Outlining how to use the Hardware Measurement Tool

The SAP HANA Hardware and Cloud Measurement Tool (HCMT) provide tests and reports for new single host and scale-out systems to determine if the hardware you intend to use meets the minimum performance criteria required to run SAP HANA in production use. The tools consist of the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool, which can be downloaded from the SAP Support Portal, and the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement analysis, which is available online.

The SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool (HCMT) allows customers and partners to collect information on the infrastructure intended for SAP HANA deployment. The tool measures whether the planned hardware or cloud system complies with the requirements defined by SAP. Furthermore, it gauges whether the system planned for SAP HANA deployment can achieve satisfactory base performance by meeting the minimum requirements defined as well as satisfactory overall performance given the intended SAP HANA usage. The measurement results are saved into a single file, which can be uploaded to the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement analysis for further analysis and reporting.

Download and set up the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool (HCMT) to be able to measure whether the infrastructure planned for SAP HANA deployment meets the system and performance requirements that are needed for certification.

Caution

The test should only be used before going into production. Because the tests stress the system to the maximum, it is not possible to use the tools in production systems.

Before you can download and install the HCMT application, you need to have a valid S-user for accessing the SAP Support Portal, the latest version of SAPCAR, and have read the latest version of SAP Note 2493172 – SAP HANA Hardware and Cloud Measurement Tool. Perform the following steps to download and install the HCMT application:

• Download the HCMT application using the search function of the SAP Support Portal (https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/softwarecenter/search). In the search field, search for HANA CLOUD OPTIM.

• In the search results, select the HANA HW CLOUD OPTIM TOOLS 2.0, and download the latest version that fits your CPU architecture.

• Unpack the downloaded HCMT archive using the command: SAPCAR -vxf HCMT_0XX_0-80003261.SAR

• Change into the extracted setup directory with the command: cd setup

• Install the HCMT application by starting the hcmtsetup application with the command: ./hcmtsetup

• Test the HCMT application installation by listing an overview of all available test using the command: ./hcmt -l

The measurement enables you to decide whether the system planned for SAP HANA deployment meets the desired system and performance requirements.

The SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool performs a series of automated tests, for example, network tests, file system consistency tests, system management BIOS tests, and CPU benchmark tests. The duration and repeat rate of the tests depends on the type of execution plan that you intend to run. The following execution plans are available:

• executionplan.json – Default execution plan that helps you to check if the KPIs for SAP HANA certification are met.
• full_executionplan.json – Performs the same tests as the default execution plan, but has a higher test repeat rate and thus a longer test duration. This test is required for SAP HANA certification.

The following checks are executed by the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool:

• CPU Micro Benchmark (CPU Benchmark Test)

  Benchmarks CPU performance on number of found primes during search period, number of floating point arithmetic operations (+,-,*,/) per second, and number of integer arithmetic operations (+,-,*,/) per second.

• NUMA Timer Test (NUMA Timer)

  Measures NUMA node timer behavior. To optimize its internal resource use and calculation, SAP HANA extensively uses the capabilities of the underlying Intel Xeon chipset family. In most cases, the resource management and optimization are handled directly in the SAP HANA database kernel rather than using the operating system capabilities. To continually improve performance, SAP strives to optimize the use of CPU cores and memory, also in relation to NUMA awareness. In case of virtualization through a hypervisor, SAP HANA hence requires a read-only guest SDK that provides a kind of mapping table between vCPUs and physical NUMA cores as well as between virtual memory and physical NUMA nodes.

• NUMA Memory Latency Test (NUMA Memory Latency Test)

  Measures NUMA node memory latency. A Simple NUMA Memory Latency Check and a Simple NUMA Memory Latency Check are performed.

• NUMA Memory Bandwidth Test (NUMA Memory Bandwidth Test)

  Measures NUMA node memory access bandwidth.

• File System Write Test (File System Write)

  Storage testing measures data throughput and latency between SAP HANA computing nodes and the external storage system. To perform the test, it is not necessary that SAP HANA software is installed on the system. The test uses the same libraries for file system access and the same I/O patterns as SAP HANA does.

  The process of measurement is related to the I/O engine of the SAP HANA database to ensure that the projected results meet the requirements of SAP HANA. The SAP HANA I/O engine uses the AIO interface and some operations are not well represented in some file systems such as ext4. This means that certain types of file-enlarging writes are completely unsupported and block all other activities for the entire duration of the operation.

• File System Read Test (File System Read)

  Storage testing measures data throughput and latency between SAP HANA computing nodes and the external storage system. To perform the test, it is not necessary that SAP HANA software is installed on the system. The test uses the same libraries for file system access and the same I/O patterns as SAP HANA does.

  The process of measurement is related to the I/O engine of the SAP HANA database to ensure that the projected results meet the requirements of SAP HANA. The SAP HANA I/O engine uses the AIO interface and some operations are not well represented in some file systems such as ext4. This means that certain types of file-enlarging writes are completely unsupported and block all other activities for the entire duration of the operation.

