NIPING a useful tool from SAPThis article got motivated by a customer support case we lately engaged in. The issue in the case was that after rolling out new NICs, new drivers and new NIC teaming software the DBMS server of their SAP ERP system seem to respond sluggishly sometimes. What brought us to look into the network was the fact that ST0. ERP showed response times of 5. Checking into the DMV sys. SQL Server side revealed that the same queries which were recorded in the 5. SAP side were noted by SQL Server as being executed within 3 4ms. Hence we focused on looking into the network. In order to perform basic investigations we took NIPING in the way as described in this article. What is NIPING NIPING is a tool delivered by SAP in the SAP executable directory. SID Dlt instance enumeration exe. The tool is used by SAP support to check on the network connectivity and more important latency and throughput on the network. Where the tool was used very little in the past was around the configuration of SAP landscapes. In the past we relied on the fact that just doubling the of network cards NIC would be sufficient to increase the throughput on the DBMS server whereas the application servers usually were fine with the throughput one NIC could provide. However with the current hardware development of the many core processors more and more results in network throughput issues even with 1. Gb Ethernet NICs. Here and there software component mixes like NIC teaming software and other software interfering with the network packages like IPSec, eventual encryption of network traffic, etc also might significantly lower the throughput from the theoretical possible throughput. Hence it makes sense to use this little tool from SAP in order to test network throughput under real conditions with the exact same network stack as SAP programmed it in their dispwork executable. Dreambox Dm800 Hd Se Clone Image Download. How does it work You need to start at least 2 NIPING sessions. One will be the server side session and at least another one which is so to speak in the client role on another server. It is possible for the server session to receive from multiple transmitting clients. Hence the scenario of a DBMS server receiving data from multiple SAP application servers and then sending data back to the very same application servers is possible. NIPING thereby checks the receiving and transmitting part. Means the of bytes sent by the NIPING session on an application server is returned by the receiving session to the sender. SAP has an OSS note 5. NIPING pretty well. This blog provides information about running SAP Applications on the Microsoft Platform. The blog is written by people who are working with SAP on the. HTB1MYMCQpXXXXcUXVXXq6xXFXXXD/46pcs-1-4-Inch-High-Quality-Socket-Set-Car-Repair-Tool-Ratchet-Set-Torque-Wrench-Combination.jpg' alt='Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools' title='Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools' />Lets describe a small scenario. Lets assume that we want to check the network throughput of our DBMS server. In order to do so we use the 4 of the SAP application servers to press on the DBMS server. Assuming that we dont have SAP application software installed on the DBMS server, we need to copy the following 4 files into a directory we created to the DBMS server Niping. Icudt. 30. dll. Icuin. Icuuc. 30. dll. Next step would be to start the nipping session on the DBMS server with the following command line out of a command window in the directory we copied the 4 files into niping s I 0. After a successful start, a comment like Sun Mar 2. On the application server side, we open a command window and go into one of the SAP directories containing the SAP executables. Note Your browser does not support JavaScript or it is turned off. Press the button to proceed. References and further reading SAP Quick Sizer tool. SAP Standard Applications Benchmark. SAP Note 1514966 SAP HANA 1. Sizing SAP InMemory Database. Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools For Copper' title='Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools For Copper' />Here we start the client sessions with the following command line niping. H lt server name which runs the server session B 5. L 1. 00. 0The B parameter defines the batch size. Whereas the L parameter defines the of loops which will be worked through. So the L parameter is mostly for defining the length of the test. In order to perform a test which shows what the maximum data volume is we can transfer to and from the DBMS server, we took a batch size of 5. KB to be submitted in both directions. After the test started on the client side, the following comment should show up in the command line Sun Mar 2. Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools' title='Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools' />In the nipping session on the server side, this comment should show up Sun Mar 2. After the test ran successfully, the client will give the following result Sun Mar 2. Bs excluding max and min av. Bs. We usually take the av. So if we have four client sessions working against one server session we e. Client 1. Client 2. Client 3. Client 4. SAP HARDWARE SIZING. It is used to measuredetermine the hardware i. SAP Systems to be implemented. SAP provides QUICK SIZER Tool to calculate the. PI Best Practices Sizing Performance Tuning November 2009 2 2. Sizing Guidelines For information about sizing SAP solutions in general, pleaser refer to SAP. Quick Sizer is a webbased tool designed to make the sizing of SAP Applications easier and faster. It has been developed by SAP in close cooperation with all platform. SumAvg. Avg Latency in ms. Transmission Volume in Kbits. If we look at the numbers, the response time of around 3ms seems to be OK. SAP-Sizing-Site.png' alt='Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools' title='Sap Sizing Tool For Hardware Sizing Tools' />Looking at the Kbitssec, we seem already close to the physical possibilities of a 1. GBit Ethernet card. Checking in task manager of the server which ran the server session, the network utilization on the only NIC indeed seems to be 9. So the result of the test is that the DBMS server can run on line speed in terms of throughput with acceptable response times. Reasonable test sizes for everyday situations. The normal situation is to have way smaller package sizes than 5. K which are transferred. When looking at a typical SAP ERP, we look at the SAP application instances sending prepared parameterized queries to SQL Server. Means usually the statement text is replaced by a handle. All what is sent besides the handle are the set of parameter value. In return SQL Server will then return some metadata descriptions plus the result set. In typical SAP ERP cases, the result sets usually are on the smaller side. Hence analyzing a SAP ERP system for a while, we saw typical average sizes of a network request sent to SQL Server being in the size of 3. But then it was quite a few thousand or a few ten thousand packets of that size per second. In return SQL Server used to return packets in the size of 1. Usually tens of thousands packets like that per second. Hence another test can be done where we try to use the smaller packets sizes and where the focus is to push the of packets send into many tens of thousands. One area we can test with such a test is the configuration of Windows Receive Side Scaling RSS. A functionality which is essential on the server hardware we use today. In essence this functionality will allow leveraging multiple CPUs on the incoming stream of network traffic. In very old days before Windows Server 2. SP2, there only was one CPU used to execute substantial work resulting out a network interrupt. In more recent version of Windows Server, multiple CPUs can work on it using RSS. However different Network Card vendors are supporting RSS in very different ways and very different configurations. Hence it can make sense to test the RSS configuration with niping. Another real life experience is the fact that more packages are getting pushed from the DBMS server to the various application servers than packages are getting received from the application servers. The difference can be factor 4 5. So not only larger packages are getting sent by the DBMS server, it also is that more packages will be sent. Some things else to take into account. Some NIC teaming software is bundling sending data only and leverages one NIC for receiving only. In those cases NIPING doesnt help to figure out the maximum possible send rate volume of the DBMS server side since niping on the other side will return the volume sent. However some NIC teaming software does have options where they can bundle both ways. Bundling both directions is especially interesting for intensive data load situations or the classical SAP homogenous, Unicode or heterogeneous system migration. In those cases SAP application servers are used to run importing R3.