VMWARE AND ORACLE CORE TECHNOLOGY: CURRENT STATE

Maclean Liu(刘相兵

VMWARE AND ORACLE CORE TECHNOLOGY: CURRENT STATE


Introduction

Welcometo the world of one-hour Oracle core technology node setups, wheremost of your effort consists of calling the requestor with their IPaddress, user name and password.

TheOracle VMware joint agreement changed the face of Oracleenvironments.  We’ll explore virtualization’s impact on hardwarebudgets and staffing.  We’ll explore VMware’s contribution toOracle high availability.  Demo: a true multi-node virtual RACcluster on Linux.  We’ll review the status of the Oracle VMwaresupport policy and explain how it’s been moot for us and otherOracle VMware customers.  Case study/demo: true multi-node RAC 10g R2virtual cluster on Linux.

Sessionobjectives

• Understand        VMware’s impact on Oracle Core Technology integration
• Oracle        Core Tech that we run in VMware: DB 9i-10g, RAC 10g R1 and R2, AS        10g and 11.5.10 middle tier
• How        to get started with Oracle Core Technology on VMware
  

Aboutthe presenter: Dave is a founding partner of House of BrickTechnologies.  He has a B.S. in Business Management.  Dave startedworking with Oracle twelve years ago.  He became a Chauncey Groupcertified Oracle DBA within a year and is a 10g Oracle CertifiedProfessional.  Dave is expert in Oracle performance, troubleshooting,hardware sizing, data integration and business intelligence.  He’sbeen a key facilitator in the on-going right sizing of millions ofdollars of hardware and software.  Dave pioneered the use ofvirtualization for the delivery of Oracle University Partner RACclasses.

OracleVMWare Joint Agreement

OracleCorp. gets it.They have been using VMware®internally for some time. In December 2004, Oracle announced ajoint marketing/support agreement with VMware®.This included Oracle’s intent to expand VMware®as Oracle’s standard virtualized development platform to asmany as 7,000 development machines.

Metalinknote 249212.1 details Oracle’s VMware support policy.  It was lastupdated March 8, 2007 as of the time of this writing.  

Oracleprovides support of the Oracle Stack when running on a VMware virtualmachine in the following manner. If a problem arises and it is aknown Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriatesolution. If that solution does not work, the issue will be referredback to VMware for support. If the problem is determined to be anunknown Oracle issue when running on a VMware virtual machine, andthe issue cannot be reproduced on a physical system by Oraclesupport, the issue will be referred back to VMware for support.Oracle and VMware have in place a joint customer support agreement toenable customer support issues to be transferred between the twopartners.

PleaseNote: RAC is not supported on VMware by Oracle.

Oracle’scaveats in their VMware support policy have been moot for us.  Wehave never seen or even heard of an issue running the Oracle Stackwithin VMware that turned out to be VMware related.  We’ve had agrand total of two issues in over two years we’ve been integratingon VMware.  One was early in the configuration of our RAC virtualcluster for Oracle University.  We had erroneously configured theOracle Clusterware virtual private interface as managed by the Linuxnetwork service.  Indeed the Oracle Stack needs to exclusively managethe VIP so we got intermittent virtual machine lock-ups.  The otherissue was a time when we had multiple copies of the same virtualmachine running within the same subnet and the virtual networkinterfaces were inadvertently configured as bridged rather than NAT. That variously caused the guest OS’s to throw IP conflict errorsand virtual machine lock-ups.  Neither issue had anything to do withVMware.  Leaving virtual machine acceleration enabled worksflawlessly for us including with the RAC virtual cluster. .  Giventhe remarkable stability of the Oracle Stack on VMware, theunqualified support announcement isn’t anything we’re losing anysleep waiting for.

VMwareCorporation’s Rajagopal Ramanujam presented Oracle Open World 2006session S285139. Rajagopal talked about an unnamed global retailerthat did all the VMware RAC testing and said the heck with it andwent live without waiting for Oracle to certify RAC on VMware.  (Thatvignette doesn’t surprise us in the least given our year-plusexperience with our RAC virtual cluster spanning 10g Releases 1 and2.)  Rjagopal said there is a serious effort underway between VMwareand Oracle to certify RAC on VMware.