• NUMA Jobs Query Performance Test (NUMA Query Performance)

  Measures NUMA node query performance. With this test brutto/netto scan operations per second and the overhead time are measured.

• NUMA Jobs Throughput Performance Test (NUMA Throughput)

  Measures NUMA node throughput. With this test brutto/netto scan operations per second and the overhead time are measured.

• Network Device Information (Network Device Information)

  Queries network device information like IP address, device name, max. speed in Mbits/s and TCP segmentation offload.

• Network Loopback Test (Network Loopback Adapter)

  Measures network speed using the network loopback adapter.

  The networking test module tests the network behavior with the same network properties and communication stack used in SAP HANA. It measures the minimum bandwidth of the intra-node network, that is, the bandwidth available between the SAP HANA computing nodes that comprise a scale-out system.

  The tool consists of a server and a client component. To perform a point-to-point network test, it is necessary to start the server component on one of the servers and connect it to the client component on another server in the SAP HANA cluster. To check the network performance, all network combinations between the servers in the SAP HANA cluster must be measured.

• Network Topology Test (Network Topology Test)

  Checks the network performance between computer nodes.

• Process Tree Information (System Process Tree)

  Collects system process tree data.

• System Management BIOS (System Management BIOS)

  Collects system management BIOS data.

• File System Mounts (File System Mounts)

  Analyzes the file system configuration.

• Running Processes (Process List)

  Lists all running processes.

• Installed Packages (Installed Packages)

  Collects the installed packages and validates against given prerequisites.

• Hyper-Converged Consistency Check (File System Consistency)

  Checks hyper-converged infrastructure systems for file system consistency.

• CPU States (Processor C States)

  Collects the power setting states for all processors.

• Landscape Test (Landscape Test)

  Collects detailed system information and logs from the SAP HANA system landscape and uses this information to validate OS configuration and check the consistency of the landscape.

The SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool supports both Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and version 6 (IPv6). However, all hosts must use the same IP version. A combination of different IP versions is not supported.

Before you can run the HCMT application on a single host system, you need to make sure that the system meets the minimum requirements for running the tool. The prerequisites are as follows:

• You have installed the latest version of the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool on the system.
• You have at least 20 GB of free storage space in the location where SAP HANA data can be placed during the test.
• When using nonvolatile memory, mounts for all hosts or an alias of the same name must be available.
• Port 50001 must be open for communication.

Now you can start a measurement on the single host system to check whether the system planned for SAP HANA deployment meets the requirements.

The measurement tool executes a series of tests based on the execution plan that you specify. The two main execution plans are named executionplan.json and the full_executionplan.json. You can find these in the config directory. You will find several more execution plans in the config directory, but they are to be used for a scale-out system test or are smaller subsets of the two main execution plans.

Note

The executed tests in the executionplan.json and the full_executionplan.json file are identical, only the test repeat rate is higher.

Start the measurement tool in verbose mode using the following command: hcmt -v

You can now interactively adjust the variables or accept the default values. The following table shows the adjustable variables:

The results of the measurement are saved in the hcmtresult-[timestamp].zip file. How to upload the results to the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement analysis for a more detailed analysis will be explained later in this lesson.

Before you can run the HCMT application on a scale-out system, you need to make sure that the system meets the minimum requirements for running the tool. The prerequisites are as follows:

• You have installed the latest version of the SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tool on the system.
• You have at least 20 GB of free storage space in the location where SAP HANA data can be placed during the test.
• When using nonvolatile memory, mounts for all hosts or an alias of the same name must be available.
• Port 50000 and 50001 must be open for communication.

Now you can start a measurement on the scale-out system to check whether the system planned for SAP HANA deployment meets the requirements.

For scale-out systems, you start the measurement tool on the coordinator host and specify any worker hosts on which the tests should run as well. The tool reads the execution plan, starts the test locally, and delegates tests marked for scale-out to the worker hosts.

The tool waits for the completion of the tests on the worker hosts before starting the next test in the execution plan. All test measurement data and the host manifests are collected in one result file written by the coordinator host instance.

Upload the measurement results file and analyze the results to see whether your systems meet the configuration and performance requirements.

You use the SAP hardware and cloud measurement analysis to upload the measurement results file and analyze the setup and performance of the systems that are intended for SAP HANA deployment. Use the SAP HANA Hardware and Cloud Measurement Tool Aalysis Service to review the results.

The tool performs several measurements, some of which are related to parameters that ensure your system can achieve high performance. Others are target KPIs that must be met to pass certification. These KPIs are labeled as such and the required target values are displayed in the charts.

The analysis results are displayed as a percentage of the number of tests that meet the requirements defined by SAP. If all requirements are met, the analysis result is 100% and represented by a green bar. If any thresholds or KPIs are not met, the percentage is lower and displayed by a red bar. If there is no bar shown, then the analysis does not entail KPIs that are relevant for certification, but other performance indicators.