Tag Archives: oracle vm

Licensing Oracle on VMware vSphere

Uncategorized, , , ,

Honestly, I thought this issue was done and buried, but over the past few weeks I’ve seen this question come up multiple times, so let’s get this cleared up.

Let’s go right to the source – Oracle’s own documentation. If you read Oracle’s partitioning document you will see that this is Oracle’s stance as of January 24, 2011. In it, it discusses soft partitioning and hard partitioning. Soft partitioning is leveraging the Operating System features to limit the number of CPUs an Oracle instance (or Oracle virtual machine) can run on. Hard partitioning physically partitions a large server into smaller self contained servers. The document lists what Oracle considers valid examples of each type of partitioning. In the document, Oracle specifically defines VMware’s partitioning (and Oracle VM’s partitioning) as soft partitioning. In the document, Oracle states that soft partitioning isn’t a “valid” means of restricting the amount of software licenses and you must license all the processors on a given server. Note that later in the document Oracle states that Oracle VM CAN be used for hard partitioning if you set it up as described in this document which goes into detail on how to bind an OracleVM VM to physical processors / cores. There is no mention in the documents if binding a VMware VM to a physical processor/core would also count as hard partitioning. Oracle does state that their list of partitioning technologies isn’t comprehensive, so things are left open to interpretation.

Please note I highly recommend you go and read these documents yourself and draw your own conclusions, and of course you can and should talk with an Oracle-employed licensing expert. In these documents Oracle states I cannot reproduce the document in any manner without express written consent so I am only telling you my interpretation.

VMware has three different techniques for restricting a VM to a specific subset of processors / cores. They are VMware vCenter clusters, VMware DRS affinity rules, and vSphere CPU affinity (pinning). I advise my clients to use the VMware vCenter cluster technique, but your organization might have a different interpretation. To describe the different VMware techniques, I will use an example of a 10 host VMware vCenter datacenter, with each host having 2 physical sockets and 4 cores per socket. Therefore, this entire VMware vCenter datacenter has 80 physical x86 cores (4*2*10) of processing power.

VMware vCenter clusters are logical clusters inside of vCenter made up of one or more hosts. By assigning a VM to that cluster, you are forcing that VM to run ONLY on the host(s) that make up that cluster. For example, if you create a 2 host VMware vCenter cluster inside your 10 host VMware datacenter, your VM can run on any processors / cores inside that 2 host cluster. As a result, Oracle licensing requires you to license all 16 (4*2*2) cores in that cluster. Note that you are restricting other non-Oracle workloads from also running on these hosts, so your Oracle VMs will get the best possible performance available on those hosts, possibly at the detriment to your non-Oracle workloads running on other hosts.

In vSphere 4.1, a DRS rule called “Virtual Machines to hosts” became available. That rule allows you to limit the location of a VM to specific host(s) in the VMware vCenter cluster. For example, if you create a DRS affinity rule assigning a VM to a single host inside your VMware cluster, your VM can run on any processors / cores inside that host. As a result, Oracle licensing requires you to license all 8 (4*2*1) cores on that host. You can read more about the VM to hosts affinity rule in this post by Frank Denneman who is a co-author (along with Duncan Epping) of vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive. Note that you aren’t restricting other non-Oracle workloads from also running on this host and thus you could have less than optimal Oracle performance.

VMware vSphere itself allows you to pin a virtual machine to one or more physical cores on a server using vSphere’s CPU affinity settings. You can read about the details of this in the vSphere resource management guide version 4.1 starting on page 20. This is the technical equivalent of the Oracle VM technique of binding a VM to a specific subset of physical processors / cores. For example, if you pin your Oracle VM to two physical cores, your VM can only run on those two physical cores. As a result, Oracle licensing requires you to license those 2 cores. Note that you aren’t restricting other non-Oracle workloads from also running on this core and thus you could have less than optimal Oracle performance.

