A DBA's Journey into the Cloud and Big Data: Virtualization

Showing posts with label Virtualization. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

IOUG Virtual Symposium

The IOUG is bringing together some of the top virtualization knowledge experts in the Oracle VM and VMware eco-systems for a two-day Virtual Symposium. Below are the details.

IOUG Virtualization SIG Symposium - Day One (Oracle on Oracle VM)
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM CST

IOUG's Virtualization SIG Symposium is coming to a workstation near you- this broadcast makes it easy (and affordable) to sharpen your Oracle VM skills. Day One will cover a host of hot topics, including rapid enterprise application deployment and simplifying server management.
Schedule below:
10:00am - 10:55am           Oracle on Oracle VM - Expert Panel
11:00am - 11:50am           Successfully Deploying the Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM
12:00pm - 12:50pm           Oracle RAC Template on Oracle VM
1:00pm - 1:50pm               What's New with Oracle VM?
2:00pm - 2:50pm               Simplifying Application Deployment in Cloud Using Virtual Assemblies and EM12c

Reserve your Webinar Seat Now
IOUG Virtualization SIG Symposium - Day Two (Oracle on VMware)
Thursday, November 8, 2012
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM CST

The IOUG Virtualization SIG Symposium continues! Day Two picks up with best practices for VMware support, tips on simplifying your IT environment and leveraging your storage, network and computing resources.Schedule below:
10:00am - 10:55am           Virtualizing Oracle
11:00am - 11:50am   Oracle Virtualization Best Practices from VMware Support
12:00pm - 12:50pm   Virtualization Migration Strategies
1:00pm - 1:50pm   Storage Best Practices for Oracle on VMware
2:00pm - 2:50pm   Raising the Bar with Oracle on Vblock(tm) Systems

Reserve your Webinar Seat Now

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

As a Tier One Oracle and BCA Specialist at VMware, I have been stressing the importance of making sure storage is designed, configured, managed and monitored when virtualizing Tier One platforms (business and mission critical). The statistics show over and over that 80% of issues in a virtual infrastructure are due to the design, configuration and management of storage.

Three Areas of Best Practices

There are three areas of best practices around storage. They include:

VMware Best Practices - VMware has best practices guides around key tier one environments such as Oracle, SQL Server and Middleware. They are not just recommendations. The best practice guides have to be looked at in detail. There are two sets of best practices guides that should be viewed when discussing storage:

Oracle DBA Best Practices Guide
Oracle RAC Deployment Guide
Workload Characterization Study
High Availability Guide

Fibre Channel SAN Config Guide
iSCSI SAN Config Guide
Best Practices for Running vSphere on NFS Storage

VMware Press: Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0

Storage Vendor Best Practices - VMware works very closely with all their storage vendors to make sure best practices are consistent. Here are two sets of best practice guides from vendors:

Using EMC VNX Storage with VMware vSphere Techbook
Using EMC VMAX Storage with VMware vSphere Techbook
EMC ISILON ScaleOut Storage and VMware vSphere 5 - Best Practices Guide

NetApp Storage Best Practices for VMware vSphere (TR-3749)
vSphere 5 on NetApp Data Operating in Cluster-Mode (TR-4068)

Organizational Best Practices - This is based upon an organizations internal processes and methodologies for managing their virtualization infrastructure. Here there are three important factors for success:

Strategic and Tactical assessment: The strategic assessment is with the VMware Accelerate program. The Accelerate team will come in and evaluate the business requirements, Key Performance Indicators and define a solution that will drive business value. Making sure designs are based on requirements and not technology is a very important factor for success. The technical assessment is done with VMware BCA Virtualization services. This includes an advisory workshop, discovery, plan and design, implementation and optimization processes. The technical assessment does two important things: 1) Makes sure infrastructure is based on a reference-able architecture that is scalable and based on best practices. 2) Helps build the skill set of internal teams to make sure they have the confidence to troubleshoot problems in a virtualized production environment.
Get the right tools in place: Using outdated management and monitoring tools that were build for legacy physical server environments that have additions for virtualization will not work. Most infrastructure teams would rather get their gums scraped than bring in new software but this is important. Your organization must have the right tools that have the level of granularity necessary to manage virtual infrastructures and allow the pro-active management of the environment.
People, Processes and Technology: It's important to develop internal best practices, management processes and guidelines for managing and monitoring a storage virtualization environment. Make sure your infrastructure management is ready to handle tier one workloads and dynamics.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Key Strategies and Best Practices on Virtualizing Oracle

An excellent workshop is going to be delivered in Rochester, NY, New York, NY and Stamford, CT around virtualizing Oracle on VMware.

