Enterprise Strategy Group – ESG, recently completed a evaluation of Nutanix Cloud Platform for Enterprise Workloads and Databases, covering MS SQL Server, Oracle, SAS Analytics, Splunk, and VDI. The results compare performance from 2017 to 2021, and as you expect show some impressive improvements. One thing that shines through is the linear scalability and stability of the Nutanix platform. The performance you get with one node, you get each time you add a node, making performance and capacity scale easily without complications. You can access the full report here, this post will cover some of the brief highlights.

The report (download here) highlights that Nutanix Cloud Platform can simplify infrastructure supporting any enterprise workload or database, and provide consistent, repeatable, and linearly scalable performance with high availability. The elastic scalability and fractional consumption of the Nutanix Cloud Platform can benefit any type of workload, and create a cloud experience wherever a customer chooses to deploy it.

The following image displays the availability graph across Nutanix systems globally and demonstrates high levels of availability can be expected (not included in the report).

Two areas I would like to highlight from the report is the MS SQL Server and VDI Performance, both demonstrate the consistent performance and scalability of the Nutanix Cloud Platform, and low latency that can be expected.

As workloads are added, and nodes are scaled, overall performance increases and response times stay consistent. The report covers many more workloads and has special features to note applicable to big data workloads, such as SAS Analytics, Splunk or Elastic Search. I would recommend you download the full report (download here) and read through it, as it’s only 20 pages.

Final Word

Enterprise workloads and databases need a solid underlying infrastructure to ensure optimal business results. The Nutanix Cloud Platform allows a customer to deploy the same consistent infrastructure in public cloud, co-lo, or on-prem and experience the same reliability and linear scalability. Choose your location, build your cloud, all on your terms.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2021 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Managing large databases is hard. Having changes go through a dynamic environment to production with thorough testing is also hard. When you have a 100TB+ production system, keeping non-production copies up to date is even harder still. Most companies can’t afford to keep exact copies of production due to the size and scale, so compromise the non-production environments. This is no longer necessary. Nutanix Era solves this acute database management problem, and many others!

Nutanix Era is a Database-as-a-Service Solution that solves many of the acute problems facing businesses and DBA’s today when managing large number of databases, or large databases, which impact productivity, reliability, availability and performance.

One of the biggest benefits for customers that have large databases is the ability to take a complete clone of the production system and make multiple copies for non-production uses. Any number of clones can be created without impacting storage capacity requirements, this is due to using native Nutanix API’s in the cloning process. The following 9 minute video shows an example of a 100TB Production Oracle RAC DB being refreshed to 10 clones, for use in testing and development. The clones don’t take up any additional space until the moment data is changed. I hope you like the Jazz music :).

If you like what you see and you’d like to get some hands on experience with Nutanix Era, please take a look at the Nutanix Era Test Drive – Available Online from the comfort of wherever you are.

Recently version 2.0 of Era was released, including the following enhancements.

Hybrid Cloud Flexibility and Multi-cluster Management

With Era 2.0 we have extended our database platform capabilities across clusters and hybrid cloud. This provides our customers the flexibility to build and manage databases on their own terms, giving them the freedom to develop and deploy databases of their choice in the environment they want.

Expanding Database Engine Portfolio with SAP HANA

SAP/HANA has joined Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, & MariaDB in the portfolio of database engines supported by Nutanix Era. SAP/HANA customers can now leverage Era’s 1-click capabilities to create an end-to-end sandbox environment on the Nutanix HCI platform.

Extended Choice and Support with PostgreSQL

With Era 2.0, PostgreSQL admins can now take full advantage of all Era capabilities, including patching and in-place restore. In addition, Nutanix will now provide 24×7 support for PostgreSQL databases provisioned by Era, allowing customers to call our support number with any issues.  

Enhancing Service Model Delivery with HCL Partnership

For customers seeking fully-managed database services, Nutanix has partnered with global technology company HCL, to offer a joint solution called SKALE DB powered by HCL and Nutanix. The partnership provides a secure, scalable, cloud-ready managed DBaaS offering integrated with Nutanix Era and Prism for automation and management for database & hyperconverged infrastructure.

There is much more to come in future releases!!

