This guide provides an overview of how SAP Business One works with Google Cloud, and provides details that you can use when planning the implementation of a new SAP Business One system.
For more information about how to deploy SAP Business One on Google Cloud, see the SAP Business One deployment guide.
About SAP Business One on Google Cloud
SAP supports Business One on Google Cloud with either SAP HANA or Microsoft SQL Server.
This guide, as well as the SAP Business One Deployment Guide, covers Business One with SAP HANA only.
SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database that provides high-performance analytics and real-time data processing. SAP Business One is business management software designed for small and medium-sized enterprises.
You can leverage the ease of provisioning, high scalability, and redundant infrastructure capabilities of Google Cloud to run your business-critical SAP Business One workloads cost-effectively on SAP HANA. Google Cloud provides a set of physical assets, such as computers and hard disk drives, and virtual resources, such as Compute Engine virtual machines (VMs), located in Google data centers around the world.
When you deploy SAP Business One and SAP HANA on Google Cloud, you deploy them to a VM running on Compute Engine. Compute Engine VMs provide persistent disks, which function similarly to physical disks in a desktop or a server, but are automatically managed for you by Compute Engine to ensure data redundancy and optimized performance.
For information from SAP about SAP Business One for SAP HANA, see the SAP Help Portal.
For information about the costs that are associated with running Business One on SAP HANA on Google Cloud, see the SAP HANA planning guide.
Google Cloud basics
Google Cloud consists of many cloud-based services and products. When running SAP products on Google Cloud, you mainly use the IaaS-based services offered through Compute Engine and Cloud Storage, as well as some platform-wide features, such as tools.
See the Google Cloud platform overview for important concepts and terminology. This guide duplicates some information from the overview for convenience and context.
For an overview of considerations that enterprise-scale organizations should take into account when running on Google Cloud, see the Google Cloud Architecture Framework.
Interacting with Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers three main ways to interact with the platform, and your resources, in the cloud:
- The Google Cloud console, which is a web-based user interface.
- The
gcloudcommand-line tool, which provides a superset of the functionality that Google Cloud console offers. - Client libraries, which provide APIs for accessing services and management of resources. Client libraries are useful when building your own tools.
Google Cloud services
SAP deployments typically utilize some or all of the following Google Cloud services:
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| VPC networking |
Connects your VM instances to each other and to the internet. Each VM instance is a member of either a legacy network with a single global IP range, or a recommended subnet network, where the VM instance is a member of a single subnetwork that is a member of a larger network. Note that a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network cannot span Google Cloud projects, but a Google Cloud project can have multiple VPC networks. To connect resources from multiple projects to a common VPC network, you can use Shared VPC, so that the resources can communicate with each other securely and efficiently by using internal IP addresses from that network. For information about how to provision a Shared VPC including requirements, configuration steps, and usage, see Provision Shared VPC. |
| Compute Engine | Creates and manages VMs with your choice of operating system and software stack. |
| Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk |
You can use Persistent Disk and Google Cloud Hyperdisk:
|
| Google Cloud console |
A browser-based tool for managing Compute Engine resources. Use a template to describe all of the Compute Engine resources and instances you need. You don't have to individually create and configure the resources or figure out dependencies because the Google Cloud console does that for you. |
| Cloud Storage | You can store your SAP database backups in Cloud Storage for added durability and reliability, with replication. |
| Cloud Monitoring |
Provides visibility into the deployment, performance, uptime, and health of Compute Engine, network, and persistent storage disks. Monitoring collects metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud and uses these to generate insights through dashboards, charts, and alerts. You can monitor the compute metrics at no cost through Monitoring. |
| IAM |
Provides unified control over permissions for Google Cloud resources. IAM lets you control who can perform control-plane operations on your VMs, including creating, modifying, and deleting VMs and persistent storage disks, and creating and modifying networks. |
Pricing and quotas
You can use the pricing calculator to estimate your usage costs. For more pricing information, see Compute Engine pricing, Cloud Storage pricing, and Google Cloud Observability pricing.
Google Cloud resources are subject to quotas. If you plan to use high-CPU or high-memory machines, you might need to request additional quota. For more information, see Compute Engine resource quotas.
Software versions supported by SAP on Google Cloud
SAP Business One 10.0 for SAP HANA is supported by SAP on Google Cloud with the following software versions:
- SAP HANA 2.0
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 and later service packs (x86_64)
SAP Business One 9.3 for SAP HANA is supported by SAP on Google Cloud with the following software versions:
- SAP HANA 1.0
- SLES 12 SP3
Resource requirements
VM types
The following Compute Engine VM types are officially supported by SAP for production use of SAP Business One on Google Cloud.
| Google Cloud Instance Type | vCPU | Memory (GiB) | CPU Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| n2-highmem-8 | 8 | 64 | Intel Cascade Lake |
| n2-highmem-16 | 16 | 128 | Intel Cascade Lake |
| n2-highmem-32 | 32 | 256 | Intel Cascade Lake |
| n2-highmem-64 | 64 | 512 | Intel Cascade Lake |
| n1-highmem-32 | 32 | 208 | Intel Broadwell |
| n1-highmem-64 | 64 | 416 | Intel Broadwell |
For a list of the Compute Engine VM instance types that SAP certifies, see Certified Compute Engine VMs for SAP HANA.