Learn Key Strategies and Best Practices around Virtualizing Oracle

Please join us to learn the secret sauce on reference architectures, best practices, storage, migration strategies as well as stories from the trenches around virtualizing Oracle on VMware. This is a detailed technical workshop addressing core knowledge that every Oracle DBA needs to understand about virtualizing Oracle. This is a can't miss workshop being presented by three industry recognized Oracle experts:

Michael Corey, Founder and CEO, Ntirety – Oracle ACE and VMware vExpert, Author of Tuning Oracle, Oracle Data Warehousing, Oracle A Beginner's Guide, ...
Charles Kim, Co-Founder Viscosity North America – Oracle ACE Director and VMware VCP, Author of Oracle Data Guard Handbook, Linux Recipes for Oracle DBAs, Oracle 11g New Features, Oracle ASM, ...
George Trujillo, Oracle Double ACE, VCP, VMware Tier One Specialist

Register Today

Thursday, 9/6 – Rochester, NY

Woodcliff Hotel and Spa

199 Woodcliff Drive

Rochester, NY 14692

Thursday, 9/13 – New York, NY

Morton’s The Steakhouse

551 5th Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Tuesday, 9/18 – Stamford, CT

Marriot Stamford Hotel and Spa

243 Tresser Boulevard

Stamford, CT 06901

Agenda
08:30 a.m.	Welcome, Registration, Breakfast
09:00 a.m.	Virtualization Architecture and Fundamentals
09:30 a.m.	Why Customers are Virtualizing Business Critical Applications
09:45 a.m.	Key Strategies for Migrating to Virtual Servers
10:45 a.m.	Break
11:00 a.m.	Virtualizing Business Critical Applications: Doing it RIght
12:00 p.m.	Key Tuning and Monitoring Metrics DBAs Need to Know
12:30 p.m.	Lunch, Networking, & Raffle Giveaway*

Breakfast and Lunch will be provided

*One lucky winner will receive Beats Solo HD headphones by Dr. Dre

Friday, June 1, 2012

Key Links for VMware Best Practices

Here are some good links to VMware best practices.

Four key documents for virtualizing Oracle
DBA Best Practices

http://info.vmware.com/content/12581_VirtApps_index?src=socmed_BCAblog&xyz=

Oracle Databases on VMware – RAC Workload Characterization Study http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/oracle/Oracle_Databases_on_VMware_-_Workload_Characterization_Study.pdf

Oracle Databases on VMware – RAC Deployment Guide http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/oracle/vmware-oracle-rac-deploy-guide.pdf

High Availability Guide

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/oracle/Oracle_Databases_on_VMware_-_High_Availability_Guidelines.pdf

vCloud Suite and vCloud Networking and Security

vCloud Editions

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcloud-suite/compare.html

vCloud Networking and Security

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcloud-network-security/compare-editions.html

vCenter Operations

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-management/compare-editions.html

VMware Tech Resource Center (Videos, Whitepapers, Docs)
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/resources.html

Miscellaneous

A high level whitepaper on virtualizing Business Critical Apps on VMware
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/VMware-Virtualizing-Business-Critical-Apps-on-VMware_en-wp.pdf

Deployment Guide, Reference Architecture, Customer case studies and white papers

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/partners/alliances/oracle-database.html

Oracle Databases on VMware – Understanding Support and License : http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-understanding-oracle-certification-supportlicensing-environments.pdf

Thursday, May 17, 2012

DBAs are Way Behind the Technology Curve and Need to Catch Up

I've been doing a set of presentations on virtualizing Oracle and Business Critical Applications around the U.S. and I've really been surprised by the complete lack of knowledge DBAs have around Virtualization and the Cloud. This is really interesting in the fact that the virtualization of tier one platforms is one of the hottest areas of IT and DBAs that understand virtualization and the cloud are in incredibly high demand.