Final Word

Good DBA’s are far too valuable to allocate to mundane tasks that can be automated. The DBA’s can create and control the policies, and delegate to competent team members the rights to perform tasks for themselves. DBA’s can then focus on solving real business problems, improving data efficiencies and delivering far greater insights. Utilising Nutanix Era can greatly reduce the storage required to manage database environments and maintaining large numbers of non-production systems. The capital saved from not needing excess storage infrastructure can be redeployed to more business focused investments. There is no need to migrate defects to production because you couldn’t test changes on a full scale copy in your non-production systems! Don’t forget to get some hands on experience with Nutanix Era, please take a look at the Nutanix Era Test Drive – Available Online from the comfort of wherever you are.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2021 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

I think John Troyer sums today at Oracle OpenWorld up well – Hell Freezes Over? VMware Support on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Software Support on VMware Hypervisor, even when deployed on-premises!

Today at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco there was a small announcement that might not have initially got too much attention, but it’s really caused a tectonic shift in the IT industry. Oracle and VMware jointly announced VMware Cloud Foundation support for VMware’s stack on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and at the same time announced support for Oracle software on VMware, including premises deployments. This is the first time ever that Oracle has acknowledged the presence of VMware in the ecosystem and support for their software on VMware’s hypervisor, although previously they certified Hyper-V.

OCI has some special features including significantly less complex networking compared to some of the other cloud vendors, so VMware will get some benefit from that. Additionally VMware customers who use OCI will get direct access to all of the native OCI capabilities, including Oracle’s highly tuned offerings. This could be a big onramp both ways and shows VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy playing out. I would predict VMware would announce something similar with SAP’s cloud at TechEd in Las Vegas in a few weeks, or at a later date.

I sent a message to one of my long time friends at VMware congratulating him on this monumental announcement. We have both been fighting with Oracle for decades to come up with some sort of common sense. Finally they have made some movement. This will be good for all virtualization in the future as Oracle is more acutely aware of what their customers want. But let’s wait and see if it plays out more widely.

The good news for all Nutanix customers is that this announcement will directly benefit any Nutanix customer currently running Oracle on VMware on Nutanix. Previously there was a lot of FUD. Now the support situation is even more clear, and you can use all of the hybrid offerings as well. When it comes to AHV we already had our storage stack on the Oracle HCL for iSCSI (which AHV uses) and Nutanix Files, so we already had a higher level of support.

Final Word

This is a big announcement for VMware, finally getting Oracle to support their software on VMware’s hypervisor. It also provides an important route to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for Oracle to potentially gain more customers. It’s almost like the Berlin wall coming down at the end of the cold war. I’m sure there will be more to come on this announcement as things develop. This is great news for joint customers, including Nutanix customers. Nutanix will be announcing jointly with Oracle Database Solution Bundles at Oracle OpenWorld, if you are at the conference, look out for them. As soon as the public announcements are made you’ll hear more on it.

Nutanix continues to make Oracle much easier for enterprise environments with our Database as a Service and Copy Data Management Solution – Era. You can create non-production clones of production data including masking with a zero byte overhead, freeing storage and developer and tester productivity. Nutanix Era is the easy button for Oracle and other database engines and allows much higher DBA control and productivity. I strongly encourage you to check it out and request a demo. It will be a tectonic shift for how you manage database copies and clones.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2019 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

At Nutanix Customers’ and Prospects’ often ask about performance data. There is a lot of performance data published, such as in best practice guides, on third party sites such as the SAP SD Benchmark site (where Nutanix has a published certified SAP 2-Tier benchmark), and on blogs such as this. We are able to readily provide insightful data across a wide range of applications, systems and situations. Yet there are still people that say for some reason that we don’t publish performance data (maybe their GoogleFoo is weak?). Nutanix performance is more than just latency and IOPS, we analyze real application characteristics. It’s about time this was resolved with a third party vetted report.

Nutanix has worked with ESG and had them independently review and provide a report on the performance of the Nutanix architecture and platform using real applications as the basis of the analysis. Andy Daniel (at PernixData before joining Nutanix in the acquisition) has done a great job of pulling together the various parties, including my team, to contribute to the work. Andy explains the basis of the testing in his article here, and thanks to Mike Leone from ESG for his expert analysis.

