Category Archives: vmware

Oracle listened, customers WIN! RAC supported on VMware

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As I was flying home last night and downloading tweets before takeoff, I found out some amazing news. Ugh, not the time to have intermittent internet access! But eventually I got home, did the reading and confirmed the news.

Oracle RAC 11gR2 (11.2.0.2) is now supported by Oracle under VMware.

You can read the updated My Oracle Support (MOS) announcement yourself in note 249212.1 which now states:

NOTE:  Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware.
For Oracle RAC, Oracle will only accept Service Requests as described in this note on
Oracle RAC 11.2.0.2 and later releases.


(Remember:  Certified is different than Supported .  Oracle doesn't certify hardware that isn't Oracle's own )


This is simply fantastic news.  I talked to an petroleum company in Houston earlier this year who wanted to virtualize their Oracle EBS system and move platforms from Sun Solaris to x86 architecture.  Their big concern was that they were using 8 SPARC Processors and they knew that 8 x86 CPUs is the limit for a virtual machine under VMware vSphere 4.1.  We discussed various steps they could take to ensure their environment would thrive under this limitation, but now it's a non-issue. In the event they need more computing power, they can implement Oracle RAC under vSphere and start up another RAC instance as necessary. 

I do need to point out that as of this moment, 11.2.0.2 database is not certified or supported with Oracle Application (Oracle EBS) 11i or R12.  These certifications usually come out a few months after the initial database announcement (which was Sept 10th for 11.2.0.2).  If you check out the blog of Steven Chan (a Senior Director in Oracle's Applications Technology Group - the group responsible for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack) and specifically these comments , you'll see that Steven wrote:


We haven't certified 11.2.0.2 with Oracle E-Business Suite Release
11i yet.  This project is underway now.  11.2.0.1 is the latest
certified database release for the E-Business Suite.
Oracle's Revenue Recognition rules prohibit us from discussing
certification and release dates, but you're welcome to monitor or
subscribe to this blog for updates, which I'll post as soon as soon as
they're available.





So 11.2.0.2 database certification with EBS 11i and R12 is coming.My main client doesn't use RAC (our business can survive the downtime associated with a HA event and we aren't near the 8 CPU limitation of VMware vSphere 4.1), but knowing its an option can only give upper management even more confidence that virtualizing our entire Oracle environment under VMware vSphere was the right thing to do.






For those wanting more information on Oracle RAC under VMware vSphere, I'd suggest watching this Oracle virtualization webcast put on by Embarcadero and VMware a few weeks ago. I'd also highly recommend following VirtualTodd on Twitter.  Todd Muirhead was at Oracle OpenWorld in the VMware booth and presented some very interesting performance data from running RAC under VMware.  I can't find a link to the presentation, but you can follow Todd's postings and perhaps find his testing results at his blog on the VMware communities site .



Think of the possibilities of combined Oracle RAC and VMware vSphere:



o  Multiple RAC nodes on different vSphere hosts means no database downtime during a hardware failure.



o  Combining multiple RAC databases on same vSphere host to consolidate workloads but still segregate environments 



o  Much faster provisioning of new RAC nodes with vSphere virtual machine cloning and VMware VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array integration)

o ... and many more I still need to wrap my head around

Webinars of interest to Oracle Apps DBAs on RedHat Linux with VMware

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So recently I’ve been getting notifications about a number of various interesting Webinars. Since they’re coming from all sorts of random sources, I’m sharing the links as a service to my readers.