The operating system you choose must be compatible with the version of SAP Business One you plan to install. For more information see the SAP product availability matrix. For more information about different instance types and their use cases, see the machine types documentation.
Storage configuration
SAP HANA is an in-memory database, so data is mostly stored and processed in memory. Protection against data loss is provided by saving the data to a persistent storage location.
Compute Engine SSD-based persistent disks serve as the
block storage on the Compute Engine VM types
that are certified for Business One on SAP HANA.
On a VM with 32 or more vCPUs, an 834 GB SSD persistent disk can
achieve up to 400 MB/sec for writes, and 400 MB/sec for reads, which
meets the minimum performance requirements for the /hana/data and
/hana/log volumes.
The default storage configuration for SAP HANA backup uses standard HDD persistent disks. Standard HDD persistent disks are efficient and economical for handling sequential read-write operations, but are not optimized to handle high rates of random input-output operations per second (IOPS). SAP HANA uses sequential I/O with large blocks to back up the database. Standard HDD persistent disks provide a low-cost, high-performance option for this scenario.
The SAP HANA backup volume size is designed to provide optimal baseline and burst throughput as well as the ability to hold several backup sets. Holding multiple backup sets in the backup volume makes it easier to recover your database if necessary.
You can also use other backup solutions for SAP HANA, including the Backint feature of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP, which lets you store SAP HANA backups directly in Cloud Storage.
For more information about backing up SAP HANA, see Backup and recovery.
Memory configuration
The memory configuration of your Compute Engine VM differs depending on the instance type that you choose. To see the memory configurations that you can choose from see Certified Compute Engine VMs for SAP HANA.
Operating systems
Business One 10.0 is supported by SAP on the following operating systems:
- SLES 15 SP1
- SLES 15 SP1 for SAP
Business One 9.3 is supported by SAP on SLES 12 SP3.
- SLES 12 SP3
- SLES 12 SP3 for SAP
Licensing
Running SAP Business One and SAP HANA on Google Cloud requires you to bring your own license (BYOL). For more information about SAP licensing, contact SAP.
You can install Business One and apply your existing license to the instance before the grace period ends.
Deployment architecture
You deploy SAP Business One using a single-node architecture that has the following components:
One Compute Engine VM instance, with an SSD-based persistent disk that meets SAP HANA performance requirements, and a network bandwidth of up to 16 Gbps. The SSD-based persistent disk is partitioned and mounted to
/hana/datato host the data. You install both the SAP HANA database and the SAP Business One Server on this single VM. For more information about the persistent disk options for SAP HANA, see Persistent disk storage.VPC firewall rules restricting access to instances.
Optionally, a Persistent Disk volume for backups of the SAP HANA database. If you use the Backint feature of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP, then you don't require a Persistent Disk volume for backups.
Automated SAP HANA database installation with a configuration file that you create.
An optional Compute Engine VM as a bastion host.
An optional, but recommended, subnetwork with a custom topology and IP ranges in the Google Cloud region of your choice. The SAP HANA database and the other Compute Engine instances are launched within this subnetwork. You can use an existing subnetwork for SAP HANA.
An optional, but recommended, Internet gateway configured for outbound Internet access for your SAP HANA and other instances. This guide assumes you are using this gateway.
An optional Compute Engine VM for SAP HANA Studio. This is an optional step that isn't discussed in these SAP Business One guides. To learn more, see the SAP Hana deployment guide.
An optional Compute Engine VM for SAP Business One Client, for administration.
The deployment uses an optional NAT bastion host for accessing SAP HANA, so that an external IP is not exposed. The bastion host is deployed in the same subnetwork as the SAP Business One Server instance.
You can use Cloud Storage to back up your local backups available in
/hanabackup. This mount should be sized equal to or greater than the data
mount.
Support
For issues with Google Cloud infrastructure or services, contact Customer Care. You can find the contact information on the Support Overview page in the Google Cloud console. If Customer Care determines that a problem resides in your SAP systems, then you are referred to SAP Support.
For SAP product-related issues, log your support request with
SAP support.
SAP evaluates the support ticket and, if it appears to be a Google Cloud
infrastructure issue, then SAP transfers that ticket to the appropriate
Google Cloud component in its system: BC-OP-LNX-GOOGLE or
BC-OP-NT-GOOGLE.
Support requirements
Before you can receive support for SAP systems and the Google Cloud infrastructure and services that they use, you must meet the minimum support plan requirements.
For more information about the minimum support requirements for SAP on Google Cloud, see:
- Getting support for SAP on Google Cloud
- SAP Note 2456406 - SAP on Google Cloud Platform: Support Prerequisites (An SAP user account is required)
What's next
For information specific to deployment, see the SAP Business One deployment guide.