We use real applications because customers run real applications and a micro benchmark isn’t a production application. Martijn Bosschaart explains very well the why of this testing method in his article To Finish First, You First Have To Finish.  The applications included cover Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Exchange and XenDesktop for VDI. The report shows the typical performance that can be expected from the platforms under testing, some of which are not the latest generation, so performance is likely to have improved on the latest models. The report also shows the predictability and consistency of performance across the test scenarios. If you are interested in the performance of the Nutanix platforms I would highly encourage you to review the ESG Lab Review – Performance Analysis: Nutanix.  Hopefully this report can clarify any performance concerns that customers, partners and prospects have.

Final Word

Performance isn’t just one element, it is the result of a whole set of elements across a business solution and should be considered when things are going well, in addition to when things are not going well. It should include upgrades, failed components, recovery operations, and provisioning times and other elements. All of these are part of measuring the success and performance of a business solution. In the absence of specific requirements and a specific solution to a business problem benchmarks and other performance data can give an indication of how a platform might perform or behave under certain specific scenarios. But it’s important to be able to relate those scenarios back to your individual requirements. Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix CEO, explains how Nutanix is different in many ways to other HCI players in his Quora article. It can be quite nuanced, and architectural decisions of the core platform really make a difference, when things are going well, and when things are not going so well.

The Nutanix team is available to help answer any customer/partner/prospect questions on this report or any other topic relating to the Nutanix platform.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2017 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Kevin Closson’s Silly Little Oracle Benchmark, aka SLOB, is a great free tool to test the IO capability of an OLTP type system based on small 8KB IO, with varying IO patterns (update percentages). It uses the database engine to generate the IO, to provide an understanding of the possible IO capability of the platform, and what the database sees from the underlying infrastructure. By using AWR reports you can measure the IO throughput and latency of the database after each test and use that as a comparison when making changes. The purpose of using SLOB is to test the underlying infrastructure, not to test the database software itself. This article will cover example SLOB and Guest OS configurations used to test two different versions of Nutanix AOS software in an all flash cluster. The only changes between the sets of tests was the Nutanix AOS software to demonstrate the difference in performance that may be achieved by a simple one click upgrade from AOS 4.7 to AOS 5.0. SLOB is used as it is an easy way to set up a repeatable and measurable test.

I had first written about using SLOB in my article All Flash Performance on Web Scale Infrastructure. The tests there were based on using a single 2 Node Oracle RAC Cluster to drive load, whereas the test I have done for this article are using multiple Oracle Database VM’s and scaling out across multiple servers. The sets of tests demonstrate the linearity of performance scaling available in the Nutanix platform, which is very predictable. As you add more resources (nodes and VM’s), you get more performance.

There were 4 or 8 Oracle database single instances VMs.  The VMs were installed with RHEL 7.2 x86_64 with 12 vCPU and 32GB of memory.

Disk Configuration for Each VM

• 1 x 100GB vDisk for Linux Operating System
• 1 x 10GB vDisk for ASM diskgroup dedicated for ASM SPFILE (OCR)
• 16 x 125GB vDisks for ASM DATADG diskgroup dedicated for Oracle database datafiles and online redo logs
• Linux UDEV was used for disk persistency, i.e. no ASMLIB
• When using VMware, Virtual Disks (VMDK’s) should be split across 4 x PVSCSI Controllers, Hyper-V should use SCSI Controllers on Generation 2 VM’s and AHV is by default using SCSI directly to the guest OS

Each VM was installed with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12.1.0.2 and Oracle database software 12.1.0.2.  Below is the initialization parameter was used for the SLOB database.

Here is the /etc/sysctl.conf was used during this test

SLOB Configuration:

The configuration parameters are standard as per the SLOB documentation and README files, but some settings are modified based on the type of test you want to run. The following settings are in slob.conf.

UPDATE_PCT: 30

I used 00, 30, 50, or 100 during various tests based on the percentage of updates required. Note that using 100 as the update percent produces a roughly 50% random write workload. The graphs below are with this set to 30

RUN_TIME: 7200

7200 seconds is 2 hours runtime, enough to get a result under a sustained workload.

THREADS_PER_SCHEMA=1

I used 1 or 2, 1 was used during most runs, I experimented with 2 with higher update percentages to drive more load. The graphs below are from tests with this set to 1.

None of the other settings need to be modified.

To execute a test on each VM using 24 vUsers you run ./runit.sh 24 from the SLOB directory.