I’m receiving no consideration or such from the companies mentioned, these are things I thought would be of interest to me, and perhaps my readers

—

Upcoming (all dates / times are based on Central US time zone)

Get The Facts: Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Linux Oct 26th 11am, put on by Oracle

EBS Workflow Purging – Best Practices Nov 10th 11am, put on by Oracle

How to use My Oracle Support for ATG issues Oct 27th 11am, put on by Oracle

E-Business Suite using a DB-Tier with RAC Oct 28th 11am, put on by Oracle

Top 10 Virtual Storage Mistakes Oct 28th 1pm, put on by Quest Software

On-Demand (already happened)

Oracle Virtualization Webcast put on by Embarcadero and VMware

RHCE Virtual Loopback: Unlocking the value of the Cloud put on by RedHat (pdf)

RHCE Virtual Loopback: Performance and Scalability RHEL5 -> RHEL6 put on by RedHat (pdf)

Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux in an Increasingly Virtual World put on by RedHat

State of “Btrfs” File System for Linux put on by Oracle

Lower Your Storage Costs with Oracle Database 11g and Compression put on by Oracle

Linux Configuration and Diagnostic Tips & Tricks put on by Oracle

—

Feel free to share any other Seminars you think may be of use in the comments!

It’s been too long

vmware,

Wow, it’s really been over a month since I posted last. Since then I’ve attended VMware VMworld, went on a cycling and camping vacation for a week, attended Oracle Openworld, was at work a week, and dealt with a distant relative dying.

It’s been a bit busy.

During all that however, I’ve just had tons of blog post ideas floating around in my head that need to get out.

First, a housekeeping point. As Paul wrote in the comments of my previous post on Advanced Compression, using the compression and de-duplication aspects of Oracle SecureFiles DOES require licensing advanced compression. This is putting a big crimp in my plans for an end of year conversion to SecureFiles that was going to reduce our space usage, but you’ve got to stay legal.

On to other matters. VMware VMworld was awesome.  It was my third VMworld, and the best I’ve attended. Major changes took place with scheduling sessions (now first come, first serve) and the labs (all now on demand and there were 38 of them compromising about 50 hours of training). It was extremely impressive just to see the 480 on demand lab stations and performance overall was good to excellent. I attended one session on the architecture of the lab systems and I was blown away. Super super impressive.

Oracle Openworld was huge this year – 41,000 people. It’s funny how just different the two conferences feel. VMworld feels to me much more about the underlying technology. How to do cool things with the products, how to make things work faster or better… Openworld… well, it just has that big business feel to it. The sessions although interesting, weren’t generally covering that much new, at least with regards to E-Business Suite.

More on these topics later, I need to get back to providing good technical data.

Too big to fail: Virtualizing Big Iron databases

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Recently I was talking with a company in Houston,TX running Oracle E-Business (EBS) 11i on Solaris with an Oracle 9i database. They run VMware for other parts of their business and wanted to leverage the features of VMware vSphere and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to virtualize their EBS environment and have the ability to quickly move their EBS environment in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster bearing down on Houston to their geographically diverse DR site.

This call had lots of moving parts. They were on Oracle 9i database and wanted to move to Oracle 11g to ease their support costs. They wanted to move from Solaris hardware to commodity x86 hardware and RedHat linux to ease their support costs. Their existing Oracle 9i database was running on and using 8 SPARC processors at peak levels throughout the business day.

in VMware vSphere, the maximum processors you can make visible to a VM is 8 virtual x86 processors. Is a virtualized x86 processor as fast as a physical SPARC processor? Would their SQL run faster on Oracle 11g than it did on Oracle 9i? Is RedHat Linux going to allow the database to process requests as fast as Solaris? Will their SAN storage and LUN layout be fast enough? Will their file system be a limiter?

Besides building up the environment and just going for it in production, how can you know?

By leveraging some very cool tools from both Oracle and VMware.

For Oracle database, Oracle offers an add-on called Real Application Testing which has a feature called Database Replay. Database replay allows you to capture the workload on your production database server and replay it on another environment to see if things are faster or slower. Although this was a new feature on Oracle 11g database, Oracle made backports of this available for 9i and 10g databases – exactly for purposes like this (well, maybe not to aid in virtualizing to VMware, but you get my drift).

Using Database Reply and Real Application Testing (both licensable features from Oracle Enterprise Edition) allows companies to test SAN changes, hardware changes, database upgrades, OS changes, etc., all with a production load, but without risking actual production issues.

