Best Practice 18.3 – Evaluate licensing impact and optimization options - SAP Lens

Best Practice 18.3 – Evaluate licensing impact and optimization options

When moving SAP workloads to AWS, there might be commercial impacts with the software licenses your SAP workloads require. You should understand these impacts and the options available to you.

Disclaimer

Any discussion of Database licensing policies in this document is for informational purposes only and is based on the information available at the time of publication. For more specific information, users should consult their own license agreements with the specific Database Vendor.

Suggestion 18.3.1 – Understand the impact of CPU and memory on software license

Evaluate the different vCPU and memory ratios available with the supported Amazon EC2 Instance Types for SAP to optimize license costs.

For Oracle based environments, review:

For Microsoft Windows and SQL Server environments, review:

For IBM Db2 environments, review:

Understand the impact for ISV and third-party products licensed by CPU or memory:

Suggestion 18.3.2 – Understand operating system purchasing options

For each of the SAP supported operating systems, there is a set of purchasing options available.

  1. Amazon EC2 provided license

  2. AWS Marketplace provided license

  3. Bring your own licenses (BYOL)

Not all options are available for each operating system. You should evaluate your requirements and licensing agreements to determine which option is the most cost effective. You can include the costs of the following operating systems as part of the Amazon EC2 cost:

  • Windows Server

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

You can purchase the following operating systems via the AWS Marketplace:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP (based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux base EC2 cost)

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP (based on Amazon Linux base EC2 cost)

You use bring your own licenses (BYOL) for the following operating systems:

  • Windows Server

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux1

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP2

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP2

  • Oracle Enterprise Linux (Oracle Premium Support requirements are detailed in SAP Note: 2069760 - Oracle Linux 7.x SAP Installation and Upgrade ) [Requires SAP Portal Access]

1 Consider SAP Note: 2871484 - SAP supported variants of Red Hat Enterprise Linux [Requires SAP Portal Access] as SAP no longer supports standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux for any SAP workloads as of RHEL 8.

2 These products have a longer term support which might reduce your operational costs for upgrades – see SUSE Documentation: SUSE Enterprise Support Policy and Red Hat Documentation: Red Hat Enterprise Support Policy for more details.

Suggestion 18.3.3 – Consider the use of Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts to mitigate licensing restrictions

Amazon EC2 offers Dedicated Hosts, which allow you to access hardware that's fully dedicated for your use. You can use your own licensed software on dedicated infrastructure. Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts integrate with AWS License Manager, a service which helps you manage your software licenses, including Windows Server and SQL Server licenses.

Suggestion 18.3.4 – Evaluate the cost benefits of moving away from a per gigabyte or per core licensing model

As part of your migration to cloud, consider use of the SAP Runtime database licensing model.

SAP provides the ability for customers to license SAP HANA, SAP ASE and third-party databases under their Runtime database license model. Runtime databases licensed from SAP are solely to support software and SAP named users licensed from SAP. Runtime databases from SAP are licensed as a percentage of the SAP software fee, commonly referred to as the SAP Application Value (SAV).

Runtime licenses are not based on number of gigabytes of memory or CPU cores and therefore can provide a cost benefit over per gigabyte or per core licensing models, particularly when you have multiple non-production systems, as the SAP Runtime database license applies to all environments covered under your SAP license agreement.

If you already have the right to use the SAP HANA Database Runtime license within your SAP license agreement, you should determine if you additionally have the right to use the SAP ASE Database Runtime license for SAP components that cannot use SAP HANA as the underlying database or to reduce the infrastructure costs associated with using SAP HANA for that component.