Now lets look at some results, which I have graphed for you. The first test is with 4 VM’s on 4 Nodes, followed by 8 VM’s on 8 Nodes. This shows the increase in performance when scaling a configuration. During the test all data reduction features are enabled. Data Checksums are always enabled and can’t be disabled, unlike some competing platforms. All the VM’s and storage used in these tests take up just 4 rack units. The SSD’s used in the All Flash Nutanix nodes are standard Intel S3610 SATA-SSD’s, no NVMe or anything exotic is used. When NVMe platforms are available we will repeat the tests and share the results.

Nutanix AOS 4.7 Performance with Oracle SLOB:

Nutanix AOS 5.0 Performance with Oracle SLOB:

The only difference between the above tests was the version of Nutanix AOS software running on the cluster. No hypervisor version upgrade is required between tests to achieve better performance. Average read and log file write latency were fairly good and fairly linear. CPU utilization across the nodes was ~ 60% during the tests and more performance was available, so these test do not represent peak performance by any means. Scaling up to 2 VM’s per node almost doubled IO performance, at the cost of some additional latency as workload increases. The hardware used during the test had the Intel Xeon v3 processors, which are Haswell, the latest generation is v4 Broadwell. If the same tests were repeated on Broadwell it would be expected to show approximately a 15% improvement in performance. Software defined storage benefits not only from software improvements but also improvements in system and CPU performance improvements. Which means you can have continuing performance improvements at a much faster rate than on traditional infrastructures.

I decided to record similar images from my previous article from Oracle Enterprise Manager Express while testing against a 4 Node Oracle RAC cluster using SLOB, but this time a 100% read test (UPDATE_PCT=00). Each RAC Node VM was configured with 24 vCPU and 32GB RAM. The results were as follows:

Instead of using standard virtual disks with the Oracle RAC Nodes in these tests I used Nutanix Acropolis Block Services and in-guest iSCSI initiator to connect to 40 iSCSI LUN’s that are distributed and load balanced across the Nutanix cluster. By doing this it allows a small number of VM’s, in this case 4 x Oracle RAC Nodes, to benefit from a larger number of storage controllers and therefore increased overall performance. There is a cost to latency however due to the partial loss of data locality for the transactions that need to go over the network. Acropolis Block Services allows either VM’s or External Physical OS (Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Windows and other Linux variants) to benefit from the Nutanix environment.

Final Word

As with a lot of tests these were conducted in a controlled environment that isn’t subject to the random noise of a production environment, and while nothing else was consuming resources of the systems used in the test. As a result your milage in real world environments will be different. However under the same conditions, with the same configuration, you should be able to reproduce the same or similar results. There are more factors involved in selecting a platform than just performance. These results compare very favorably to other published HCI SLOB results, especially on latency, which is significantly lower. I partnered with Mellanox on the switching hardware for this environment. Their switches produce predictable latency and performance across a variety of message sizes. You can read more about Mellanox switching solutions for Nutanix environments here. For general performance information about Nutanix please see Raising the Bar and Pushing the Envelope on Performance.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Usually when you go up against Oracle it is a herculean effort, a David vs Goliath battle. By being prepared, even if you are the David, you can prevail. When it comes to Oracle licensing there is a lot of FUD as I have written about many times before. You need to read your contract very carefully and understand it and in most cases it is a good idea to get independent legal advice. The consequences of a configuration error or mistake can be very high. What is in the contract isn’t as interesting as what is not in the contract. There is no mention of virtualization, clustering (other than RAC), partitioning etc. There is actually nothing in the contract that prevents you from configuring a VM with just 2 vCPU’s and provided you can prove the software never used more than 2 vCPU’s, only licensing those 2 vCPU’s. But nobody has had the courage to configure just 2 vCPU’s for an Oracle system and pay only the license based on those 2 vCPU’s in a larger environment. They would have had the partitioning guide thrown at them (not contractural and not referred to in the contract, for education purposes only). That is until now!

Daniel Hesselink of License Consulting, a global licensing consulting business with HQ based in the Netherland, is putting his own money where his mouth is. He is taking on Oracle, or hassling Oracle as I put in the title. He recently wrote about an article where he has purchased a 2 vCPU VM in a VPS service and has installed a licensed version of Oracle on the system. As there is nothing against this in the contract, and he can prove he has only ever paid for 2 vCPU’s, there is no way Oracle can say that their software has run anywhere else. This could open up the flood gates of Oracle software in cloud environments. It would also allow for pay as you grow licensing across any hypervisor and any cloud.

