vCenter Application Discovery Manager for SAP environments

vCenter Application Discovery Manager (ADM) enables quick, automated, real-time application discovery and dependency mapping capability that you can leverage for change and configuration management across physical and virtual environments. In short, ADM enables this in following four steps:

1. Passive discovery of your application infrastructure
2. Active, high-definition discovery of hardware and software configuration details
3. Discovery analytics to visualize, analyze, and report on the collected data
4. Track changes to the discovered IT infrastructure

ADM provides a broad coverage of application technologies – check the documentation for details.In this post, I want to focus on how vCenter ADM can quickly discover, manage and audit complex SAP landscapes. ADM inludes built-in application pattern template for SAP. Here is an example discovery map for an SAP environment from ADM.

ADM is able to identify various components as well as connections to and from the SAP landscape:

• At the top, center of this map you can see remote clients who have connected to the Dispatcher Service via the SAP GUI.
• Below this, you can see that ADM has identified the Dispatcher service itself, with its ‘runs on’ dependency to the windows virtual machine.
• You can also see other SAP-specific services operating in this VM, and related to this SAP instance, Instance – 01, these include the Java Enque Server and Message Server.
• Further down, you can see a similar set of services for another central instance deployed on this VM. Again you can see the Gateway, dispatcher and Message Server communicating to the Central Instance, all of which have another ‘runs on’ dependency to the VM.
• Next, you can see other dependencies on this VM that support the landscape, in this case an Oracle DB Server Service, with its 2 database instances.
• Lastly, in the lower left of the map you see the mapping from the VM to the physical ESX host to complete the drill down from remote clients, through VM, to the underlying ESX host.

At this point, if interested, you can continue to traverse objects in our map to query relationships, or simply export the picture to Visio to help document the “as is” or “as deployed” nature of our configuration.

I hope this post demonstrates how ADM can enable IT managers to discover and manage a “blind” spot in a complex IT environment that can cause a vulnerability with costly implications.