Chapter 2. How business continuity is achieved with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions

Red Hat Update Services for SAP Solutions (E4S) provides up to four years of support, including security patches and critical fixes for minor releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When you upgrade to the next minor release, binary compatibility and kernel stability ensure that your system remains stable and that both SAP and custom applications continue to run smoothly.

Red Hat Insights analyzes IT infrastructure against Red Hat’s constantly expanding knowledge base to provide real-time assessment for risks related to performance, availability, stability, and security. Previously an independent service offering, Red Hat Insights has further evolved into a family of proactive monitoring services and is included in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. RH Insights helps customers gain better operational efficiency and support in security and compliance risk management. For more information on Red Hat Insights, see the Red Hat Insights product page.

RHEL for SAP Solutions customers gain the following benefits by using Red Hat Insights for monitoring your SAP environment:

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On provides all the necessary packages for configuring a pacemaker-based cluster that provides reliability, scalability, and availability to critical production services.

The Red Hat High Availability solutions for SAP NetWeaver, S/4HANA and SAP HANA which are based on the RHEL HA Add-On, help to easily setup and configure highly available SAP environments, providing a standard-based approach to reduce planned and unplanned downtime in corresponding SAP environments.

RHEL for SAP Solutions also provides the components required for support of the SAP HA interface. The SAP HA interface allows customers to use SAP management tools such as SAP MMC or SAP Landscape Manager to manage SAP NetWeaver and S/4HANA application servers, which are controlled by the RHEL HA solutions for SAP.

Linux kernel live patching allows customers to patch a running RHEL kernel with selected critical and important CVEs without rebooting the system. This provides operational efficiency to support mission critical infrastructure underpinning SAP business applications, where downtime is not an option and security responsiveness is required.

For more information about the kernel live patching solution and how it works, refer to Applying patches with kernel live patching.

As part of the RHEL for SAP Solutions subscription, Red Hat provides validated in-place upgrades of the underlying operating system in the context of SAP workloads. An in-place upgrade offers upgrading the RHEL system to a later major release of RHEL by replacing the existing operating system without removing applications. Doing so can greatly reduce the costs, for example, highly expensive hardware for an SAP HANA in-memory database does not need to be purchased twice.