Key points that stand out to during my virtualization/cloud road shows:

DBAs know almost nothing about virtualization and most of what they do know is wrong.
DBAs are trying to ignore the fact that virtualization can reduce a company's CapEX by 60%, OpEX by 30% and energy costs by up to 80%.
DBAs are trying to maintain the status quo, not change anything and incur no risk while ignoring the fact that they are the one's that are keeping their IT from moving forward into the next generation of technology that will completely transform how their IT organization works.
DBAs that can turn an index or do a backup are a dime a dozen. The most valuable DBAs are DBAs that understand the infrastructure. For example, in the Oracle world RAC and Exadata DBAs are in higher demand and worth more money. What makes them more valuable is their knowledge of architecture, storage and networking. The virtual infrastructure is the new infrastructure in IT and DBAs that understand this infrastructure are worth more money and more marketable.
Virtual servers have a lot more enterprise features, high availability and provide a higher Quality of Service than physical servers. It is flat out killing companies to stay on physical servers. Yet DBAs are sticking to physical servers like the last buggy whip maker hugged the last horse buggy made.
Every CIO is needing to go to virtualization and the cloud to meet business objectives, DBAs that are aligned with the business goals are needed. The DBA that focuses just on the technology side of building scripts and doing backups are going to be the DBAs that do not move up the IT hierarchy and are the most easy to outsource.
Virtual servers have evolved significantly and have reduced the performance overhead down to 2 - 6%.

Understand that virtualization and the cloud always go together. Virtualization is the foundation for making the cloud work. The industry trend around this space is consistent and almost exploding. As a Tier One Specialist that helps organizations virtualize their production database servers and business critical applications I can tell you the demand around virtualizing databases and business critical applications on VMware is increasing monthly. With VMware controlling the market with an 80+ market share and years of market leadership they are still 3-5 major releases ahead of their closest competitor, most virtualization of tier one platforms will continue to occur on VMware. Some obvious trends and directions you need to understand.

Cloud solutions are "greatly" reducing the costs of IT, and companies leveraging the cloud are running their infrastructures at a fraction of previous costs with a higher quality of service which is giving them a significant competitive advantage. This is forcing companies to come out of their physical server hugging mentality.
Companies initially virtualize for consolidation and cost reduction. However, once they learn how to virtualize the higher availability, faster agility and higher quality of service is what they state are the biggest advantages.
Moving to virtualization and the cloud will transform the business and the IT infrastructure. Sticking your toes in the water is not the same as swimming. Just like virtualizing a few systems is not the same as building virtualization and cloud infrastructures.

The virtualization of production database servers and Business Critical Applications is absolutely exploding and the DBAs that have the upcoming skill sets in virtual and cloud infrastructures are going to be worth their weight in gold.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

IOUG Launches Virtualization SIG website

The IOUG is the largest technical Oracle Users Group in the world. They have a new virtualization Special Interest Group (vSIG) that is focused on the virtualization of Oracle and MySQL. Knowledge experts from Oracle VM and VMware are leading this exciting new vSIG. The vSIG will be offering monthly webinars on virtualization using VMware and Oracle VM.

If you are interested in the virtualization of Oracle, then this is the group for you.
You can register for free as an Associate member of the IOUG. We will be recruiting presenters for the monthly virtualization webinars. The IOUG's vSIG will be hosting events and presenting on numerous topics at the Collaborate 2012 Oracle users group conference in Las Vegas, starting April 22nd.
http://www.ioug.org/virtualization

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Virtualization is the Engine the Drives the Cloud

The virtualization of production databases and business critical applications continues to accelerate. With VMware dominating 85% of the virtualization market most of the virtualization of Oracle and SQL Server environments will be on VMware platforms in the next year.

Virtualization hypervisors from different vendors are as different as products from different database vendors. Comparing Hyper-V, Xen Server and VMware is like comparing SQL Server, MySQL and the Oracle Enterprise Edition.