Does Oracle consider VMware’s CPU affinity settings an acceptable form of partitioning? What about VMware DRS VM to host affinity rules? I have seen no official documentation from Oracle either way. I advise my clients to always buy enough Oracle licenses to allow Oracle to run on at least two hosts. This allows the customer to not be concerned about Oracle’s licensing ambiguity (as you’re licensing the entire hosts Oracle can run on) and also allows the customer to get the benefits of VMware such as vMotion, HA, DRS and FT to reduce and possibly eliminate downtime or less than optimal performance for their Oracle systems. I have had a client who went from running Oracle physical (with the one physical server having 8 processors / cores) to virtual (with the physical server having 8 processors / cores) and the client wanting the benefits of vMotion, HA, DRS and FT but without having to buy Oracle licenses for an additional 8 CPU host. According to the Oracle partitioning document I referenced earlier, Oracle does allow customers to only licenses processors / cores that are turned on. For this customer I therefore recommended that they turn off half the processors / cores in each host. Please note this limited their VMs to a maximum of 4 cores each- the amount of cores available on each host.

Licensing Oracle on VMware vSphere is an area of much confusion and disagreement due to Oracle not presenting clear public guidelines on whether DRS Affinity rules or vSphere CPU affinity are valid methods of partitioning.  I hope that Oracle addresses this licensing confusion soon, but until then, separate VMware vCenter clusters are the least legally risky way to virtualize Oracle.  I would love for someone from Oracle to officially and on the record address the techniques I mentioned in this post.

Oracle VM Security: Sometimes you need hip waders

Uncategorized, ,

Have you ever read something and thought, “what a load of crap. I had better get my hip waders out.”

Well, as a cynical jaded DBA, I have that experience regularly.

Take this Oracle.com blog post on Oracle VM where Rene Kundersma who is a Technical Architect with Oracle explains Oracle’s reasons for NOT shipping Oracle VM with a “fancy Gnome X-Window” environment:

“Oracle has it reasons to NOT ship Oracle VM with all the bells and whistles of a fancy Gnome X-Window environment. This has to do with vulnerabilities, not tested situations of software combination’s and whatever reason that makes Oracle VM not to behave as tested and intended.”

Vulnerabilities as the reason for Oracle VM not having a “fancy X-Window environment”. Vulnerabilities… really? But isn’t Oracle VM running on a special version of Oracle Unbreakable Linux (hint: yes – they’re both based off of RedHat Enterprise Linux)?

Want to get to the console of a VM running under Oracle VM? It uses VNC. Sure, you need to know the password to connect to the VNC Desktop, but guess what, the VNC traffic isn’t encrypted. The password is sent in cleartext.

Unbreakable indeed.

I find this all the more contradictory when one of Oracle’s talking points for why to use Oracle VM is Secure Live Migration which SSL encrypts the live migration (aka vMotion) traffic. My favorite line: “No need to purchase special hardware or deploy special secure networks. “

No need to deploy special secure networks! VLANs? Who needs them? We’ve got encrypted live migration!

Oh wait, in Oracle’s own Oracle Real Application Clusters in Oracle VM Environments guide, there’s this tidbit

“While Secure Live Migration is enabled by default, it should be considered that a secure connection to the remote guest (using –ssl) adds overhead to the Live Migration operation. It is therefore recommended to avoid such secure connections, if permitted. In general, a secure connection can be avoided, if the Live Migration network is inherently secure. “

Seriously Oracle, which is it?

But let’s get back to the main point Rene was trying to get across – that Oracle VM doesn’t come with a GUI to reduce vulnerabilities. Oracle’s October 2010 CPU (Critical Patch Update) was released on October 12th, 2010 and for the current version of Oracle VM (2.2.1) it lists 4 vulnerabilities, 3 of which have a base score of 9.0 (the scale is from 0.0 to 10.0, with 10.0 representing the highest severity of vulnerability). All 3 of those 9/10 severity vulnerabilities have a low access complexity (they’re easy to do) and result in complete access.