Where does VMware fit into this? The way Real Application Testing and Database Reply work is by capturing all the transactions generated in production, massaging them a little bit, and then playing them back against a clone of Production. That clone needs to be at the exact same point in time (or SCN – System Change Number in database speak) as PROD so that the replay is playing back against an exact replica of the database. Although setting up a clone to an exact isn’t hard for an Oracle DBA, it does require time – time to build the test system, time to restore a backup of the database and time to apply archive logs and roll the database forward to match PROD’s SCN.

Even in cases such as this where the Production database isn’t virtualized, by making the test system virtualized, we can not only test all these changes, but we can leverage VMware snapshot technology to allow us to very quickly take our database back to the SCN we want to run Database Replay against, without having to continually restore the database. Using snapshots you just go thru that setup effort once, take a snapshot and then just keep rolling back to your snapshot as many times as necessary to test performance.

Of course, you may find that the 8 processor limit in VMware or the OS or the SAN can’t handle your production load. Time to give up and stay physical? No. In Oracle 10g and further refined in Oracle 11g, Oracle has greatly improved the ability the database has to help a DBA manage the system load and even to have the database tune itself. By leveraging features such as Advanced Compression and SecureFiles (to reduce the physical I/O), Automatic Optimizer Statistics Collection and Automatic SQL Tuning Advisor (to tune queries to use less CPU and/or disk resources), you can give your database more room to grow yet still stay on the same (or less!) hardware.

Kicking the tires on the CloudShare cloud

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I’m extremely lucky as an Oracle Apps DBA – I’ve got literally tons of hardware for me to experiment and play on to learn.   

But not everyone has hardware and software lying around and the time and ability to set it up. I may know my way around Oracle and RedHat Linux, but setup Windows with SQL Server? Active Directory? Sharepoint? Not a chance. That’s what my (very nice and understanding) Windows Administrator coworkers are the experts in. But I came across a way to create a prebuilt environment with all this and more, for free.

Recently I stumbled across CloudShare and their free Pro offering. This isn’t a sales pitch, I promise.

Right now they are in public beta and while it is in public beta, it’s free to use. All you need to sign up is to provide your name and an email address.

With the free account you can create an environment of up to 6 VMs (Linux or Windows) at a time based on the available templates:

Xubuntu 8.04 Desktop

Windows XP With Office 2007

Windows XP Professional

Windows XP Pro with Office 2010

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise

Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition

Windows 7 Pro

Windows 2008 with SQL Server 2008

Windows 2008 with Microsoft CRM Dynamics

Windows 2008 with Active Directory

Windows 2003 with Sharepoint 2007

Windows 2003 R2 with Oracle 11g

Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop

CentOS 5 With RubyOnRails

CentOS 5 with MySQL

CentOS 5 with KDE

CentOS 5

Sure the machines aren’t the most powerful things out there, but that’s not the point. You want to go through an Oracle install? Go for it. Want to kick the tires on Windows 7 without buying it? 5 minutes and you’re up and running. Want to mess with Sharepoint or Active Directory but avoid all those downloads, installs and configuration? Poof – done. Want to setup a 6 VM environment and share it with friends over the internet? Done.

It’s actually pretty cool.

There’s one feature they have that I especially like: FastUpload functionality. With this you download one of their existing templates (which are good for 90 days), fire it up with VMware Workstation, and make whatever changes you want and then you can upload your VM back to their servers. The magic of this is it doesn’t re-upload the whole VM (Gigabytes and gigabytes of data), but just the changed blocks.

How cool is that? Short of having friends in the know, this is the only legal way I know of to download a prebuilt Windows VM (please note you should have your own Microsoft licenses) and be able to check it in after configuring it just so.

So now you’ve made this super cool environment and want to share it with your friends – you can send them an invitation to use your environment. You can send 10 invitations each month. When your friend opens their invitation, they see the last snapshot of your environment and can make whatever changes they want, without it effecting your original. Your friend can decide to take ownership of the environment and then they become authors of the copy for as long as they want. Think linked clones in VMware speak.

