The first thing I did with my new lab was connect it to my old lab. (yawn - and well, the power bill at some point becomes a problem)
CAUTION: This was an experiment. It involves mostly commercially supported configurations. I'm specifically "detail light" in this post because I don't want any assumptions being made about suitability or supportability for production workloads. Nothing about my homelab is suitable for production supported workloads.
I'm involved in a pretty cool project for work around SAP HANA virtualized on VMware vSphere. As a VMUG Advantage member, I'm loving the fact that I can get non-production licenses for just about anything I can think of when it comes to building out virtual datacenters. While I am not licensed for HANA at home, I did have 30 days to mess around with it, and mess around I did.
I wish I had taken screenshots, but here's the hot take. I connected my homelab with a 64GB HANA instance (and 3 application servers) to a 64GB HANA instance I built in Walldorf, Germany. This was a mostly functional landscape, with some bogus data I generated in my homelab - and used HANA System Replication to copy the data, and Dell EMC RecoverPoint for VMs for the application servers to Germany. This copy (with my exceptional cable modem service) took almost a week to complete, but just before I shut down my HANA landscape in my homelab, I was able to literally push all of the functions of my tiny little application instance over to Germany.
VMware vSphere as my virtualization engine provided stable, consistent infrastructure. I was using vSphere 6.7 in my homelab and 6.5u3 in the Germany VxRail cluster. Of course, consideration had to be made for a variety of configuration details (HW versions for the 6.7 VMs, etc). Let me tell you how incredibly simple VMware NSX virtual networking made this - especially since the test was across such great distances.
In the projects I'm on at work, this is a very similar scenario to what we're working on, but with much bigger landscapes. For me personally, provided a proof point as to how simple SAP HANA can be when it's built on top of intelligent virtualization. The great thing about this to me is, I proved several important concepts in my own mind that before this, I had only read about in whitepapers.
I'm a very pragmatic technologist, and the ability to perform a "cloud to on-premise and back" landscape migration / replication / copy is hard. Systems must be 100% perfect across potentially hundreds of them. Complex application integrations must remain established on either side of the landscapes. Data integrity is, of course, sacrosanct. Intelligent virtualization helps customers with a consistent view, regardless of the "iron underneath". There is no better than VMware vSphere, vSAN and NSX - especially on VxRail. My little experiment has given me a high degree of confidence that with the right tools, time and smart people, enormous projects at enormous scale can be accomplished with the right tools. A proof point in my own mind on the work I do every day.
Interested in learning more? Find out more about VMUG Advantage here. Learn about SAP infrastructure for free here.
/finis
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