What is SAP Landscape?

Landscape : is the arrangement for the servers DEVELOPMENT ---> QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA)----> PRODUCTION DEVELOPMENT SERVER : is where the consultants do the customization as per the company's requirement. It will have 3 clients Clients: a)Sand BoxIt is used to test out configuration ideas and theories at any time. b)Configuration(Golden)(Customizing Client)Once we are comfortable with configuration solution in the sand box recreate the same configuration in configuration client. In this client no transactions or testing should take place. Transport recording will be turned on here--It should be moved to development testing client c)Development-testingGenerally unit testing will be done in this clientIn some project they conduct integration testing also here.

QUALITY ASSURANCE(QA)SERVER: Clients: a)Q/A testing Where all final testing is done here before moving to Production client. Normally here integration (end to end business process) testing and user acceptance testing (UAT) is conducted. b) Training clients-For giving training this client will be used PRODUCTION SERVER : is where the live data of the company is recorded. This is the last/ most refined client where the user will work after project GO LIVE. Any changes/ new develpoment is done is development client and the request is transported to production. A request will flow from Dev->Qual->Prod and not backwards.
SAP Architecture (SAP R/3)
SAP works on client server architecture. The term client/server was first used in the 1980s in reference to personal computers (PCs) on a network. The actual client/server model started gaining acceptance in the late 1980s. The client/server software architecture is a versatile, message-based and modular infrastructure that is intended to improve usability, flexibility, interoperability, and scalability as compared to centralized, mainframe, time sharing computing.

Ill explain the client server model using a small example. Im sure that all of us have used Microsoft outlook to send and receive mails to our buddies. To

send a mail we open the Microsoft outlook on our pc, type the new mail and press the send button. Here the Microsoft outlook acts as a client. Once we pressed the button outlook connects to the exchange server which will receive the request from the client and send the mail for you. Here the microsoft outlook as a client sends the request to the exchange server. server receives the request and process the tasks.

When the client and server programs both run on the same computer, the configuration is referred to as single-tier client/server. (A tier is the boundary between two computers.) When they run on different computers, the configuration is referred to as two-tier client/server. A program can function as both a client and a server if it both requests information and replies to requests. When you have three programs in communication, the configuration is called three-tier client/server. The main advantage of the software of this nature is that it can be fine tuned to give maximum performance for the given scenario. The client/server configuration enables the MySAP ERP system to spread its load across multiple computers. This provides the customer with the ability to scale the processing power of the system up or down by simply adding another computer to an existing configuration, instead of replacing a single computer that performs all of the processing, such as that which occurs in the mainframe world. The main software components on a SAP system can be categorized as follows. 1.Presentation server 2.Application server 3.Database server Presentation server Presentation server is nothing but the laptop or PC which has sapgui.exe that you use to log into SAP system. Application server An application server is a set of executables that collectively interpret the ABAP/4 programs and manage the input and output for them. Application

severs act like a mediators between the presentation server and the database sever. Application sever receives the requests from the presentation sever and process them on its work processes. Database server The database server is a set of executables that accept database requests from the application server. Database server will pass the requests to the RDBMS that has been used. As you should know SAP supports Database management systems from various vendors such as Microsoft SQL server, Oracle, Informix and Sybase etc. The RDBMS sends the data back to the database server, which then passes the information back to the application server. The application server in turn passes that information to the ABAP/4 program.