Linux Conversations | Episode 8: Ensuring SAP Quality: The Automation Journey with Haris Sehic

May 16, 2025 | By: Sebastian Martinez

SUSE Linux

Welcome back to “Linux Conversations,” our blog series exploring the world of Linux with experts from SUSE. In this episode, we delve into the critical world of Quality Assurance for SAP® solutions at SUSE. For over two decades, SUSE and SAP have maintained a deep and collaborative partnership, exemplified by the co-located “Linux Lab” in Waldorf. Today, we speak with Haris Sehic, an architect in SUSE’s Linux Quality Engineering team, who has been a key figure in ensuring the reliability and stability of SUSE’s offerings for SAP customers since 2016.

Join us as Haris shares insights into the crucial nature of Quality Assurance (QA) for mission-critical SAP workloads, the journey towards automation in testing, the unique customer-centric approach to quality, and the significant impact of this collaboration on delivering high-quality SAP solutions.

Interview

Rick Spencer: Haris, thanks for joining us. Can you start by introducing yourself, your team, and your journey at SUSE?

Haris Sehic: Hi Rick, thanks for having me. I’m Haris, and I’ve been with SUSE since 2016, working within the Quality Engineering (QE) department. My focus has been primarily on SAP, and I’m currently an architect in the QE team.

Rick Spencer: As an architect in SUSE’s Linux engineering team focused on SAP QA, you’re right at the heart of ensuring reliability for mission-critical workloads. This long-standing partnership even includes the “Linux Lab” in Waldorf. Can you elaborate on the significance of this collaboration?

Haris Sehic: Absolutely. The “Linux Lab” in Waldorf, where SUSE and other SAP partners have a presence within SAP’s facilities, highlights the deep integration and daily collaboration between our teams. This close working relationship is fundamental to delivering the quality that SAP customers expect.

Rick Spencer: One of our key offerings is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications (SLES for SAP). Can you explain what it is and why it’s specifically tailored for SAP environments?

Haris Sehic: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications is our dedicated offering for customers running SAP workloads. It’s built with the specific needs of SAP in mind, featuring a tuned kernel and additional tools to ensure optimal performance and minimal downtime. Key features include our robust resource agents for high availability, the SAPtune tool for performance optimization, comprehensive documentation, and workload memory protection (WMP).

Rick Spencer: And the main workload here is the SAP HANA database, which we’re proud to say is developed on SUSE. What unique QA challenges does this present, especially with the demand for zero downtime?

Haris Sehic: Being the foundation for SAP HANA development gives us a unique advantage in QA. HANA’s in-memory nature and the zero-downtime requirement necessitate sophisticated cluster setups, with scale-up and scale-out architectures. Our QE efforts are focused on ensuring stability and seamless failover in these complex, often terabyte-scale environments.

Rick Spencer: You’re also very involved in automation within quality engineering. How has that evolved for SAP QA at SUSE?

Haris Sehic: When I started, SAP QA automation was minimal due to the expense and complexity of SAP environments. We’ve since built robust automation pipelines in collaboration with our development teams to handle system deployment, configuration, and workload testing efficiently, which is also crucial in cloud environments.

Rick Spencer: I understand you’ve also adopted a very customer-centric approach to testing.

Haris Sehic: Yes, understanding real-world customer usage is paramount. We’ve initiated a program to collaborate directly with customers, deploying our QA pipelines in their test or even production-like environments to test with actual data and setups. This provides invaluable insights.

Rick Spencer: You also have the openQA environment in Waldorf with SAP. How does that contribute to quality?

Haris Sehic: Our openQA environment at SAP’s site allows us to test unreleased SAP software on our release products and vice versa. This early and reciprocal testing is crucial for catching regressions and significantly speeds up the SAP certification process, cutting down the timeline by months.

Rick Spencer: That early feedback loop must be incredibly valuable for SAP as well.

Haris Sehic: Absolutely. We’ve often identified regressions in SAP development early on through our tests.

Rick Spencer: You mentioned a similar initiative with Microsoft Azure. Can you tell us about that?

Haris Sehic: Yes, since fall 2023, we’ve had a similar QE initiative with Microsoft Azure, focusing on their SAP Deployment Automation Framework (SDAF). We run automated pipelines to support the development and quality of SDAF in the cloud.

Rick Spencer: Finally, what key message would you like to share about SUSE’s commitment to quality for SAP customers?

Haris Sehic: Our continuous drive in QE is to replicate real customer scenarios, leveraging automation and close collaboration with SAP, including our unique openQA setup. This ensures that our customers can confidently run their mission-critical SAP workloads on a stable, reliable, and certified platform, with a significantly faster path to adopting new SAP innovations.

Conclusion

Haris’s insights highlight the deep-rooted, collaborative approach SUSE takes to ensuring the quality and reliability of its SAP solutions. From the long-standing “Linux Lab” partnership and the development of tailored offerings like SLES for SAP or the new SUSE Rancher for SAP applications, to innovative customer-centric testing and the strategic openQA environment, SUSE is dedicated to providing a robust and stable foundation for mission-critical SAP deployments. This commitment, underscored by significant reductions in SAP certification timelines, empowers customers to confidently navigate their SAP landscape, including their journey to the cloud.

To learn more about SUSE’s commitment to quality for SAP solutions, please visit our website or contact our sales team. Explore previous episodes of our “Linux Conversations” series below, where we delve into key challenges and solutions in enterprise Linux.

Linux Conversations | Episode 8: Ensuring SAP Quality: The Automation Journey with Haris Sehic

Interview

Conclusion

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