Archive
Choosing the Right ASM Allocation Unit for a Virtualized Oracle Database
Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management) is a volume manager and file system provided by Oracle for use with Single Instance and Real Application Cluster (RAC) databases. Although it supports single instance databases I’ve seen it more commonly used with RAC. ASM provides a high performance and simplified way of managing disks and placing data files and other files for DBA’s. It probably comes as no surprise that Oracle recommends ASM over other options such as OS included or third party volume managers, file systems and raw devices. The ASM Allocation Unit is a fundamental unit of storage and management in any ASM disk group. But which Allocation Unit size should you choose for your Virtualized Oracle Databases?
Vote For The Best Virtualization Blogs at vSphere-Land.com
Once every year Eric Siebert puts the list together of all of great virtualization blogs that are written and updated constantly in support of the great community around VMware and virtualization that has been adopted. This is the annual event that gives you an opportunity to show your support and appreciation for all the hours that the bloggers put in, and for you to vote for your favourite and the best virtualization blogs in the world. The list grows ever longer every year, and the number of voters grows ever longer every year also. I love brining you information and advice on virtualizing business critical apps, monster vm’s and everything else vSphere. This is one way I can give back to the community that has been so good to me. If you appreciate what I and the other bloggers do, then please vote for our blogs on the official article at vsphere-land.com.
#Exchange on VMDK on NFS – Support the Movement! #VMwarePEX
A group of interested parties from a cross section of industry vendors has started a discussion around the merits of supporting Exchange Server on VMDK’s on top of NFS. Technically there is no reason why it should not be supported. It works great and Exchange and Windows don’t even know they’re virtual. They just talk SCSI to their virtual disks. Supportability might be a concern so having some sort of a certification or QA program is important. But provided robust, performant and reliable storage systems are used and Exchange continues to use block SCSI protocol to a VMDK why does it matter that the underlying protocol to the physical storage is NFS? I believe this provides choice to customers, and in fact many customers have been choosing this for a long time and running Exchange like this in production. They’ve continued to get support under their premier agreements. But I believe this should be extended to all customers for any qualified storage platforms. If you agree and you want to see choice of protocol provided the abstraction is solid and proven then support the movement. Vote Exchange on VMDK on NFS!
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This post appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
#VMwarePEX Day 1 Keynote Wrap Up of Software Defined Enterprise
VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) kicked off today in sunny San Francisco with a great keynote presentation from a number of key VMware executives. This year VMware introduced a new term to the partner community, the Software-Defined Enterprise. SDE is where every component of IT is virtualized, abstracted, pooled, and automated. VMware spoke about their Network Virtualization and Software-Defined Storage initiatives. This article will cover some of the highlights.
Nutanix Enterprise IT Disruption as a Service, Raises $100M in Funding including from SAP Ventures
I awoke this morning to the news that hit the presses overnight that Nutanix and it’s legendary radically simple Google like infrastructure had really delivered on the promise of disruption of the enterprise IT infrastructure market. Raising $100M in series D funding, including from SAP Ventures, and having delivered over $100M in just 2 years of sales. This cements Nutanix as the leading disruption agent of enterprise datacenters and the fastest growing company of the last decade.
VMware vSphere 5.5 Virtual Storage Adapter Performance
A number of you have shown an interest in the relative performance of the different virtual storage adapters that are available in vSphere 5.5. I haven’t seen anything published by VMware so I thought I’d do my own testing in my home lab. This is a very brief article to share with you the results I found. Read more…
Nutanix: The Big Red Easy Button for Oracle Databases – Part 1
As you may have read in my article New Adventure to Redefine Radically Simple Architecture for Business Critical Apps with Nutanix I’ve started working at Nutanix. My primary role as part of the Solutions and Performance Engineering team is to help develop the platform, solutions reference architectures, and best practices for Business Critical Applications. One of the areas I’m working on right now is Oracle on Nutanix.
Nutanix really is the big red easy button for infrastructure. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform provides a hyper-converged Google like web-scale scale-out infrastructure for the masses. Even though it’s a scale-out architecture the unit of scale is large enough for monster VM’s including Monster Oracle Databases. Nutanix is a Gold level Oracle technology partner and considers Oracle a very important use case for the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. I’ve been working with a number of customers that are already running Oracle on Nutanix successfully and as part of this work we’ll be documenting some case studies as well as solutions architectures that you can all benefit from. But right now I wanted to start a series of blogs to document my thoughts, some of the considerations, and benefits of running Oracle on the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform.
Long White Clouds 2013 Year End Review
Another year has flown by, and what a year it was, and now we’re in a new year and I’m a year older and hopefully a little wiser, we never learn less. The great thing about being in the IT industry and especially being involved with Virtualization, Cloud and Software Defined Datacenters, there is always so a lot to learn and things are changing at an ever faster pace. All the time the economics and customers benefits are rapidly increasing all the time. I mean we don’t just do things because they are cool and technically interesting, there has to be an ROI for our customers, partners and customers organizations. It was great for me to personally be involved in revolutionizing many customers economics of delivering IT infrastructure and applications services throughout 2013, especially with the many Unix to VMware migration projects I was involved with. So this article will reflect on some of the highlights of 2013.
VMware Storage vMotion, Data Movers, Thin Provisioning, Barriers to Monster VM’s
I’ve recently been testing some Monster VM’s in my lab and setting up templates to provision these Monster VM’s more rapidly. Along the way I’ve run into a few things I wasn’t aware of that could be a potential barrier to Monster VM’s in some ways, and some interesting behaviour during large storage migrations. When you start provisioning Monster VM’s more often and move them around you are quite likely to run into the same problems. So hopefully this article will help you work around the problems I hit and avoid them until there is a more permanent solution. I also hope that our friends at VMware are aware of this behaviour and work towards addressing it in an upcoming release so that Apps can continue to love vSphere as much as they do today, even when the scale increases and they become the norm. I would like to thank Duncan Epping, Andrew Mitchell and Frank Denneman for their help with understanding this problem and it’s possible solutions.
Reboot or Shutdown ESXi 5.x Host Using Command Line
I was recently doing some maintenance and upgrades on some of the hosts in my lab environment when I had the need to enter maintenance mode and reboot my hosts from the command line. I have used esxcli a bit, which is handy if you’re going for your VCAP-DCA exam, but I’d not rebooted a host from command line. Fortunately it was easy to find out how to do it, and it’s well documented. I thought I’d let you know where to find it, and what the commands are, just in case you ever need to know.
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Your Author: Michael Webster, VCDX-066, vExpert
IT Solutions 2000 Ltd
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