Tag Archives: vmware

Licensing Oracle on VMware vSphere

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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 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.

Oracle internal cloud session updates from VMworld Day 1

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This week I’m at VMware VMworld in San Francisco. Yesterday was day one of the event and the Oracle related highlight for me was session

EA7061 Creating an Internal Oracle Database Cloud Using vSphere by Jeff Browning of EMC.

I’ve been to Jeff’s sessions before and always found them entertaining and informative. Below are some of my thoughts from what was covered at the session.

The most striking informative graphic was an X-Y graph where the X axis was scalability and Y was availability. At the high end of both were Oracle RAC. At the low end of both was MS Access and MySQL. In the sweet spot was Oracle standard edition coupled with VMware vSphere HA clusters.

What does this say to the DBAs? What many of us already knew – not every workload is appropriate for being virtualized under VMware. If your system or the business it’s supporting cannot survive the downtime you’d have in the event of a host failure and subsequent HA restart, you should spend the $$ for Oracle RAC. However, Jeff pointed out that in his experience roughly 90% of systems can survive the downtime associated with a HA event – that’s 90% of the databases out there being good candidates for virtualizing Oracle under VMware vSphere.

One of Jeff’s great examples of why to virtualize was to reduce database sprawl. He cited a Fortune 100 company with 824 physically booted Oracle databases and they pay $228 Million a year to support those machines.

To reduce this sprawl, you’ve got two approaches – according to Jeff, Oracle’s preferred way is to use RAC and come up with one global instance where you can put all your various products. Unfortunately that just doesn’t strike me as realistic in any sort of large company. I run primarily Oracle’s own products and even they can’t run on the same database version in many cases. Oracle E-Business requires Oracle 10g or Oracle 11gR2. Yet Oracle Email Center requires an Oracle 9i database (which needs RedHat 4). A global RAC instance just doesn’t make sense.

The other approach is to virtualize the machines – now I’ve got a RedHat 4 32-bit OS machine running Oracle 9i database on the same hardware as a RedHat 5 64-bit OS running a 11gR2 database. There’s lots of cost savings on both Oracle licensing and reducing the amount of hardware that one can gain with this approach.

One thing I hadn’t really thought about that Jeff brought up with regards to VMware vSphere and Oracle is that the time to vMotion your Oracle database can be longer than with other types of virtual machines – sometimes taking as long as twenty minutes. The reason for this has to deal with how vMotion works – its basically copying the contents of RAM for that VM to another server and then copying over memory blocks that have changed since the first copy, over and over till the delta is very small. Oracle heavily uses memory for its SGA (System Global Area) and so for heavy transaction OLTP systems, vMotions can take a longer than expected time.

The final thing I want to share from Jeff’s presentation was the relevant performance of different protocols and file systems with regards to Oracle and VMware. On the NAS (NFS) storage side, Jeff assigned a value of 95% efficiency when accessing database datafiles via Oracle Direct NFS (DNFS) offering. Compare this to 65% efficiency running VMDKs over traditional NFS. That’s a huge performance difference. As a result, Jeff recommends just using this for a boot / OS disk and definitely not for your database files. On the SAN side, Jeff noted the best performance (100% relative efficiency) comes from using Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) with VMWare Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) containers. Compare this with a 98% efficiency with ASM using VMware Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) containers. This is another example of how the Oracle DBAs need to communicate with the VMware administrators when planning out their environment. Many times DBAs don’t even realize they’re running in a virtual environment, and you can’t expect a VMware admin to know about the performance benefits of Oracle DNFS or ASM.

Overall it was a great session and I’m definitely looking forward to applying what I learned to my environments when I get back home.

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.”

Why Oracle VM isn’t enterprise ready

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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.

a rant about FUD about Oracle on VMware

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You know those searchXXXXXXXXXXX.com websites (searchoracle.techtarget.com, searchvmware.techtarget.com, searchvirtualization.techtarget.com etc)? There are some good articles, but I keep seeing alot of plainly inaccurate articles about virtualized Oracle, especially Oracle under VMware.

