Memory fragmentation can happen in any operating system, but if you are running a memory intensive workload like SAP HANA, fragmentation can put an upper limit on how long the application can be available before needing to be restarted.
Increasing the amount of virtual address space can alleviate this problem by providing more memory to the application.
SUSE increased the virtual address space available in SLES 12 Service Pack 3 for POWER to 512TB last year to help with this problem.
Unfortunately, many of our SAP HANA customers on POWER started out on SLES 11 SP4 and will be running on SLES 11 for a long time to come. What about them?
Help has arrived: with the kernel-bigmem–3.0.101-108.7.1 update, we now support up to 128TB virtual address space on SLES 11 SP4. This provides the head room to allow customers to run their memory intensive applications, like SAP HANA, for longer periods between restarts.
This capability complements the support for 32TB of physical memory that was introduced with the bigmem kernel about a year ago (Blog: More memory now available for SAP HANA on SLES 11).
For more information, please see the SUSE TID at https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=7018408
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About Jay Kruemcke
Jay Kruemcke is passionate about helping customers and partners achieve their goals.
Jay is the Linux product line manager at Wind River Systems, responsible for embedded Linux operating system products including Wind River Linux and Wind River Linux Distro.
Prior to Wind River, Jay was responsible for the SUSE Linux for High-Performance Computing, SUSE Linux for Arm, and SUSE Linux for Power servers. Jay released the first commercially supported Linux distribution for Arm in 2016.
Jay has built an extensive career in product management based on being a bridge between customers and engineering teams. He has extensive experience in many areas including product positioning, driving future product directions, using social media for client collaboration, and evangelizing the capabilities and future directions of enterprise products.
Jay had a long career at IBM including many roles in the Power and Cloud Engineering and Offering teams including being the product management owner for the AIX Unix operating system.
In addition to his product management experience, Jay has held a variety of technology roles at including product marketing, manager of a technical architecture team, briefing center staff, SAP systems management consultant, and as a system programmer and administrator
Jay also volunteers with the Boy Scouts in multiple roles and with ProductCamp Austin.
The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of my employer.
Follow me on twitter @smollinux and @phastflyer
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