OracleCore Technology on Virtual Machines

VMwareESX 3.0 has been out of its broad, deep beta for over a year.  ESXsupports virtual machines with each up to four virtual CPU capacity,up to 16 GB RAM, and 64 bit guest operating systems.

InVMworld 2006 session ADC4568 “Virtualization Assessments PanelDiscussion”, VMware’s John Arrasjid said a significant number ofOracle DB customers with more than 16GB host RAM can successfully fitinto the ESX 16GB RAM limit per virtual machine. Often they weren’tusing the extra RAM and just wanted an insurance policy. There may belarge memory model customers that might want to consolidate to fasttrack disaster recovery even if they have only one large virtualmachine. John consults with some very large companies that discover asignificant percentage of the physical host’s RAM is actuallyallocated to the OS file cache and therefore unreported. When thatcache is shoved down below ESX, then 16 GB ESX VM RAM can oftenhandle Oracle server hosts that started with > 16GB RAM.  Part ofthe above information came from a post-session chat between John andme.

Impacton node integration

Imentioned this in the introduction.  It’s worth mentioning again. Once you’ve established your library of every version you use ofOracle database and Oracle Application Server on VMware, you beginliving in a world where your Oracle core technology node setups takeabout an hour.  Most of your effort during that hour consists of asimple virtual machine network reconfiguration, and calling therequestor with their IP address and password.

Forstudents of Oracle Core Technologies: Use your Windows box forexample with all your other stuff still on it, to quickly beginlearning Oracle on Linux products from the top down.  For example,you might have fifteen minutes to do some more playing around withDatabase 10g.  Leave all your Windows apps running.  Unsuspend yourDatabase 10g virtual machine.  That takes about a minute.  YourLinux-based database, listener, Enterprise Manager Database Controland iSQLPlus or SQL Developer are already running.  Immediatelycontinue your practice activities.  When you run out of time, eitherhot key back to Windows, or if you like, re-suspend the virtualmachine, which takes about a minute.  You can see that you don’tneed to be anything more than a Linux power user to immediately begininterrogating an Oracle Stack from the top down  What a relief formany of you compared to the days when you couldn’t even approach anOracle Stack on Linux without first successfully installing andconfiguring the OS.

ForDevelopers and Testers:Reboot, restore, rebuild and cloneyour environment to peers at will with
noneed to get permission from anybody else sharing the same hardware. Virtual machine files on the host OS consist of a handful of filesall in the same directory.  You can zip those up on a network driveor DVD and pass them around, whether or not the virtual machine wasshut down or merely suspended.  Our team members all have 120GB USBdrives, packed with our favorite Oracle Stack virtual machines.

Asan alternate to suspending and zipping virtual machines, you can useVMware’s Snapshot capability.  Snapshots are a similar concept toOracle Database redo log files.  Reverting back to a VMware Snapshottakes just moments.  Snapshots require additional storage and canentail some performance overhead.  My personal preference is ratherto suspend and zip the virtual machine files.

Clientsoutside of my notebook can access software stacks running in avirtual machine in VMware® Server on my notebook with minimalnetwork configuration.  Bridged networking allows the virtual machineto share the host’s network interface.  This is a quick, easyconfiguration that is less secure.  The virtual machine can also beconfigured with Network Address Translation.  This requires moreconfiguration but is the most secure method for external clients toaccess the virtual machine.

VMware®ESX server provides remarkable configurability and separation of eachof these hardware resources: CPU, Memory, I/O and Network Bandwidth. Each resource can be configured per virtual machine with a minimumand a maximum, and can also be configured to be allocatedautomatically.  Each resource’s allocation is not violated as longas the sum of virtual machines’ network bandwidth allocationdoesn’t exceed the network bandwidth of the physical host.  Howeverit is quite common for shops to over-allocate host resources among agiven host’s virtual machines.