I keep seeing these FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) articles on searchXXXXXXXXXX.com that just bug the hell out of me.

Take this article about Oracle RAC on VMware . They start out with something reasonable and accurate

Oracle will not support customers running Oracle RAC on VMware, for reasons that many say are political and technically outdated.

and then say things that are just completely not true:

“In short, Oracle won’t support it unless the customer can prove that the problem wasn’t related to the virtual machine.

…

While getting support for single-instance Oracle on VMware is difficult…”

I run multiple Oracle databases and various Oracle products (Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Hyperion, Oracle Universal Content Manager, Oracle Hyperion, Oracle Agile, etc) and It is no different to get support for Oracle virtualized under VMware unless troubleshooting leads Oracle Support to suspect your issue is with VMware itself.

The rest of the article I pretty much agree with. I’ve met Dave Welch numerous times and find his outlook on Oracle on VMware similar to mine. Oracle’s stated “we do not support Oracle RAC on VMware” appears to be nothing more than Oracle’s whim with no current technical issues to back it up. As much as I don’t like it, that’s their choice. If / when VMware starts getting Fault Tolerance working with multiple CPUs in a VM, that’s going to mute the argument about needing to run Oracle RAC solely for uptime requirements. Sure, you’ll still have VMs that aren’t good candidates for virtualization (Oracle VM or VMware) but that’s not the bulk of installations out there.

Oracle uses VMware in its training classes – I attended an Oracle Hyperion installation and configuration class last year that utilized VMware Workstation running 3 or 4 VMs on each student’s machine. I’ve worked issues with Oracle Hyperion with Oracle Support and had the analyst not only notice my environment was under VMware, but state that roughly half their customers run Hyperion virtualized under VMware. With Oracle now having Oracle VM and Oracle Virtualbox, you’d think at least Oracle’s own training partners would be using Oracle products in their lab and you’d think if this support was such a big deal that I’d have Oracle’s support telling me about the benefits of Oracle VM when they noticed I was running VMware.

Here’s another article that bugged me, this time about how Oracle VM is not half bad . First line of the article:

“Oracle’s continued refusal to support its applications virtualized on something other than the Oracle VM hypervisor has forced the hands of some users, pushing them to try the Xen-based virtualization offering.”

Did you see what I did? ” Oracle’s continued refusal to support its applications virtualized on something other than the Oracle VM hypervisor..”. That’s simply and plainly wrong.

I’ll end this article quoting from the official stance of Oracle Support with regards to VMware, My Oracle Support (aka Metalink) note 249212.1

Support Status for VMware Virtualized Environments 
-------------------------------------------------- 
Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized 
environments. Oracle Support will assist customers running Oracle products 
on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide 
support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or 
can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware. 

If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the 
appropriate solution on the native OS.  If that solution does not work in 
the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware 
for support.   When the customer can demonstrate that the Oracle solution 
does not work when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support, 
including logging a bug with Oracle Development for investigation if required.


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A battery improvement tip with VMware Fusion

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So I recently switched from PCs running a RHEL base operating system to a MacBook Pro running MacOS. It’s been overall a pretty smooth transition, but with plenty of small bumps along the way.

In current MacBook Pros (MBPs) there are 2 graphics chipsets – an integrated Intel chipset and a NVIDIA discrete chipset. The NVIDIA gives much better graphics performance but at the expense of battery life.

Whenever I start up a Windows VM, I found the system would automatically switch to the NVIDIA chipset. Since I don’t use my Windows VMs for graphics intensive usage (they’re mainly to run those few Windows only business applications), I needed to find a way to force the system to stay using the Intel chipset.

I came across gfxCardStatus . With this program I can manually switch which graphics chipset is being used. I’ve found that I need to set my chipset to Intel only before starting the VM in order for things to work properly. If I try to change it while the Windows VM is already running, the VM will no longer respond to keyboard input.

This *may* also be the case with Linux and ESX VMs – I haven’t run any of them recently. It is definitely an issue with Windows XP VMs.

Hope this helps!