So the question is, can you do the same thing? The answer depends on your contract and the wording you have signed up to. Each contract may be slightly different and contain custom wording. You should seek independent advice based on your individual circumstances. Maybe talk to Daniel as this is his business and he’s been doing it successfully for years. If you do decide to go down this road, and do it properly with proper documentation, operational process, audit controls etc,  I’d love to hear about your experience, I’m sure Daniel would too.

Final Word

It’s time to take the power and control back over your business and your use of Oracle software. By allowing a pay as you grow model across any cloud environment Oracle software usage would likely skyrocket. Few people have a problem with Oracle technology, most people have a problem with their licensing practices. Their use of their dominant market position to try and get customers on their platform by offering special privileges that are not allowed on other platforms. Only you as their customer can start to turn the tide. But you have to have the courage, the right advice, and the right processes in place to do it safely. You also have to be willing to stand up to Oracle during the inevitable audit when it arrives.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Licensing databases in your datacenter is a complex task. Remaining compliant with the licensing agreement is also complex. You need to figure out what is fact (and legally binding), vs what is FUD or fiction (of no consequence to your contractual obligations). When it comes to Oracle this is a topic I have covered a lot in the past and you can find references to it on my Oracle Page here. I haven’t really covered other databases in the past as they are more clear cut and their licensing policies and vendor sales teams are usually much more honest and transparent. But Oracle is really the ISIS of your datacenter when it comes to software licensing and it’s time every customer and their vendors stood united. It’s time we all started to give them what they deserve, which is less of your money, or more specifically, only what you owe them and not a penny more. Nothing will change until customers demand change and vote with their wallet. So it’s good to see there are some new resources that you can use to help you in the fight against the licensing terrorists in your datacenter.

So what prompted this renewed angst against the global villain, axis of evil that is Oracle Licensing? My good friends Dave Welch (other articles by Dave are here) and House of Brick have recently published a white paper on licensing databases in a virtualized environment. Although the paper specifically targets VMware and EMC technology it is applicable to all environments. Nobody would argue that Oracle doesn’t have great technology, but universally their licensing practices make them more like mob bosses or terrorists (spreading licensing terror), than a technology company. How this happened and why it continues to persist is beyond comprehension.

Chad Sakac, President of VCE, has lamented this same problem in his article here. My experience is very similar to what Chad is describing. While we may not agree in some areas, where Oracle Licensing is concerned, we certainly do. Everyone that is running databases in their virtualized environment needs to read the House of Brick white paper. Let’s fight the FUD and eradicate the technology terrorist threat from our data centers.

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Firstly thank you to all of the 2,587 attendees that made the trip to Las Vegas for the second annual Nutanix .Next Conference. It was a sold out event and was great to meet a lot of new customers and partners and catch up with some familiar faces from last year. This year my team and I helped put together some of the demos for the day 1 general session, specifically for Oracle and SQL Server on an All Flash Lenovo HX Cluster, in addition to presenting a few of the breakout sessions. There was a clear progression of Nutanix not only being good at VDI, but being great for all virtual workloads, including large SQL Server databases, and now with Acropolis Block Services (Based on iSCSI) being able to support any workloads that for some reason need to remain physical.  There is also a clear trend towards all flash systems, and Nutanix announced that almost all platforms have a configuration option for all flash. I explain why Nutanix has some unique benefits with all flash configurations in Your Network Is Too Slow For Flash And What To Do About It. This article takes a look at some of the highlights from the conference specifically around business and mission critical applications, large databases, and all flash solutions.

This year I had the pleasure of presenting a deep dive databases on Nutanix break out along with Leopoldo Salgado, Director IT Infrastructure from Kellogg. Kellogg runs a lot of different workloads on Nutanix, including Oracle and SAP. Thank you to all those that attended and filled in the survey. It was one of the top 5 break outs of the conference. I was also lucky enough to co-present All Flash, All Apps on Nutanix with Tim Isaacs, Sr Director of Product Management and Chris Cate, CIO of ValPak. This session also made it into the top 10 most highly rated.

