It is great to be able to announce that today my company, IT Solutions 2000 Ltd, was one of the first in the world to achieve the VMware Virtualizing Business Critical Applications (VBCA) competency, which has only recently become available. This recognition is evidence of the quality of the work that we have been doing for quite some time with many customers around the world, that have successfully virtialized some of their most critical business applications on VMware vSphere. To gain the competency there were strict training and customer reference requirements to meet. I am very fortunate that my company has a number of fantastic customers who are willing to be a reference for the work we do.
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I read a great blog post a while ago from Jason Boche titled Jumbo Frames Comparison Testing with IP Storage and vMotion. The results of the tests showed at best marginal gains to be had from using Jumbo Frames with 1Gb/s NIC’s on ESXi 4.1. Based on reading this, and a lot of discussion that came out of PEX 2012 regarding Jumbo Frames I decided to conduct my own tests to see if the results were any different when using modern 10G switches and NIC’s. Some of the results were not what I expected.
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I was recently engaged to design and implement a VMware vSphere architecture solution for a large company that wanted to virtualize Oracle RAC 11g R2 as the back end of a small number of web based online transactional systems. Nothing unusual about that, I hear you say. Well the interesting thing with this project is that the customer intended to use Oracle 11g R2 Standard Edition (11.2.0.3). Up until this point all of the Oracle single instance and RAC systems I had been involved with virtualizing were using Enterprise Edition licenses. This was only a relatively small project and a small part of a very large Oracle landscape, although it was still business critical. The customer was planning to use this project as the test case for virtualizing Oracle RAC 11g R2 with VMware vSphere, with the aim of potentially migrating a significant number of additional database systems off their existing Intel standalone, IBM pSeries and Sun SPARC platforms (which are and will remain using Oracle Enterprise Edition).
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Many organizations are interested in deploying Oracle Databases, even the business critical ones, on vSphere. I’ve been helping customers for a while now to deploy Oracle and other business critical applications in a VMware environment (since ESX 3.x). As there is a lot of FUD around I thought I’d try and write an article on how to successfully virtualize Oracle databases in a way that will meet performance and SLA requirements, along with the key design considerations. This will focus a lot more on the how than the why, although I’ve included the key virtualization drivers from my experience. There are numerous benefits to virtualizing Oracle databases and other business critical applications on VMware vSphere, so I hope this helps you ensure the process is successful. This will be a fairly high level overview and by no means exhaustive, but should provide you with some solid guidance to build upon. Much of the information is also applicable to other database systems and other types of business critical applications.
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I recently finished a great project where our team replaced the enterprise firewall used in two DMZ’s with vShield Edge and vShield App (using vShield 5.0), in a PCI environment supporting some of the customers most critical applications. Due to the nature this type of environment there are a number of considerations that were important to completing it successfully.
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PCI compliance and being able to secure Virtual Machines connected to the same vSwitch and Port group are becoming critical requirements in most large enterprise virtualisation deployments as they drive adoption further and consider Business Critical Applications. This is important because the network traffic would otherwise not be visible back to the traditional network security appliances and security administrators. With a virtualized environment more dynamic and automated enforcement of security policies are needed, as an individual virtual machine can run on any host at any time. The problems with the traditional security methods can be solved in a couple of different ways, such as using a Cisco Nexus 1000V and port policies and ACL’s (access control lists), private VLAN’s or with VMware vShield. Here I will discuss design considerations and limitations that will be important in enterprise deployments of vShield App.
There are considerations that impact both the management and managed infrastructure. The goal is to ensure the architecture is deployed in a secure and scalable manner. This will allow traditional security bottlenecks to be avoided, while allowing consistent security policy to be applied in a more automated manner to allow further business critical applications to be virtualized with confidence.
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Oracle RAC is a cluster database with a shared cache architecture that provides highly scalable and available database solutions for business critical applications. Oracle RAC is a key component of Oracle enterprise grid architecture and uses Oracle Clusterware for the internode communication required in cluster database environments to enable node interaction. Clusterware is the technology that transforms multiple servers into a cluster. In November 2010, Oracle included Oracle RAC 11.2.0.2 and above in its VMware support statement (Refer to document ID #249212.1, available on MyOracleSupport.com). Under the VMware Extended Support Policy for Oracle Databases VMware Technical Support will take total ownership of any Oracle Database problems reported to them, well as providing access to a team of Oracle DBA resources, and working with Oracle support until resolution.
An Oracle RAC deployment in a VMware HA/DRS environment can fully leverage both DRS for initial placement and load balancing, and also VMware HA to enhance availability and recoverability. When configured to disable the simultaneous write protection provided by VMFS using the multi-writer flag (Refer to http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1034165) Oracle RAC nodes can be vMotioned without disruption. Using the multi-writer flag eliminates the problem of not being able to vMotion VMs when they are doing SCSI bus sharing, as you have to do with Microsoft Cluster Services Clusters.
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