What are the best practices of SAP IBP deployment that we can use in the future? We will see that in this section.
What Is SAP IBP Deployment?
SAP IBP Deployment is a very common and important concept in SAP. SAP IBP deployment is a process of deploying the SAP IBP themselves.
We can deploy the SAP IBP in a variety of ways, but some of the common deployment methods are described here.
SAP IBP Deployment Landscape
SAP has its terminology for deployment. We will start with some of the terms that are used in SAP IBP deployment. Let’s take a look at them:
Application Server (AS)
Application Server is another term for a server on which we have installed our SAP system. It is also known as a host. The application server is where our business processes run.
Application servers can be physical or virtualized machines.
Commonly, application servers are physical servers, but we can use virtualization too in our environment. Application Servers are used to run all the components of an SAP system; these include the following:
- ABAP,
- Java, and S/4 HANA Core
Application Server is the place where people connect and interact with the business processes using the respective front-end client tools. Like the following:
- SAP GUI,
- WebGUI, o Fiori apps
In other words, the Application Server is where users interact with our IT landscape. Application Servers can consist of multiple application servers too. It depends on how many users we have in our environment and how many transactions they carry out during their daily workflow.
As per SAP best practices, we should have one application server for 25 to 30 users in an enterprise-size organization. We have to have enough infrastructure to support this number of users in an application server at any point in time.
Otherwise, these users will feel performance-related issues while working on their workstations or laptops.
An enterprise-size organization may have more than 1,000 users all working on one Application Server at any point in time. If so, then we need at least 2 to 3 Application Servers installed in our environment for a seamless user experience.
These numbers may vary from one industry to another and from one country. To another as per the user population size and their transaction volume per day or week.
Application Layer (AL)
The Application Layer is a layer of the architecture. As it contains all ABAP components together with some SAP Java components. Like Work Manager (WKM) and HTTP Service (HTTPS), etc., which run on the application server layer (AS).
Business One Connection (B1C)
Business One Connection acts as an interface
between the application layer and the Business One (BO) system. This interface is called B1C.
Business One is an SAP add-on product, which many organizations use in their IT landscape. If we have BO in our IT landscape, then we need a B1C connection. Otherwise, it is not required for our SAP IBP deployment.
Conclusion
In this section, we have seen the best practices for SAP IBP deployment. There are many other factors that we need to take care of to deploy SAP IBP in an enterprise environment.