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Categories
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Infrastructure/Landscape Configuration
Infrastructure/Landscape Configuration
- A Beginner's Guide to Implementing SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) —
Designing and Configuring an SAP XI Integration
by Manish Agarwal, Senior Technical Architect, Infosys Technologies Limited
Most companies that rely on SAP for their core business systems also have a mix of non-SAP systems that form an integral part of their business operations. In the past, you had to resort to brittle point-to-point interfaces or third-party middleware to integrate these systems, but not anymore. Based on open standards, SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) not only seamlessly integrates your SAP and non-SAP systems, it easily incorporates your existing middleware and point-to-point solutions for a simplified and standardized landscape. This article is the second in a two-part series that introduces the SAP XI toolset and shows you how to implement an SAP XI integration. The first installment walked you through the initial setup of an example integration; this second installment details its design and configuration.
- A system administrator’s practical guide to SAP System Landscape Directory (SLD)
by George Yu, Solution Technology Architect, SAP Labs
Administrators often use a spreadsheet or database program to manually keep
track of the systems in their landscapes, but these won’t tell you whether
two systems are compatible, and the ever-increasing size and geographical spread
of landscapes makes this task difficult at best. SAP System Landscape Directory
(SLD) serves as a central repository of information on all the systems installed
in your landscape, and provides this data to maintenance and integration tools
such as SAP Solution Manager and SAP XI to support and simplify system administration.
This article provides an overview of SLD and how it works, including best practices
for key decision points in the installation and configuration process.
- Achieving a More Manageable and Reliable R/3 Spool Server Landscape Using Release 4 Output
Classifications, Logical
Servers, and Alternate Servers
by Uwe Krüger
Three new output features give rise to a more manageable, more reliable R/3 spool server environment — classifications, logical servers, and alternate servers. With Release 4, classifications of output devices and spool servers (along the lines of production, high-volume, desktop, and test printing) are now made possible within R/3 itself. This helps you ensure that print requests are directed to the spool servers that are best able to process them.
Logical servers give you a way to reassign multiple output devices with no more effort than it takes to reassign just one. Alternate servers enable you to establish automated failover and load-balancing scenarios. In the event that a spool server fails or becomes overloaded, print requests will be automatically redirected to another (alternate) server. This article provides detailed coverage of these new output features and shows you how they can be used to remedy many of the common problems that plague the spool systems of older releases.
- An Introduction to SAP's New and Improved Frontend Printing
by Stefan Fuchs
SAP’s new spool access method for frontend printing, method “F,” solves some persistent frontend printing problems. Administrators no longer have to define an output device for each and every user who wants to print to his or her personal frontend printer, and users gain an easy, interactive way to print directly from the SAPGUI.
How does this new and greatly improved frontend printing work? How does it eliminate the need for multiple output device definitions for all the users who want to print to their frontend? And what do administrators need to know in order to ensure its successful deployment? These are the questions answered in this article.
- Architecting a high availability SAP NetWeaver infrastructure: Strategies for ensuring a
successful, cost-effective
implementation
by Matt Kangas, Product Manager, SAP NetWeaver, SAP Labs, LLC
Providing high availability (HA) for an enterprise
service-oriented architecture like SAP NetWeaver
is a challenge — typical setups include multiple
integrated SAP systems that are required around the
clock for continuous, one-step business scenarios.
This article helps you meet this challenge in your
own systems by explaining the SAP NetWeaver architecture,
its configuration, the procedures involved, and the
implications of these elements on systems availability.
It starts with an overview of HA basics, and then
discusses the technical details of an HA setup with
SAP NetWeaver, including topics such as architectural
single points of failure (SPOFs) and ways to isolate
and protect such failure points.
- Choosing the right platform for your SAP implementation: Six case study TCO assessments that
help you make the right
choice
by George W. Anderson, Senior Technical Consultant and Project Manager, HP Services
Implementing or migrating between different platforms for SAP is neither
cheap nor easy. The technology-specific cost is significant, not to mention
the business and technical costs of analyzing SAP programs and interfaces to
ensure a smooth migration, retooling and retraining staff, bringing in new
servers and disk subsystems, and implementing high availability/disaster recovery
solutions. And each company’s situation is unique — staffing models
greatly differ, as do process and technology practices. This article presents
six case studies based on real-world TCO analyses that you can use to identify
a low-cost platform alternative within the constraints of your company’s
particular business model.
