket Ivy-Bridge and Haswell systems, as well as Intel Xeon E5-v4 (Broadwell) systems. SAP does not support these server platforms, when a virtualized SAP HANA gets installed. Background is, that some of the 8 socket systems in the past had shown TSC synchronization issues, which may negatively impact the memory performance of a wide SAP HANA VM (> 4 NUMA nodes).

Broadwell based 8 socket server systems are in validation and may get added as a supported platform once our testings got successfully finished.

vSphere 5.5 is not supported on >2 socket Broadwell based server systems. Broadwell >2 socket support requires vSphere 6.0. We did not test vSphere 5.5 with SAP HANA on Broadwell server systems, therefore SAP does not support this combination.