20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.

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High Availability
Explained – v1.1

July 14, 2017

T
here are numerous blogs about SAP SHARE

running High Availability but none of

them seem to focus on explaining how the

basics work.

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20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

What are the Basics?

To explain this in simple terms we should start

from a standard Standalone SAP system. A

standard system has 3 basic components, each

of
them is critical for the system to work:

1. ASCS -> stands for ABAP SAP Central

Service and it’s made of two parts, the

Message Server and the Enqueue Server.

The Message Server acts as communication

channel between the application servers

and handle the load distribution, the

Enqueue Server
controls the lock

mechanism.

2. AS ->  Applications servers.  In the

old

days you had a Central instance which

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 days you had a Central instance which
20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

included the ASCS component, now the

ASCS component has been removed and

stands on its own, hence the

first

application server is called the PAS (Primary

Application Server)
and the ones after that
are called AAS’s (Additional Application

Servers) but in practice there is very little

difference in between them.

3. Database -> The database is simply the

database, your primary persistence and

where you store your data.

Your traditional standalone system looks

something like this:

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20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

So, what do you have to do to make your

system highly available?… very simple, you

have to give each of these components

redundancy, covering all the single points of

failure.

How do you achieve that?

Well, for the basic HA system you need at least

two hosts (or nodes) to fit the required

components, also ideally they will be located in

separate data centers.

ASCS -> For the central services the

recommended procedure is to use ERS

(Enqueue replication server). ASCS and ERS

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 (Enqueue replication server).  ASCS and ERS
20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

are installed on a shared disk in both hosts.

Enqueue server will keep the lock table and

ERS will keep a replicated copy of the lock

table. A third party cluster

software will

provide an automatic failover mechanism for

the ASCS instance. Now that the jibber-jabber

is out of the way, what this means is that you

have an ASCS and an ERS on each host so if at

any moment an issue was to hit one of the

nodes it would automatically failover to the

other one keeping the system alive.

AS -> From the application server point of view

the key is the numbers of them; at a basic level

you need at least 2 application servers (PAS

and AAS) using load balancing. If an issue hit

one of the nodes all users connected to that

node wold be kicked out but users will be able

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 node wold be kicked out but users will
be able
20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

to logon again as the other AS will be up and

running.

Database -> DB wise the norm is to have at

least 2 databases where

one is set to be the

primary database, serving the system and the

second one is a standby database which is

supplied with a constant feed of logs from the

primary database (this is called log shipping).

On top of that you need a cluster software and

an automated fail-over mechanism. This means

that the cluster will be pointing to the primary

database, if that node becomes unavailable the

failover mechanism will kick in and the standby

database will become the primary database

effectively keeping the system running.

Once finished your new HA system should look

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 Once finished your new HA system should look
20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

something like this,

Now, What is a HA-Cluster?

At the most basic level a standard HA-Cluster

in an Active-Passive configuration has 2 nodes,

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20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

one is the primary node and the other one is

the standby node. That simply means that the

primary node is actively serving the system

while the standby node is waiting to jump-in in

case of a failure.

How does it work?

The cluster get set with a virtual IP (and

hostname via DNS), these are the details to be

used on the SAP profiles to call that particular

component. The Cluster will assign that virtual

IP to the active node and use a heartbeat

monitor to confirm the availability of the

components, if the primary node stops
responding it will trigger the automatic failover

mechanism that will call the standby node to

step-up to become the primary node and will

assign the virtual IP to it restoring the

component availability. Once the failed node is
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 component availability. Once the failed node is
20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

fixed it will come online as a standby node.

A High Availability database will look

something like this:

You can read more about this subject on High

Availability – Frequently Asked Questions  by

Eyal Katz

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20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

So? is that it?…

Yes, and no….

Yes, you have a HA system now!! … if there is a

problem your system will be able to withstand

the loss of one of its components or even an

entire host.

No, you need to make sure everything that

talks to this system is using load balancing. I

cannot stress this enough, if the rest of the

landscape and third parties are pointing at a fix

host you will end up out of business… so, it’s

very important to make sure that all the RFC’s,
JCO’s and GUI’s are set to take full benefit of

load balancing.

Hope this was a good overview of a basic HA

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 Hope this was a good overview of a basic HA
20/10/21 14:51 High Availability Explained – v1.1

system.

PS: This is a very basic case scenario, if you use

ICM or the SAP Gateway you want to make

sure you use an SAP webdispatcher and a

standalone SAP Gateway to load balance those

requests too.

PPS: HA differs drastically depending what OS

and Database you run your landscape on, also

there are several tools available for virtualised

environments.

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