Manyapplication vendors now require dedicated hardware.  It circumventsthe issue of performance and port conflicts.  The beauty of thevirtual machine is it offers resource guarantees and ensures completeport isolation.  Where average CPU utilization might otherwise hoveraround five percent, hardware hosting virtual machines can beutilized much closer to resource capacity.

WhenESX’s various resource partitions are combined with the ability toreboot individual virtual machines, it opens up the possibility toeven place production, test and development environments on sharedhardware.

VMwareproduction trends

VMware’spresident Diane Greene reported at VMworld 2006 that best estimatesindicate a million production workloads have been virtualized.

Inour team’s experience, we encountered several customers that hadadopted VMware for just about everything other than Oracle workloadsas they didn’t know they could.  Recently we have seen thebeginnings of large database instance virtualization.

VMwareand Disaster Recovery

Itused to be pretty difficult to persuade some folks there was any ROIon Disaster Recovery. That all
changedwith 9/11 and more recently with Katrina.

Butthere was still the DR reliability issue. Years ago a House of BrickFortune 50 customer told me
abouttheir frustration that their regular Disaster Recovery trialsaccomplished such a small percentage
oftheir objectives. Mechanics Bank experienced the same frustration.When Mechanics Bank went with
VMware®-basedDR, the DR trial success percentage quickly reached 100%1.

Thebane of traditional DR is the challenge of maintaining the DR site inlock step with production in terms
ofOS configuration, patch level, device drivers and the applicationstack. That can impede production
maintenanceif strictly enforced. Traditional DR trades off reliable fail-overconfiguration against the cost of
configurationmanagement of the standby servers.

VMware®circumvents those problems by encapsulating the OS, device driversand application stack in
thevirtual machine. The device drivers in the virtual machine aregeneric. This abstraction dramatically
increasesthe portability of the virtual machine. “Hot” virtual machinescan be configured to open
reliablyon fail-over hardware within the same CPU family. “Cold” virtualmachine copies allow even
moreportability.

Aswith traditional physical Disaster Recovery, there is no requirementthat the production and DR-side physical servers have identical CPUcounts or physical memory. The same virtualization serverconsolidation ratios that apply to production sites can also apply tothe DR site servers. It is recommended that hot virtual machines areprotected by DR servers of the same CPU family.

Movingvirtual machines between dissimilar CPU families can be done in somecases but is most reliable when the source virtual machine is fullypowered off. There is nothing prohibiting opening a virtual machineon a different VMware® product than it is normally hosted on as longas the virtual machine type is compatible with both VMware®products. This opens the door to “poor-man’s” DR scenarios,including running a failed-over virtual machine on someone’sdesktop using VMware® Server, with distributed clients connecting invia network bridging.

DR-siteSANs are becoming increasingly attractive as SAN prices continue todrop. SAN vendors’ agents can provide block-level asynchronousfeeds to the DR site. This could save the expense of purchasingbackup agents for each virtual machine.

MostVMware® DR customers don’t replicate ESX itself but wait untilproduction fails before selecting available DR-site hardware toinstall ESX on. This is because ESX server can install in under tenminutes if you script it or are experienced with it. Installing ESXon the fly is a perfectly reasonable and fully supported way toapproach fail-over. Once ESX is installed, point it at the DR-sitevirtual machine file set copy, edit the virtual machine for anynecessary network IP adjustments, and open the virtual machine.

GettingStarted with Oracle Core Technology on VMware

Arecommended shopping list:

• Desktop        and notebook PC memory: 2GB per unit. Memory is the single most        significant VMware® enabler. It can cost as little as $100/GB for        some PCs and notebooks.
• A        120GB USB drive: $100. Use this to hold and exchange your collection        of zipped virtual machines.
• To        create virtual machines: Download the free VMware® Server.
• Down        the road: an annual VMTN Developer subscription at $300 per year per        seat, which gets you a development copy of VMware®’s cadillac ESX        server.
  

