Chapter 5. New features and enhancements

• You can use live patching to patch critical CVEs in the kernel without interrupting business critical SAP applications. With this enhancement, interruptions that result from system reboots are minimized. In previous releases, the initialization of in-memory databases, such as SAP HANA, could take several hours to load data into memory after an outage.
• SAPInstance: Integrating the upstream patch for systemd-based SAP Start-Up Framework.
• The resource-agents-sap-hana and resource-agents-sap-hana-scaleout packages provide resource agents for managing SAP HANA System Replication setups in combination with the RHEL HA Add-On.

• A new rhel-system-roles-sap package is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as a Technology Preview. The rhel-system-roles-sap package provides Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles for SAP, which can be used to automate the configuration of a RHEL system to run SAP workloads. These roles greatly reduce the time to configure a system to run SAP workloads by automatically applying the optimal settings that are based on best practices outlined in relevant SAP Notes.

  Note

  Access is limited to RHEL for SAP Solutions offerings. Contact Red Hat Customer Support if you need assistance with your subscription.

  This enhancement update adds rhel-system-roles-sap to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for SAP Solutions The following new roles are now available:

  • sap-preconfigure
  • sap-netweaver-preconfigure
  • sap-hana-preconfigure

• An update for resource-agents-sap-hana-scaleout is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 Extended Update Support.

  The resource-agents-sap-hana-scaleout packages provide an SAP HANA scale-out resource agent interface with Pacemaker that allows SAP HANA scale-out instances to be managed in a cluster environment. For more information, see Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA Solution for SAP HANA Scale-Out and System Replication.

Additional resources

• Release Notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1

• SAP HANA users can now use the RHEL in-place upgrade to upgrade SAP environments from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8. For more information, see How to in-place upgrade SAP environments from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8.
• Introducing support for IBM virtual Persistent Memory (vPMEM) and increasing maximum amount of supported logical CPUs and physical memory as an enhancement to IBM advanced virtualization platform (PowerVM) on Power9 processor.
• Introducing support for Intel’s 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (formerly code-named Cooper Lake).
• RHEL System Roles for SAP, earlier shipped as a Tech Preview in RHEL 8.1 for SAP Solutions, are now General Available (GA). For more information, see Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles for SAP.
• With this release, cgroup v2 is now fully supported. You can use V2 to protect the memory, where SAP Applications store data, for fast access from the Linux kernel memory management to obtain higher performance for SAP systems.
• The newly introduced PCP HA Cluster PMDA for high-availability / pacemaker clusters allows customers using RHEL HA solutions for SAP to view their cluster health, node health, resource health and location constraints in near real-time, and marks an integral part of the Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions.
• By introducing a SAP application-focused view into Red Hat Insights, SAP administrators can automatically detect and display all of their SAP applications across numerous environments, to include accessing their application status and risk information, from a single panel.
• The resource agents for managing SAP HANA Scale-Out System Replication have been updated to also support HANA Multitarget Replication, with manual takeover. For more invormation, see Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA Solution for SAP HANA Scale-Out and System Replication.

Additional resources

• Release Notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2

• With the enhancement to Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles for SAP, customers can now not only configure, but also verify existing RHEL systems to be configured in-line with SAP Best Practices.
• Adding further automation to the RHEL HA solutions for SAP HANA, allowing pacemaker-based clusters configured for SAP HANA Multitarget System Replication to promote its secondary SAP HANA instances automatically as the new primary node for a third site, if the original primary instance fails.
• Enhancing support of Red Hat Smart Management and Red Hat Insights for SAP workloads.

• An update for the resource-agents-sap package is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Extended Update Support.

  The resource-agents-sap package contains SAP resource agents interface with Pacemaker to allow SAP instances to be managed in a cluster environment.

• An update for rhel-system-roles-sap is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Extended Update Support. The rhel-system-roles-sap package provides Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) System Roles for SAP that can be used to automate the configuration of a RHEL system to run SAP workloads. These roles greatly reduce the time to configure a system to run SAP workloads by automatically applying the optimal settings that are based on best practices outlined in relevant SAP Notes.