- Ensure effective system management by configuring the right infrastructure for
SAP Solution Manager using central system landscape maintenance
by Doreen Baseler, Technical Product Manager, SAP AG
Managing a globally distributed, heterogeneous system landscape is one of the biggest challenges project teams face. Fortunately, SAP Solution Manager provides a set of sophisticated tools that enable centralized administration of the systems throughout your landscape. For these tools to run smoothly, however, you need to properly configure the infrastructure upon which they rely. This article introduces you to how the infrastructure works and how it is configured using an SAP Solution Manager component called Solution Manager System Landscape (transaction SMSY), which houses the settings and system connections that enable SAP Solution Manager to access and manage satellite systems.
- Gearing Up for a Test-Drive of Linux for SAP
by Boris Bialek, Enterprise Systems Group, Dell Corporation
Linux is a reliable, secure, flexible, and highly configurable operating system that is supported by an impressive lineup of hardware and application vendors. But is this OS really ready for a prime-time SAP audience? Is Linux up to the rigorous demands of a full-fledged R/3 production environment? This article will help you decide. It examines the pros and cons of Linux as a platform for SAP, and includes instructions and tips for installing free SAP LinuxLab test-drive software.
- Is It Time to Revisit Your SAP Security Infrastructure?
by José A. Hernández
All too often SAP implementation projects don't take security beyond the application level, where security and authorization are often regarded as one and the same. To ensure adequate protection, security measures must be factored into all layers of the SAP infrastructure. With their client/server architecture, SAP systems include many components that exchange information, each of which constitutes a layer of the SAP security infrastructure.
This article introduces you to this multilevel notion of security, and what you need to be mindful of when reviewing your overarching security measures, as well as the security measures you have in place (or lack thereof) to address each specific level.
- Is User 'Sally Smith' Really Who She Claims to Be?! Lessons for Establishing Rock-Solid
Authentication and Single Sign-On
(SSO) Practices
by Dr. Jürgen Schneider, Development Manager for Security, SAP AG
Authentication forms the foundation of your security infrastructure, and access privileges granted to users (or systems) are predicated on the notion that users are who they claim to be. There are a number of options available to help you do this with SAP systems, including password parameters, secure network communications (SNC), X.509 digital certificates, and Pluggable Authentication Services (PAS), all of which are discussed in this article. But authentication is a must for SAP and non-SAP systems alike — and before you know it, your users are faced with numerous logon prompts from different systems, each requiring different user IDs and passwords. SAP's solution for this is single sign-on (SSO).
This article shows you how to use SSO to authenticate users across multiple, standalone SAP systems, and also how the mySAP Workplace can provide SSO for SAP systems and third-party applications across your company's intranet, and even across the Internet.
- Keep Your Java-Based Systems and Applications Running Smoothly with Early
Problem Detection: A System Administrator's Guide to State Monitoring in SAP
NetWeaver '04
by Robert Heidasch, SAP NetWeaver Foundation Group, SAP AG
Consider how much time and effort you would save if you could quickly determine at a glance that your systems are operating properly or — better yet — have the systems alert you to any problems and their potential severity. This article introduces you to the State Monitoring solution built into SAP NetWeaver ’04. It shows you how to take advantage of the provided administrative tools for managing and viewing monitoring data — the Monitoring Service in the Visual Administrator and the Alert Monitor in CCMS — and provides guidelines for identifying and resolving any problems that might occur with the monitoring configuration or functionality.
- Lessons in Logon Load Balancing
by Janet Hutchison
In large SAP R/3 environments that require multiple application instances, you can achieve intelligent, automated distribution of workload across multiple application instances, with minimal impact to end users, through logon groups. This article explains how logon groups work and how to use them to establish a logon load balancing strategy that can improve system performance, elevate end-user satisfaction, and help attain High Availability objectives.
- Optimizing, Monitoring, and Fine-Tuning a Newly Upgraded Release 4.x Spool Service
by Uwe Krüger
For Release 3.x spool servers, all output requests and related management activities are anchored by a single spool work process. Needless to say, processing bottlenecks can be a common occurrence, forcing administrators to add additional R/3 servers just to get more spool work processes. Release 4.x spool servers, which can support multiple spool work processes, yield far better throughput and performance. Just how many spool work processes should you set up on your Release 4.x spool server?