So while your VM is in CloudShare’s cloud, how do you access it? It’s got a External address ( XXXXXXXX.env.cloudshare.com ) so you can access it from anywhere on the Internet and also an Internal IP so it can see the other VMs in your environment. Want to RDP to your private Windows XP Pro with Office 2010 box from your iPhone to open a document in your email? Go for it. Their platform supports http/https, ssh, RDP and any fat client that uses public IPs.

I spent a couple hours messing around in my environment this past weekend and setup an Oracle 11gR1 database on a windows box, downloaded some evaluation software from Oracle and setup a little client server environment involving 3 boxes. I was able to upgrade the Centos box (it was Centos 5.4 – latest is 5.5), and get it configured to talk to my Oracle server.

CloudShare has some big Partners , notably to most of my readers, VMware. There’s even a quote from Paul Maritz (President and CEO of VMware) on the Partners page: “We see the CloudShare platform as an attractive technology that strengthens, supports and extends our ecosystem.”

Test lab

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These days I’m waiting on my functional users to finish testing a large upgrade of our Oracle Apps environment.  So far *fingers crossed*, they have yet to find many issues that require my time, so I’m having plenty of time to work on side projects.

This past week I build up a VMWare test lab with some de-commissioned hardware we had lying around.  The test lab consists of

  • Dell 2950 with 4 cores and 16GB of RAM, 300GB RAID 5 local storage
  • Dell 2850 with 4 cores and 9GB of RAM, 300GB RAID 5 local storage
  • Iomega Storcenter ix4-200d  2.7TB RAID5 NAS storage (NFS / iSCSI)
  • ESX 4.0 (vSphere) plus all patches thru 3/17/10
  • vCenter 4.0

I admit, for de-commissioned hardware, it’s still a pretty powerful little cluster.

We’re about 3/4 of the way thru our upgrade from ESX 3.5 to vSphere on both our primary cluster and our DR (Disaster Recovery) cluster.  At this point we’ve got all the ESX hosts upgraded to vSphere.  The next steps are to get those hosts with all the latest ESX patches and then update the VMWare tools (which will cause a momentary downtime for the network of the VM) and the VM hardware layer (which requires the VM be shut down) of each VM running in the cluster.  Due to business requirements for when we can bounce certain VMs, this is a process that will take a week or two to get done.

In addition to our primary and DR clusters, we also have 6 standalone ESX 3.5 boxes with no shared storage.  Some of these run somewhat critical virtual machines and so minimizing downtime is important.  That’s where the test lab is coming in.

Besides providing a non-production environment for me to learn and test out various things with VMWare, I’m utilizing the Iomega StorCenter as shared storage.  The plan is as follows.

  1. Add the NFS Share on the StorCenter to the ESX 3.5 Server.
  2. Utilize Storage Vmotion to move the datastore for the VMs on the ESX 3.5 Server to shared storage
  3. Utilize Vmotion to move the running VM from the ESX 3.5 Server to the ESX 4.0 Servers.

So far, no downtime.

Once we’ve moved all the VMs off the standalone ESX 3.5 server, we’ll upgrade the various BIOSs / Firmwares on the ESX host and then install a fresh and fully patched version of vSphere.  Then we’ll re-attach it to the shared storage and move our VMs back.  Finally, we’ll schedule downtime with the respective business owners of those VMs for some downtime to upgrade the VMWare tools and the VM hardware version.

It’s a good little project that lets us leverage many of the cool features in VMWare and should provide quite the fun learning experience.

And for those of you scratching your head and wondering why we are choosing to run somewhat critical VMs on only localized storage – we’re finishing up an expansion of our server room and upgrading to a larger SAN so we can eventually store those VMs in the SAN.  The StorCenter might be used once we’ve upgraded all these standalone ESX boxes as a temporary home, but we’ll have to see.