For the Business Critical Apps – SQL Server and physical Oracle RAC components of the the day 1 general session we had a cluster of 6 x Lenovo HX All Flash Appliances running Nutanix AHV, and 2 x physical Lenovo 3850-X6 systems, running Oracle Linux 7. This is in addition to the 100 Citrix XenDesktop’s running on the same cluster while it was under load, and one of those Citrix desktops was used for the keynote demo itself. The image below shows the architecture and setup for this part of the keynote.

As luck would have it this was the 13th time we’d run through the demo for the keynote and it turned out to be lucky number 13 as everything went flawlessly. The cluster was under heavy load of approximately 150K IOPS with a mix of the VDI Desktops, SQL Server VM’s running batch jobs and the Oracle RAC environment running a transactional workload. Even though databases generally don’t reduce well with data reduction features in this environment we saw approximately 3:1 data reduction, excluding any smart clones and data avoidance. The image below depicts one of the earlier trial runs for the demo.

Even with all of this load the cluster performed well, the latency was low, and the end user desktops were very responsive. The demo infrastructure was hosted by Lenovo in their labs in Durham, North Carolina. There were a number of us connected into desktops on this infrastructure during the demo to monitor the systems as it progressed. For those interested in watching the video from this demo of the day 1 keynote it starts just on the hour mark and I have included a link to the YouTube video below.

One of the key reasons why we didn’t suffer noisy neighbor problems and why the desktops, SQL and Oracle Databases could coexist on the same cluster is due to the way Nutanix uses data locality to try and ensure reads are accessed locally to where the VM’s exist. This helps reduce network saturation that could otherwise occur on all flash systems, leaving more network capacity for real end user workloads. When you compare the various different flash technologies and their potential impact on network utilization it becomes  obvious that the only way to future proof your architecture is with a system that has data locality as part of it’s core. The image below compares different flash technologies with different network technologies. Without data locality it is impossible to take advantage of modern flash to its potential, and without data locality you also experience the noisy neighbor problems where one workload on one host can interfere with the performance of other hosts and virtual machines in a larger cluster. This is prevented in the Nutanix architecture, due to the way we intelligently place data as close to the applications as possible. If you want to run large database servers then the Nutanix NX8150, Dell XC730-24 and Lenovo HX7500 systems are the best suited to large database workloads.

One of the best things about working on the keynote demo’s this year was that all the functionality and performance that we were showing in the demo as I described above was delivered in the Nutanix AOS 4.7 release the week following the .Next conference. This means that the additional functionality and performance is only a simple one click upgrade away for all of the Nutanix customers. Some of the more futuristic announcements as part of the day one keynote are still in a future release, but the bulk are available today in the GA of AOS 4.7.

In addition to Acropolis Block Services, which allows bare metal workloads such as Oracle RAC to run on the storage of a Nutanix cluster through iSCSI there was another feature released that didn’t get much attention. That feature was TRIM or Unmap, which is now natively available in the Nutanix architecture, and will allow customers to automatically reclaim space when data is deleted from within a guest VM. This one feature provides more useable capacity without sacrificing performance and is yet another example of the continuous innovation that Nutanix bring customers so they can improve their existing investments on the same hardware. The TRIM process runs as a background task in Curator and when the guest VM marks blocks as reclaimed Curator will release them when it runs a partial or full scan. Because of the way this feature has been implemented there is no impact to performance of running VM’s, even when the background tasks are running and reclaiming space.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to .Next Conference and would like to watch the full Day 1 AM Keynote, I have included it below.

There is still way more to come this year from Nutanix. The innovation will not stop. There is another major release scheduled for later on this year and customers and partners will get to hear more about some of the other interesting things we’ve got planned further out by attending our European edition of .Next in Vienna in November. If you pre-register you could save 40% on admission.

Join @nutanix #NEXTConf EMEA Pre Register to Save 40% – https://t.co/rhEkqMbhrp pic.twitter.com/BxON38yulQ

— Lord WebScale Webster (@vcdxnz001) July 5, 2016

As we say goodbye to Las Vegas for this year of .Next Conference US we plan to bring .Next Conference to Washington, DC next year. Mark this date in your diary and be prepared for an even bigger event as Nutanix bring more of the enterprise cloud goodness to our customers and partners.