Werecommend sticking with 32-bit operating systems until yourvirtualization environment is fully architected and proven. As thetools currently stand, you will have fewer issues converting physicalnodes to virtual machines by sticking with 32-bit operating systemson the source platforms. Similarly, sticking with 32-bit guestoperating systems enhances virtual machine portability. Given thesevirtualization benefits, we currently recommend only considering 64bit operating systems in those exceptional cases when your systemstack’s memory needs exceed the memory addressability of a 32-bitOS.

VMware®Server is the product you want to start with while you are getting toknow this technology. VMware® Server is available in flavors for twodifferent base operating systems: Linux and Windows. It is a freedownload including for production use from www.vmware.com.  You canpurchase an optional support contract from VMware. You really need1GB RAM minimum on your PC or notebook to run this, and we recommend2GB RAM.

Timefor a vignette. At House of Brick, we promote Linux over anotheroperating system due to better performance and our perception ofimproved stability. Two years ago I announced my intention to wait toinstall VMware® until I had my notebook converted to Linux.  DavidWoodard on our team said I might want to install the Windows versionof VMware®. He explained VMware® handshakes with the base OS todiscover device drivers, then promotes those drives as generic devicedrivers into the ‘guest’ OS running within the virtualmachine(s). Windows can provide the first time VMware® Server user asmoother ride due to the vast set of available Windows devicedrivers.

VMwareServer is not supported on Windows XP Pro or Windows Media Centeredition but works just great for educational and integration testactivities.  With either Windows version, use Service Pack 2.

InstallingVMware Server for Windows:

• Use        Control Panel: Add/Remove Programs: Add/Remove Windows Components to        see if the optional Internet Information Service (IIS) is installed.         If it is, you will need to do one of the following:
• Remove        IIS (preferred)
• Leave        IIS installed, but re-configure it to disable its default web        interface
• Install        VMware Server for Windows.  You can download VMware Server for        Windows from www.vmware.com.  VMware Server for Windows is free for        production use.        
• The        installer will complain about IIS not being installed.  Ignore the        complaint.
• The        installer might complain about being installed on an unsupported        operating system (Windows XP).  Ignore the complaint.
• When        the installation is finishing, it will request a license key.         Register at www.vmware.com for one or more free VMware Server        license keys.
  

ReturnOn Investment

Yearsago we were telling our customer base to begin investing at leastsome time and money into establishing a Linux test bed. It’s evenmore urgent now to get your feet wet with VMware®.

“Enterprisesthat do not leverage virtualization technologies will spend 25% moreannually for hardware, software, labor, and space for x86-basedservers”1.  Gartner Group

Shopsadopting virtualization are gleaning between eight and thirty timesphysical-to-virtual server consolidation ratios, with the resultingpositive impact on operations center infrastructure. At VMworld 2005,The Mechanics Bank—Oakland CA--anticipates a $300K outlay withbreak even in 10 months and “hard” savings of $1.5 million overfive to seven years, using fairly conservative ROI projections2. VMware’s John Arrasjid stated at VMworld 2006 that the averagebreakeven payback point has decreased to between one and threemonths, with worst case is one year (panel discussion—sessionADC4568).

TheAnatomy of a True RAC 10g R2 Virtual Cluster on iSCSI

See“Virtual RAC” in Bricks September 2006 issue atwww.houseofbrick.com(http://www.houseofbrick.com/docs/Bricks_2006-09.pdf).  The Bricksarticle details the architecture of the House of Brick RAC virtualcluster.  We believe the iSCSI implementation to be more stable andsupportable than the RAC VMware cookbook using shared virtual diskposted on the Oracle Technology Network January 2007.

Conclusion

OracleStacks on VMware work.  The integration and operational benefits arephenomenal.  The ROI is significant.  Oracle’s support for OracleStacks on VMware is all but moot in our experience and observation.

Footnotes:
1.Garter Report – November 2003, quoted in VMworld 2005 session“Strategies for
SuccessfulServer Consolidation” http://www.vmware.com/vmworld/2005/sln628.pdf
2.VMworld 2005 session “How to Turn a Virtualization Strategy into aCompelling Business
CaseThat will be Approved”http://www.vmware.com/vmworld/2005/sln042.pdf