Oracle, thank you for not including a “fancy Gnome X-Window” with Oracle VM so as to reduce vulnerabilities. Given how insecure your product appears without a GUI, I shudder to think what things would be like with a GUI.

Why Oracle VM isn’t enterprise ready

Uncategorized, ,

Starting this week, Oracle has publicly started really pushing Oracle’s virtualization products. I attended a seminar on Tuesday covering the road map and yesterday was an all day online Virtualization forum.

Oracle’s server virtualization is focused mainly on two products – Oracle VM for Sparc and Oracle VM for x86. I’m going to focus on Oracle VM for x86, as commodity x86 hardware is the big industry focus and Oracle is really focusing on why you should go with Oracle VM versus VMware.

I’m hear to tell you Oracle VM just isn’t ready for the enterprise. Sure, there are large reference customers out there, but Oracle VM doesn’t have the features I consider necessary to be called enterprise ready. I run VMware vSphere in my enterprise environments and so I’ll compare Oracle VM to VMware vSphere, since I believe VMware vSphere is enterprise ready.

Load Balancing – with virtualization you can run many virtual servers on one physical server. Oracle VM’s load balancing works by performing automated load balancing at each virtual machine power on. Basically what that means is when you start a VM it gets placed on the least busy (in terms of memory and CPU usage) physical server in your server pool. That’s it. VMware’s load balancing called DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduling) not only does this but also checks the load on each host in the cluster every 5 minutes and (if you have it set to fully automated – the VMware best practice) automatically redistributes VMs for the best possible performance.

In my environments, and I suspect almost everyone’s, the workload on the servers changes throughout the day. During the business day, much of the system load is OLTP type loads – users entering data, querying data, placing orders, etc. After the primary business hours, the system load becomes much more batch intensive as things like reports are generated, statistics are gathered, and backups are performed. With Oracle VM, this isn’t taken into account. I could have some Oracle VM servers completely idle while others are overwhelmed. I believe overall system performance to be critical to a product being enterprise ready.

Snapshots – being able to take a snapshot of a VM is, in my belief, critical to an enterprise virtualized environment. Oracle VM doesn’t do snapshots. Simple as that. When I asked on Tuesday at road map seminar with Oracle if that would be available in the next version (officially due sometime in the next 12 months, though I suspect it might be released in the next month), I was told they couldn’t answer yes or no. The fact is, Oracle VM doesn’t have snapshots and VMware vSphere does. But what really is the big deal? Why do I want snapshots?

o Patching – enterprise systems frequently have patches and code changes and need to have a failback plan if something doesn’t go right. With Oracle VM I’m out of luck. Sure I can go back to the last full system backup I took, but we’re probably talking hours of downtime if I need to failback. With VMware vSphere, I take a snapshot of the VM before I start patching (something that takes only a couple of seconds – no exaggeration) and then start my patching. If I need to fail back, I just go in the vSphere menu and choose “Revert to current snapshot” and the VM will restart right back to where it was when you took the snapshot. You even have the option to “snapshot the virtual machine’s memory” meaning if you revert back, your system won’t be in a state as if it had just rebooted, but will have all the processes running as if the machine never stopped.

o Backups – with Oracle VM, if I want to take a backup of the entire VM, I have to use a software agent running inside the VM. As anyone who has ever dealt with Windows knows, you frequently have troubles backing up open files… you know, like an Oracle database or the OS itself. As that backup runs, something that frequently takes hours, files are changing and you’re not getting a completely consistent image of the system. In VMware vSphere, there are many software packages, both from VMware and from third-party vendors that utilize snapshots to take a consistent image of the system. To me, enterprise ready includes good backups. Maybe I’m too demanding.

o Cloning – with Oracle VM if you want to clone a VM, you need to power it off. Yes, if I want to clone my production ERP system VMs, Oracle VM requires I turn VMs off to perform a clone. It’s on page 68 of the Oracle VM Manager 2.1.5 Manual . In VMware vSphere, I can clone with the VM up and available to users. In addition, with the latest version of VMware vSphere, vSphere uses public vStorage APIs to push much of this work onto the SAN itself, thereby reducing and almost eliminating network traffic AND freeing up compute resources on your cluster.