Let the countdown to @nutanix #NEXTConf 2017 begin! Gaylord National in DC, June 28-30. pic.twitter.com/GAcMVJH6I6

— Howard Ting (@howardting) June 23, 2016

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

While setting up Oracle 12c RAC in the Nutanix performance labs and using GNS for name resolution I ran into a few issues with some cryptic error messages. Multiple Google searches yielded nothing helpful. Most people I talked to said they hadn’t used GNS before. It took me a little while to figure it out and now I have I’d like to save you the trouble.

I worked my way through the usual Oracle 12c Grid Infrastructure install and made sure all the pre-req’s were sorted out. Clicked the install button and went away to make a coffee. When I got back it wasn’t complete as I had expected, there was an error message saying that the root scripts had failed to execute. On further inspection through the detailed logs there was a message saying that GNS could not be configured because the domain name was invalid. In the Nutanix lab I had used a domain ending nxmgmt.local.

At first I thought this was a problem with my DNS servers, or the domain delegation that I had created. I tried a few things, such as restarting the DNS servers, trying to resolve the names and IP’s of the various components. Then I stepped back for a second and wondered if the way that Oracle RAC and GNS uses mDNS (multicast DNS) could be contributing to the problem. It was at this point that I thought, I wonder if using .local as the top level domain (TLD) is the problem as that is used by IPV6 and mDNS for name resolution.

At this point I decided to set up a new top level domain in my DNS servers and try the installation again. I set up the TLD .test. The GNS delegated domain would be nxrac.test, and my cluster would be nxrac-cluster, with SCAN of nxrac-cluster-scan.nxrac.test. I figured up the GRID installer again and this time everything went through without a hitch.

Final Word

This was an annoying problem to run into. But didn’t take too long to solve. If this article prevents just one other person from running into the same problem, it will have been worth the experience. Now that I’ve got my RAC set up I can get on with running SLOB to do a few simple tests.

—

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2016 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

It appears those guys in Redwood City, California are up to their old tricks of trying to grab money from customers where no money is owed according to the contract. By now I thought we’d heard just about every strategy that Oracle has for expanding their pocket books at customers expense. But Oracle is a very innovative company, and not just with their software and other technology. This reminds me very much of the now infamous Oracle Parking Garage from my good friends at House of Brick, only on a much larger scale.

Firstly let me start by saying that customers must pay every dime that they owe Oracle in licensing for the software they use under the terms and conditions of the contract they have signed and agreed to. But not a penny more. This is time and again where the problem begins. Because a lot of people who deal with Oracle don’t know their contract.

Before we get into the new FUD, let us review some of the wording directly from the Oracle OLSA. This is the contract that you sign with Oracle that sets out all the various obligations and agreements, and it’s legally binding on you and Oracle. There are various versions that have changed over the years, and you may have some custom wording. Some called OLSA, some called TOMA. There is this public one from a customer you can read. There is also this one on the Oracle web site. You can find more on House of Bricks blog article MANAGING ORACLE LICENSING IN A SHARED STORAGE ENVIRONMENT. By and large they are similar (you should always check your actual version) and we will discuss two very important provisions that trip a lot of people up.

Firstly I’d like to draw your attention to Section L. Entire Agreement. The section reads as follows: “You agree that this agreement and the information which is incorporated into this agreement by written reference (including reference to information contained in a URL or referenced policy), together with the applicable order, are the complete agreement for the programs and/or services ordered by you, and that this agreement supersedes all prior or contemporaneous agreements or representations, written or oral, regarding such programs and/or services. If any term of this agreement is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions will remain effective. It is expressly agreed that the terms of this agreement and any Oracle ordering document shall supersede the terms in any purchase order or other non-Oracle ordering document and no terms included in any such purchase order or other non-Oracle ordering document shall apply to the programs and/or services ordered. This agreement and ordering documents may not be modified and the rights and restrictions may not be altered or waived except in a writing signed or accepted online through the Oracle Store by authorized representatives of you and of Oracle. Any notice required under this agreement shall be provided to the other party in writing.”

