1.2. How I Wrote This Book
The foundation of this text stems from years of hands-on performance tuning, stress testing, and generally supporting hundreds of SAP customer systems, ranging from Hewlett-Packard (HP)– and Compaq-based solutions, to platforms developed by Digital, IBM, Dell, EMC, Data General, and a few others. From an SAP product perspective, most of my experience has been with R/3, Business InformationWarehouse (BW), Enterprise Buyer Pro (SRM/EBP), Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), and Internet Transaction Server (ITS), although I've also worked closely with Workplace, Enterprise Portal (EP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and, to a lesser extent, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM), and, most recently, SAP's Exchange Infrastructure (XI) and Master Data Management (MDM) products. With some notable exceptions, most of my stress-testing expertise was borne of the need to optimize R/3-, BW-, EBP-, and ITS-based solutions. In supporting these mission-critical systems over the years, I've developed close relationships with many of my customers, to the point where I could actually have made use of many of their nonproduction systems to help me put together this book.
For purposes of this book, however, I wanted a complete and fairly static environment that was not only available to me 24/7 (because that's how I tend to write—a paragraph here, a figure there—around the clock) but also one that could be re-created by you assuming you would eventually desire to see firsthand how a particular tool set, utility, or approach works in the real world. Thus, I created something of a custom home-based SAP technical sandbox to fulfill both of these needs in the following manner:
My “core” system is a workhorse SAP R/3 4.6C IDES system, running on Windows 2000 and Oracle 8.1.7—a very “mainstream” product (despite the aging database release!) today and likely for the next year or so.
I also performed a fresh install of an “empty” BW 3.0B system on SQL Server 2000, thus giving me both a different database flavor and a mySAP component based on SAP's Web Application Server.
I then added a CRM 3.0A system to the mix, also running on SQL Server 2000. As one of the fastest growing SAP products out there today, it makes sense to give it a home in my own sandbox.
Finally, I installed two instances of SAP's Internet Transaction Server, to facilitate end-user testing via the SAP HTML “WebGUI” in addition to SAP's more traditional user interfaces, all of which I'll cover in detail later.
Note the variety in terms of the underlying database and SAP application layers. I could have chosen to introduce even more variety from an Operating System (OS) perspective, in the form of a Linux-based solution, but, at the end of the day, I felt more comfortable standardizing on Windows—it was just easy, too. I also standardized on a single hardware platform. Why? Even though I'm a senior consultant in a large hardware-and services-centric organization, and have access to pretty much any hardware and software I could ever want, I no longer have the desire (nor my wife's blessing, to tell the truth) to build and install numerous servers and disk subsystems throughout the house, stringing cables between rooms to create an appropriate network or storage area network (SAN) infrastructure. Instead, I chose to go the simpler route that more and more of my customers are going when it comes to different kinds of testing (albeit not production-ready stress testing): I loaded a single “large” HP ProLiant server with VMware's GSX product, connecting it to a lone although very capable fiber-based RAID-protected (redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks) disk subsystem filled with 72GB drives, as shown in Figure 1-1. The tradeoff in raw horsepower was well worth the time, space, and general support savings I realized, compared with the requirements of a more traditional approach. Indeed, the whole setup proved to be quite manageable, and very compact as well.
Figure 1-1. By using VMware's GSX product, I was able to assemble a very complex testing environment quickly, at minimal cost, leveraging a single HP ProLiant to load four “guest” virtual machines, each executing a different SAP component or product.
I then tucked everything quickly away, performing my base operating system loads and SAP installations over the course of the next few weeks with my family none the wiser (nor appropriately excited, in my eyes), oblivious to the fact that so many genuinely cool mySAP demo systems were running quite innocuously under their noses. And to think my 9-year-old boy, Phillip, would rather play with his Game Cube!