Overview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions Subscription

Built on the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with its packages and components, in addition to this foundation, the RHEL for SAP Solutions subscription includes the following:

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, see the Red Hat Knowledgebase solution:

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.

SELinux is a security technology for process isolation to mitigate attacks via privilege escalation. Configuring SELinux helps you enhance your system’s security. SELinux is an implementation of Mandatory Access Control (MAC), and provides an additional layer of security. The SELinux policy defines how users and processes can interact with the files on the system. You can control which users can perform which actions by mapping them to specific SELinux confined users.

File Access Policy Daemon (fapolicyd) is a technology provided in RHEL to determine access rights to files based on a trust database and file or process attributes. It helps customers to ensure data remains protected even in case an attacker has successfully gained control over certain processes.

You can configure fapolicyd to secure the environment for running SAP HANA against local and remote intrusion, exploitation, and malicious activity.

To ensure that RHEL is configured appropriately to best support SAP workloads, RHEL for SAP Solutions provides tuned profiles sap and sap-hana, which contain many of the SAP best practices and some additional recommended configuration settings.

RHEL for SAP Solutions provides additional GCC runtime compatibility libraries required by newer SAP NetWeaver, S/4HANA and SAP HANA releases when necessary. RHEL 9 is GCC11 compatible, so no compat-sap-c++-<version> package is required when installing SAP software that has been built with GCC11 or lower.

The RHEL for SAP Solutions subscription includes Red Hat Satellite to provide easy management and updates of Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

The SAP-specific software packages are available with both the RHEL for SAP Applications and the RHEL for SAP Solutions subscriptions.

The SAP-specific software packages are available only with the RHEL for SAP Solutions subscription. The subscription provides access to the RHEL for SAP Solutions repositories, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 for x86_64 - SAP Solutions or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 for ppc64le - SAP Solutions - Update Services for SAP Solutions.

The following table contains an overview of the SAP-specific technical components that are included in the respective repository for RHEL 9:

(*) Use the following list and examples to identify the full repository labels:

rhel-9-SAP-NetWeaver:

rhel-9-SAP-Solutions:

<arch> denotes the specific hardware architecture as follows:

For more information, see RHEL for SAP Subscriptions and Repositories.