VMware's tooling, infrastructure and management are some of the key factors that make it the dominant market leader. Some numbers that demonstrate VMware's maturity, stability and market leadership:

There are over 20 million VMware VMs.
A new VMware VM is created every 6 seconds.
There are over 800,000 vSphere Administrators.
There are over 68,000 VMware Certified Professionals (VCP).
Latest release of vSphere 5.0 had over 1 million engineering hours and over 2 million QA hours. A VMware VM is the most stable platform to run production databases and business critical applications.

Designing and managing the virtual infrastructure is the key to succeeding with virtualization. No virtualization environment comes close to the maturity and expertise found in the VMware world.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Virtualization of Application Servers and Database Servers

Virtualization is going to continue to be a key method for organizations to reduce overall costs and deploy cloud services. There is a also a fundamental shift going on in virtualization. The first wave of virtualization focused on virtualizing print servers, desktops, domain controllers, and exchange servers. Now organizations are virtualizing application servers and database servers at increasing rates.

Earlier generations of virtualized environments could take 10 - 20% overhead versus a physical server. Today virtualized environments are taking 5 - 10% overhead while providing all the benefits and cost savings of a virtualized environment. Hardware and VMs are getting faster with every release. CPU vendors are now customizing their products for virtualization.

Virtualized Environments can run Faster than Physical Environments
There are also now a number of cases where a virtualized environment runs faster than a physical environment. Virtualized environments offer a number of advantages not available when running a traditional physical server. I am now running into customers that are virtualizing their application servers and database servers and seeing tremendous advantages over physical (non-virtualized) environments.

Oracle Does Provide Support for Databases Running on VMware
Oracle does provide support for Oracle database servers running virtualized. It makes sense because the Operating System and the Oracle Database Server do not realize they are running in a virtual machine, so there is no reason for virtualized environment to create a bug for Oracle. In fact, there are no Oracle bugs in the Oracle Metalink that are tied to the VMware ESX/ESXi virtualized environments. A few points that some customers do not understand:

Oracle does provide support on VMware for bugs already known to Oracle.
Oracle can support bugs on VMware if those bugs are not identified as being caused by virtualization software.
Oracle does not support Oracle RAC in a VMware virtual environment but they do not prevent you from doing this. A number of customers are moving forward due to the tremendous advantages of running virtualized databases.
Oracle may require the environment be recreated on a physical server if they believe it is due to a virtualization error.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

What is Virtualization?

Virtualization is the abstraction of a resource from its physical environment. There are different types of virtualization including: hardware, operating system, network, storage, application server, management and services.

For most users they see virtualization through a virtual machine (VM). A VM is a software environment that runs an operating system and applications while abstracting the surrounding hardware, networking, storage, etc. When an operating system runs in a virtual machine, it is not even aware that it running in virtual environment. For example:

You can't take the C:\ drive from a Dell system and copy it to an IBM system and get it to work. There are tons of compatibility issues with hardware, drivers, etc. Yet if you are working with VMware virtualization and you loaded VMware's ESXi (hypervisor - bare metal) on a Dell system, then you are using VMware drivers, VM SCSI definitions, etc. You can very easily move the Virtual Machine to different hardware, because the Virtual Machine (its operating system and applications) keeps hardware transparent to the operating system. You could use VMotion to move the guest OS to different hardware with no downtime. Virtualization solutions like VMware "take hardware out of the equation".

The x86 architecture runs different levels of authorization. Operating systems have traditionally run in level 0 (to get access to hardware) and applications usually run in level 3. With virtual machines, they run in level 0 so they can manage access to hardware. Full virtualization uses binary translation and direct executing techniques for performance. The VM supports direct execution of the processors for performance. This fully abstracts the OS from the hardware. Allowing the guest operating system to be decoupled from the hardware provides tremendous portability and flexibility.

VMs are servers and desktops that work like physical servers and desktops except they run in a software environment instead of a hardware environment. This abstraction layer is very thin and very high performing. VMs can have:

CPU, memory, hard disks, NICs, parallel/serial ports, SCSI controllers, USB controllers and a video card.

Most of the IT industry does not realize the blazing speed of these VM environments and the tremendous advantages they bring to IT environments and cloud computing infrastructures.