Requirements for SAP ASE Target Hosts and Databases

This topic describes the configuration and settings requirements for SAP ASE target hosts and databases.

Target Host Requirements

• The operating system on the target environment must be the same as, or binary compatible with, the operating system on the source environment

• As the Delphix Engine uses NFSv3 for mounting target host filesystems, the prerequisite packages to support NFSv3 client communication are required for normal operation, and the required services to support NFS client communications (including file locking) must be running.  This includes:

  1. 1. portmapper / rpcbind
     2. status daemon (rpc.statd)
     3. NFS lock manager (rpc.lockd/lockmgr)
• The SAP ASE version on the target environment must be the same as the version on the source environment. However, EBF/SP version on target environment can be different.
• There must be an operating system user, such as delphix_os, that meets the following requirements:
  
  • The $SYBASE environment variable is set for non-interactive shells (such as via the .bashrc configuration file).  Set the variable as follows:
    • Set the PermitUserEnvironment configuration parameter to "yes" in the sshd_config file
    • Add the variable to the user's .ssh/environment file
    • Restart the SSH daemon
  • Can login to the target host via Secure Shell (SSH)
  • Can login to ASE instances using isql with LANG=C set

  • Designating the Delphix operating system user’s primary group to be the same as the ASE instance’s means the file system permissions can be more restrictive and is a better security practice than granting world read access to the toolkit or the backup files. If the target host is used to host the staging databases, consider the following:

    • If you don’t add the Delphix operating system user to the ASE instance owner’s group, greater permissions will need to be granted to the backup files to ensure read access to the dumps and/or transaction logs. Delphix looks for the backup files on the staging host (unless a "remote" backup server is used in which case, the remote host is used which is often the source environment).

    • If you sync Delphix with a dSource by asking ASE to create a new backup, the ASE instance owner will need write permission to the toolkit (or the mount point if you use the CLI to specify a directory other than the toolkit). Delphix will issue the "DUMP DATABASE" command to write to staging database's "temp" directory which is mounted on the staging host.

    • Has write permission for the mount-point directory (by default the toolkit directory but can be a separate mount point specified in the command line interface).

  • The following permissions are usually granted via sudo authorization of the commands. Disable tty for the delphix_os user for mount and umount.  See Sudo Privilege Requirements for SAP ASE Environments for further explanation of this requirement, and Sudo File Configuration Examples for SAP ASE Environments for example file configurations.
    
    1. Permission to run mount and umount as super-user.
    2. On Solaris, permission to run pargs on Solaris 
    3. On AIX, permission to run the nfso command as super-user.
    4. (Optional) On AIX and Linux, permission to run ps as super-user.
• There must be a database user, such as delphix_db, with the sa_role on each instance on the target environment
• The database user such as delphix_db for any staging instances must also have the sybase_ts_role
• There must be a directory on the target environment where you can install the Delphix Engine toolkit, for example /var/opt/delphix/Toolkit.
  
  • The delphix_os user must own the directory
  • The directory must have permissions 0770, for example, -rwxrwx--. However, you can also use more permissive settings.
  • The directory should have 1GB of available storage
  • Avoid using the home directory of the delphix_os user
  • If you intend to use the LogSync feature, it is recommended to make the toolkit directory as short as possible to keep the full path to the transaction log file names under ASE's 127 character limit. For example, create the toolkit directory as /tk.
• If the target host will be used as a staging target environment (see Managing SAP ASE Environments Overview), at least one of the following two options must be configured:
  

  • • You must use sp_addserver to add the staging ASE instance's Backup Server to sysservers on the source ASE instance (so that remote database dump/load works)

      OR

    • Full and transaction dump files from the source database must be available locally to the staging database (over NFS, replication, scp, etc.)

• Staging and target ASE instances should have disk mirroring disabled.

  sp_configure "disable disk mirroring" – run value should be 1, which is the default.  If it is 0, change it using 

  sp_configure "disable disk mirroring", 1  – this parameter is static so the ASE instance must be restarted for this change to take effect.

• Delphix will mirror the number of devices used on the source database for the staging database (dSource) and each VDB created from that source database. The number of devices parameter should be scaled appropriately based on the max number of virtual databases that will be provisioned to the ASE instance. This parameter can be changed using: sp_configure "number of devices", <max devices>.

  ASE 15.7.0 SP100 and later releases support the shrink command. In some cases Delphix must increase the number of devices used for databases if this command is used. Delphix creates a minimum of the same number of devices as the source database for the staging database (dSource) and each VDB and will add more devices for every 4TB of fragment holes. See SAP ASE issue CR#799273 for additional details.

To support multiple VDBs and the staging databases, you may need to increase the parameter number of alarms.

ASE Manual Discovery

When an ASE environment is added Delphix automatically discovers your ASE instances. Manual discovery allows users to add instances that were not automatically discovered. This feature is currently only supported via the CLI. For more information please refer to Configuring ASE Manual Discovery.

Related Links

• Using HostChecker to Confirm Source and Target Environment Configuration
• sudoers Manual Page
• Configuring ASE Manual Discovery