Oracle Database Infrastructure as a Service Handbook

The Oracle, Database Infrastructure as a Service Handbook has been in the making for the last three years.  Charles, Steve and I have been key evangelists in the promotion of virtualizing tier one platforms on-premise for the last three years.  We are taking all our presentations, insights, experiences and best practices and putting them in the book.

• Charles Kim - Viscosity NA, Oracle ACE Director, VCP, vExpert, known as "Mr. CNN" in the VMware ecosystem as a key person to bring into extremely high profile Oracle environments that are being considered for virtual and cloud platforms.
• George Trujillo - Hortonworks, VCP, vExpert, Double Oracle ACE, former Tier One Specialist for VMware Center of Excellence team.
• Steven Jones - VMware, VCP, internationally recognized expert in VMware infrastructures. 
• Sudhir Balasubramanian - VMware vExpert, specializes in the deployment of Oracle infrastructures on virtual platforms.

The Oracle Database Infrastructure as a Service Handbook is in final review before it is released.   We look forward to announcing the book is available.

Database Infrastructure as a Service

Collaborate 11 - A DBA Discussion on VMware

To start the conference, I brought together some of the top DBA  and user group leaders in the IOUG to have a dinner discussion on running Oracle production environments on VMware.  I thought I was going to have to present the benefits of VMware and why it's safe to run Oracle on VMware.  I was surprised when they all stopped me and said:  "We know Oracle runs well on VMware you don't need to convince us".  It was a great discussion all evening on VMware, best practices for running Oracle on VMware and where it makes sense.  A summary of key points include:

• Most companies will deploy their middle-tier applications and EBusiness Suite Applications on VMware first.  As they said, "middle-tier applications on VMware just makes sense".
• Applications in the cloud will be running on VMware as the platform of choice.
• The benefits of moving a Virtual Machine running Oracle from one host to another (vMotion), moving Oracle storage to a different storage array online (Storage vMotion) and having a VM running Oracle be able to automatically start up on another host if there is host failure (High Availability) are all great benefits of running Oracle on VMware.
• The great provisioning of being able to clone a VM running Oracle, using templates to deploy new Oracle platforms or using vCenter Converter to create a new cloned VM are all important features for Oracle environments.
• We all agreed there is going to be tremendous acceleration of the percentage of new platforms running on virtual machines and not physical machines.
• VMware deployments is going to continue to explode in good part to the deployment of middle-tier and databases being deployed in the cloud. 

The VMware environment has really evolved when now top DBAs in the user community understand the important role of virtualization and they see the business drivers and the cloud accelerating the move to virualization.

Virtual Appliances a Great Platform for Databases

VMware Virtual Appliances and vApps are a fantastic foundation for deploying database platforms.   A virtual appliance is a preconfigured VM and a vApp is a container of Virtual Machines configured to work together.   Virtual Appliances and vApps are increasing in popularity.  You can go to http://www.vmware.com/appliances/  to look at current available virtual appliances.  Some of the appliances have 30 and 60 day licenses dependent on the organization. There are also open source appliances available.

Whenever I'm setting up a database, I almost never need to set up just one thing.  I usually need to set up multiple environments, the combinations are endless but here are a few examples:

• Multiple machines each containing an Oracle RAC instance.  
• Multiple Machines containing an Oracle Database Server, Application Server Infrastructure containing OID and an Oracle Application Server and a development environment containing a JDeveloper or SpringSource setup.
• Multiple machines containing a database server and multiple application servers like Apache, JBoss and Oracle Application Server for testing.
• Multiple test development platforms using an Oracle database server, Application Server and different development machines Eclipse, JDeveloper, SpringSource, .Net, etc.
• Multiple machines setting up MySQL instances for replication, testing backups, etc.
• Windows with SQL Server with domain controllers and software application platform.

Someone just needs to load a prebuilt vApp and then insert the guest customizations asking for IP addresses, host names, DNS servers, etc. and then all your virtual machines are configured to work together.  Then you can immediately start using the virtual machines that are part of your vApp as if they were running on separate physical machines in your network.

The amount of effort to deploy these virtual appliances is almost nothing after they are built.  Also, not mentioned are the tons of pre-configurations you've done to optimize the operating systems and applications that run in this appliance configuration.   Linux kernel parameters properly defined, Oracle memory settings, etc.  After recently going through an Oracle Database Server, Oracle Application Server Infrastructure, Oracle Application Server Middle-tier and development machines manually I thought I have to quit doing this the old way of using physical machines. I thought I've done these manual steps a billion times why am I doing this manually again.  From now on I'm going to deploy test environments using virtual appliances and vApps where it makes sense.   

Leveraging Commodity Based Hardware

VMware's   ESX/ESXi virtualized servers leverage x86 hardware.   When there is an opportunity to leverage commodity based hardware and run Linux and Windows servers, virtualized environments provide a lot of advantages.   However, just because you are running commodity based hardware does not mean you are not running high performance systems.

When Oracle DBAs talk about database servers they usually mention there largest systems.  However, even I was surprised to see that the average Oracle database server meets the following profile below.

• 2 CPUs
• 4 - 6 GB of memory
• < 2.5 Mbits/s
• < 2.4 IOPS

Especially since large VM environments can scale to over 50,000 IOPS, 250 MB/s and over 250,000 transactions.   Most customers are surprised to discover the how easy a virtualized server (ESX/ESXi) can handle running multiple Oracle database servers running on a virtualized server.

VMs are a Great Way to Consolidate Database Servers and Reduce Cost

Running database servers in virtual machines is a great way to consolidate database servers and significantly reduce costs by leveraging your hardware to the fullest extent.  Especially with development and test database servers.  Most development and test databases are using 10% or less of their hardware.  This creates a great environment for consolidating database servers and running them in virtual machines.

If you look at Oracle licensing for VMware there are some great opportunities to significantly save on your hardware costs.  They include:

• Tremendous cost savings for consolidating database servers using virtualization.
• Leveraging Oracle Standard and Standard One Editions on VMs.   The Oracle Standard Editions are great solutions to use when the all the features in the Oracle Enterprise Editions are not needed.
• Significantly reducing hardware and administration costs by leveraging features of virtualization.

Here is an article regarding running Oracle RAC on VMware vSphere,  http://tinyurl.com/277mgl2 .
I always hear how expensive Oracle makes it to run Oracle on VMware.  However, if you really look at Oracle licensing there are some very nice cost savings opportunities if you make sure you understand the licensing.

One thing to be careful with is making sure you control which hosts, VMs running Oracle databases can run on.   You do not want VMs running Oracle to vMotion (move) to host servers that are not licensed.  It is very easy to control within a DRS Cluster or using Groups in a Cluster to make sure you control which hosts VMs run on.  If you have any questions on Oracle licensing on VMware make sure you double check at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/index.html.   The URL www.vmware.com/oracle is another great place to get more detailed information for running Oracle on VMware, as well as white papers, FAQs, customer references, etc.