Tailor Made

Admins often face the challenge of meeting dynamic requirements. Although the trend is toward cloud-native applications and microservices – as seen primarily in the form of large numbers of comparatively small virtual machines (aka container hosts) – some applications still require massive, performance-hungry virtual machines (VMs, e.g., SAP HANA, an in-memory, column-oriented relational database management system). These monster VMs require proper handling. Running large, resource-hungry, and monolithic applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and especially SAP HANA successfully on VMware vSphere is challenging, because they have many more factors to consider than do smaller VMs. Many of the configuration best practices mentioned in this article originate from the SAP HANA environment but are just as useful for other monster VMs and their applications. An in-depth report would go beyond the…