Memory usage – One of the benefits of virtualizing is consolidation – putting many VMs onto one physical server and thereby getting getting better usage of my resources. Oracle VM offers no memory consolidation technologies to increase your consolidation ratios (how many VMs you can put on a physical server). VMware vSphere offers FOUR technologies to increase your consolidation – Transparent Page Sharing, Ballooning, Memory Compression and Swapping. If I’m going to virtualize to consolidate my infrastructure, why not use the product that allows the best consolidation?

There’s many more scenarios where VMware vSphere is a much better and mature product than Oracle VM, but that’s not my point here. My point is that Oracle VM doesn’t meet what I would consider to be an enterprise ready product.

Oracle VM compared to VMware vSphere: Part 1

Uncategorized, , ,

I’ve been meaning to take a serious look at Oracle VM for a few months. In fact, it was this post [Live Migration of EBS Services Using Oracle VM] (and my long-winded reply) that was a major push for me to start this blog.

The final bit of impetus to learn all about Oracle VM came a few months ago when I saw the “Oracle VM for x86 Essentials” beta exam. If passed, you earn the certification “Oracle VM for x86 Certified Implementation Specialist”. It’s a certification geared for Oracle Partners. I figured the knowledge could help me to better understand Oracle’s offering. First and foremost, I’m an Oracle Applications DBA. If Oracle’s product could allow me to better serve my clients and do my job – awesome!

So I’ve been hitting all the Oracle VM resources I could find to learn about the product. I’ll post links to a number of the excellent resources I found at the end of this post. All the links at the bottom refer to information on the currently available product (Oracle VM 2.2). While compiling all of this information, I came across [Oracle Virtualization:Making Software Easier to Deploy, Manage, and Support] – a slide deck from a recent Sydney Australia Oracle meetup. It talks about upcoming features of Oracle VM 3.0. If those features come to pass, Oracle VM will become more enticing to many organizations.

Honestly, I’ve got *tons* of things I want to write about with regards to Oracle VM — so much that I don’t know where to begin.

General Impressions
Remember that first time you went from something with a nice GUI, like Windows (Thanks Apple Microsoft!) to something a little more “nerdy” like Linux ? The GUI, if there was one, was stripped down and clunky. Many of the things you could do with a couple of mouse clicks before now require specialized commands at a command line. All of these different steps you need to do just to get things working. Well, it’s the same type of thing going from VMware vCenter to Oracle VM Manager. It’s not that the product is bad — it isn’t. The Oracle VM interface is clunky and the product doesn’t have the richness of features of VMware vSphere. Simple as that. Are those differences worth it to you? Everyone’s needs are different. Both underlying products (Oracle VM Server, VMware vSphere ESX 4.0) run Linux and Windows VMs well enough for most enterprise-level systems.

As you can read in this Gartner report on Server Virtualization Infrastructure, VMware is the clear market leader. Oracle VM, although categorized as a niche player, is the strongest of the niche players and right on the border of being listed as a challenger to VMware.

Here are a few areas where Oracle VM has an advantage over VMware:

o Certified vs. Supported

(I hate talking about this but it needs to be addressed.) Is your VMware virtualized Oracle database supported by Oracle? YES. Is it Certified? No. I went into this in detail in this [Oracle Support on VMware] blog post so I won’t do it again. Short of running Oracle RAC, which is expressly NOT supported when virtualized under VMware, the question of whether you should care about the “certified” distinction is something each company needs to answer for themselves. To me, the whole thing smacks of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt).

o Pricing

There are two parts to pricing. First is the effect virtualizing Oracle Database will have on your Oracle database licensing. I go into this in more detail in a post on Oracle licensing under VMware. One of Oracle VM’s main selling points is that Oracle considers Oracle VM (through hardcoding the CPU binding in the vm.cfg file) a type of hard partitioning and VMware vSphere a type of soft partitioning. When using hard partitioning, Oracle only requires you to license the processors (cores) in that hard partition (aka, the processors visible to the VM). When using soft partitioning, Oracle requires you to license ALL the processors (cores) in the server, even though there may be many more processors present than allocated to the VM. It should be noted that you can do the same type of CPU binding (called CPU affinity) with VMware vSphere, but that Oracle somehow still considers this soft partitioning.