  Note

  Access is limited to RHEL for SAP Solutions offerings. Contact Red Hat Customer Support if you need assistance with your subscription.

• An update for resource-agents-sap-hana-scaleout is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The resource agents for managing HANA Scale-Out System Replication have been updated to also support HANA Multitarget Replication. For more information, Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA Solution for SAP HANA Scale-Out and System Replication.
• RHEL customers running SAP HANA still on RHEL 7.9 can now upgrade their operating system directly to RHEL 8.4 using the in-place upgrade tooling (LEAPP).
• The package compat-sap-c++-10 is now also available for RHEL 8.4 and later on platform s390x (IBM System Z).

Additional resources

• Release Notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4

• Adding support for SAP HANA cost-optimized RHEL HA scenarios, enabling customers to:

  • Seamlessly run a QA/Test instance of SAP HANA on the secondary instance instead of idling the system.
  • Have a S/4HANA application server and SAP HANA database managed within the same cluster.

  • Run an SAP NetWeaver primary application server and additional application server on the same cluster node.

    For more information, see Supported HA Scenarios for SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP NetWeaver.

• Introduction of RHEL HA fencing agents for IBM Cloud Virtual Server (VPC) and IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers (VS), to allow secure and reliable setup of highly available SAP environments in context of IBM Cloud.
• Enhancing existing RHEL system roles for SAP by including the new role sap_hana_install, which can be used to install SAP HANA scale-up or scale-out database instances by means of Ansible automation. For more information, see Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles for SAP.
• Inclusion of Processor Counter Monitor (PCM) to ease monitoring of performance and energy metrics of Intel Core, Xeon, Atom and Xeon Phi processors, such as in the context of SAP HANA in-memory workloads.
• Starting with the latest SAP kernel packages / patch levels (shipping from April 2022 onward) SAP is supporting and enabling by default the systemd environment. All RHEL versions with Update Services for SAP Solutions, starting with RHEL 8.1, have been tested and verified by both Red Hat and SAP to assure the SAP changes with the new systemd based SAP startup framework run with no issues.
• Added in-place upgrade tool support for SAP HANA customers to go from RHEL 7.9 for SAP Solutions to RHEL 8.6 for SAP Solutions. For more information, see How to in-place upgrade SAP environments from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 - Red Hat Customer Portal.
• With the release of RHEL 8.6, the location of sap.conf, which is used to permanently increase kernel.pid_max to ensure the number of tasks per user satisfies the need of the SAP HANA database, has changed from /etc/sysctl.d/ to /usr/lib/sysctl.d/. For more information, see SAP Note 2777782 - SAP HANA DB: Recommended OS Settings for RHEL 8.

Additional resources

• Release Notes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6

• When using the HA solutions for managing HANA Multitarget System Replication, it is also possible to set up a separate inactive cluster for managing the HANA instances at the DR site, which can be activated manually in the event of the primary cluster becoming unavailable. For more details, please refer to Configuring SAP HANA Scale-Up Multitarget System Replication for disaster recovery.
• RHEL HA solutions for SAP now support managing SAP HANA Multitarget System Replication for both HANA Scale-Up and HANA Scale-Out environments, allowing for automated failover with 3 and more replicates. For more details, please refer to Multitarget System Replication.

• The following enhancements have been made for the roles given below:

  • collection: Ensures Ansible 2.16.1, 2.15.8, 2.14.12 (cve-2023-5764) compatibility.
  • collection: Minimum Ansible version is now 2.14.
  • preconfigure: Includes SLES related code. Configuring SLES managed nodes is nevertheless unsupported by Red Hat.
  • sap_hana_preconfigure: Implements SAP HANA requirements for RHEL 8.8 and is less restrictive with RHEL versions that are not yet supported for SAP HANA.
  • sap_ha_pacemaker_cluster: Improves VIP resource and constraint setup per platform.

  For more details refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles for SAP.

• You need to enable standard repositories instead of the E4S variant for RHEL 8.10.

  For more details refer to RHEL for SAP Subscriptions and Repositories.