This article provides you with evaluation criteria and guidelines to answer that question and simple scenarios that illustrate how to apply these factors in a real-world situation.
- Provide accurate and consistent language support for your global MDMP systems by converting to Unicode
by Alexander Davidenkoff, Solution Manager, Globalization Services, SAP AG
With the proliferation of global systems, organizations need to be able to handle data in a variety of languages across a range of platforms. To meet this need, all SAP applications based on SAP Web Application Server 6.20 and higher support Unicode, a character-encoding standard that assigns a unique number to every character in a database, ensuring proper representation and processing regardless of the platform, program, or language. With SAP NetWeaver 7.0, support for the old Multi-Display/Multi-Processing (MDMP) solution ends, and Unicode is the only supported character format. This article explains how to convert your MDMP systems to Unicode, including the pre- and post-processing steps you need to take to convert your data.
- Readying to Resize Your R/3 Platform
by Kurt Bishop, Remote Consulting Team, SAP America
Whether you're sizing a brand-new system or resizing an existing system, there is only one governing principle — sizing requirements are defined by the extent of the SAP functionality to be implemented. Upgraded functionality, for example, may consume resources, whether you use it or not. When resizing an existing R/3 system, you must account for all upgraded and additional new functions and applications. You must also make sure your existing system is properly tuned, so you don't needlessly buy additional hardware.
How do you analyze your system to determine whether or not it is properly tuned? And how do you account for the workloads presented by current and future requirements from "conventional" R/3 as well as new Web-based functionality such as mySAP.com, Workplace, and B2B? These are some of the questions this article will address.
- Selecting the Optimal System Landscape for Your SAP R/3 Upgrade Project
by Arthur Miller
An R/3 upgrade requires that changes be made to the new system, and it requires support for ongoing changes to the production system as well, so the underlying system landscape must make it easy to manage change. Most upgrade projects use a variation on one of two landscape strategies: rehearsal of the upgrade process on a separate, standalone R/3 sandbox system, with the intent of rolling out the upgrade to the production landscape at a later time, or upgrade of the production landscape's development system right away, followed after a time by the upgrade of the QAS system, with the maintenance of additional, temporary development and QAS systems to support the production system at the old release. Understanding the principles, benefits, and limitations of each of these strategies will help you decide which approach best suits your upgrade project.
- Size Does Matter - Strategies for Successful SAP R/3 Capacity Planning
by Kurt Bishop
Capacity planning is not a trivial task. Choose your hardware vendor and equipment carefully, and upgrades will pose few problems. Choose the wrong vendor-model combination, and you will be forced to make extensive changes to your hardware and operating system that will entail extensive planning and testing, and could ultimately require all new equipment.
So how do you, as a customer, set yourself up for a successful collaboration with your hardware vendor - one that ensures the final system design meets your current requirements and adequately scales over time? This article describes the capacity planning process, some basic tools and techniques employed by the vendors, and how you can ensure all of these items work in your favor as you attempt to size your SAP R/3 System.
- Speed Up High-Throughput Business Transactions with Parallel Processing - No
Programming Required!
by Susanne Janssen, Performance & Benchmark Group, SAP AG and Werner Schwarz, IBS
Consumer Industries, SAP Retail Solutions
Parallel processing is a built-in option available with many SAP programs that helps improve the throughput and processing time of business transactions that must process large amounts of data in a tight time frame. This article shows you how to determine whether parallel processing is the right course of action, how the workload is split up to achieve greater throughput, the options available to you to maximize performance, and how to use concurrent batch jobs when parallel processing is not an option automatically provided by the program. It also points out the two most common parallel-processing pitfalls and how to avoid them.
- Take your first steps with the Java-based SAP Web ApplicationServer in SAP NetWeaver ’04: An implementation primer for
system administrators
by Robert Heidasch, Enterprise Services Infrastructure, SAP AG
Configuring and reconfiguring the ABAP-based SAP Web
Application Server (SAP Web AS) to optimize performance
and accommodate ever-increasing and changing applications,
users, and business needs is a well-documented and
well-known undertaking for SAP system administrators.
As a newer technology, however, the Java-based SAP
Web AS is a less well-traveled path. This article introduces
you to the key concepts behind the Java-based SAP Web
AS and shows you how, with a little planning, you can
design an architecture that meets your current needs
and can be easily reconfigured to meet future needs
as well.
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