This just seems like a way for Oracle to give their Oracle VM product preferential treatment. How does the joke go… Where does the 800 lb gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants to.

The second part of pricing involves the actual Oracle VM product versus the VMware vSphere product. Oracle basically has two pricing points
o Premier Limited — Up to 2 CPU sockets, regardless of the number of cores per socket in the physical server
o Premier — unlimited CPU sockets in the server

VMware, unlike Oracle, has four product feature levels (Standard, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus) and so a head to head comparison is a complete pain to do. The short answer is that Oracle can be significantly cheaper.. The downside of this inexpensiveness is a lack of features. Yes, VMware generally costs more than Oracle, but you’re paying for additional features. Are those features worth it to your organization? That’s for you to decide. In my organization, we are willing to pay for VMware’s features, but my organization’s needs may be different than the needs of your organization.

Does your organization have a need for VM snapshots? Mine absolutely does. Oracle VM doesn’t have it and VMware does, even when you’re using the free version of each product.

Does your VM require more than 8 CPUs? VMware has a limit of 8 CPUs for a single VM. Oracle VM’s limit is 32 CPUs for a single VM. Through tuning and software improvements, my main client has managed to reduce the number of CPUs for our Production Oracle E-Business Suite database from an unvirtualized 8 cores to 2 cores virtualized, so the difference is immaterial… but maybe your organization needs 20 cores.

Does your organization have a need to do vMotions / Live Migrations? They come included with Oracle VM, but it’s not recommended to do more than one at a time. There is an additional cost to get VMware vMotion, but VMware supports a default configuration with up to 4 simultaneous moves and allows up to 8 simultaneous moves.

Does your organization need automated SAN level replication of your VMs so they can be brought up automatically in case of disaster? VMware has that functionality with Site Recovery Manager. Oracle doesn’t have anything like it.

o Oracle VM Templates

Do you want a pre-built VM you can download with the Oracle software already installed and configured? Oracle offers downloads of pre-built environments from a basic OEL 5 Linux box all the way through to a downloadable 38GB Oracle EBS R12.1.1 system. I admit, that could be pretty cool. However, it may not be right for your company. My main client never allows consultants to have console type access to our Linux servers. I don’t think my auditors would approve of a pre-built VM for production use, even if it was pre-built by Oracle. As something for quickly throwing up a demo or dev environment, I think it’s fantastic. I hope Oracle continues to do this for more and more of their products. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 took me roughly 2 weeks to install. Discoverer 11g about a week. Secure Enterprise Search about 2 weeks. It would be great to have a pre-built test system I could reference when building my production systems.

I’ve got numerous ideas for more blog posts with regards to Oracle VM. Feedback directing me to what interests others would be great.

Part 2 coming after the I take the exam later this week. Wish me luck!

Links
Live Migration of EBS Services with Oracle VM
Installing & Configuring OEL 5 with Database 11gR1 as a Paravirtualized Machine (PVM) on an Oracle VM Server
The underground Oracle VM Manual
Official Oracle VM Wiki home page
Oracle VM for x86 Essentials Exam 1Z0-540 Exam Topics Study Guide
Oracle VM 2.2 Documentation Library
Performing Physical to Virtual (P2V) and Virtual to Virtual (V2V) (aka VMware to Oracle) conversions Note the excellent pdf linked from the article too.
Installing, Configuring and Using Oracle VM Server for x86