This is fairly straight forward. You are agreeing that this document is the only document that matters. Well this document and only those other documents that are explicitly referenced or referred to. It supersedes any prior agreement both verbal and written. Furthermore nothing else can vary the terms or conditions except another document agreed to and signed by both you and Oracle. These are all very important points.  If something isn’t in this contract or the documents it refers to, it has not force or consequence at all. Somebody from Oracle simply telling you something is a certain way holds no weight whatsoever, unless it is contained in your contract. So whenever you are informed of an Oracle Policy, you should simply ask where is that included in your contract.

Next lets look at the definition of Processor from the OLSA. This is usually how most environments are licensed, or at least the ones that matter when it comes to the FUD I will get to in a moment. A Processor, as set out in the OLSA is defined as “all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running. Programs licensed on a Processor basis may be accessed by your internal users (including agents and contractors) and by third party users…” It does go on a bit more, but this is the main point. There is a core factor table that you need to refer to in order to calculate the number of processors on multi-core chips. So you must license all processors where Oracle software IS installed and/or running. Not where it might be at some point in the future. Only where it is installed and/or running. So this covers any system in the past where it may have already been running, because at that point it was installed and/or running there. But this does not include any processor where Oracle software does not or will not be installed and/or running.

So what is the new FUD? Well it’s kind of similar to the Oracle Parking Garage referred to in my introduction. This is where the driver of the car in this case, is asked to pay for every parking space in the building, because they could have parked anywhere. However now Oracle would want that same driver to pay for every parking space in the city, in the state, in the country, in the world, or even in the galaxy. Because the driver could have parked their car anywhere, or migrated their car anywhere.

Now you probably think this sounds completely preposterous and absurd, which it is. Oracle is using this tactic to say to customers that they must license every processor of every server, in every datacenter, that is connected to a network, and running VMware vSphere 6 software. Because Oracle software could be running on it, or that Oracle software could be live migrated to it. This is because with VMware vSphere 6 you can now live migrate with vMotion across different vCenters. This is an expansion of the old FUD they used to try, which is customers should license every host in a vCenter. This is of course nonsense as the contract quite clearly says that a processor is defined as where the Oracle software is installed and/or running, not where it might be or could be.

But wait, there’s more, like all good late night infomercials. Because this new functionality opens the door so wide, you can technically live migrate a workload with vMotion to a cloud provider, across states, or across continents with the right network configuration. So this now means Oracle might try and tell you to license every processor of every host in every datacenter connected to the Internet.  At least every cloud provider that runs vSphere 6.0. If you’re a cloud provider all your customers might have to license all processors in your cloud and you would have to license all of them as well. This is completely ridiculous and I am at a loss to understand how any Oracle customer could believe this to be the case. But that doesn’t stop them trying it on.

So what do you do? You fight back. Maybe with some Jedi mind control tricks, in this case, questions, answered by Oracle in writing preferably.

“Is the contract that we have signed for Oracle Software Legally Binding on both of us?“
“Does the contract supersede all prior agreements both verbal and written?“
“Can the contract be modified or altered in any way, other than in writing, and being agreed to and signed by both of our authorized representatives?“
“Does the contract form the complete agreement?“
“Where in the contract does it state we must license processors that are not running Oracle software?“
“Where in the contract does it state anything with regards to Hypervisor, VMware, vCenter, Cluster, Live Migration or vMotion?“

After you get your answers to these questions in writing and Oracle admits that you don’t owe them a dime more in licensing for any servers that do not and have not run Oracle software, go on about your daily business. You are now assured that there is no way Oracle can charge you for anything more than what you’re actually using. They can’t charge you a penny more for licenses other than where Oracle software is installed and/or running. There is no mention of Hypervisor, VMware, vCenter, Cluster (except referring to Oracle RAC), Live Migration or vMotion anywhere in your OLSA contract. So that simply can’t be applicable to you, as clearly, the contract and it’s explicitly referred to documents, are all that matter.

Final Word

I’ve been helping customers now for more than a decade ensure they pay for what they use and aren’t over charged.  The amount of money involved (between customers and their software vendors) if we added up all the deals over this time, goes well into the billions with a B. The amount of savings achieved by doing simple things, like asking the right questions, having proper procedures (configuration, management, auditing) documented, designing with licensing requirements in mind etc, has saved in the billions in total as well. So if this article, or any of the other ones has helped you, please post a comment and let me know. I’d like it if everyone just paid for what they owed and didn’t get extorted in the process of licensing and using their software.

The fight is between you and your software vendor, in this case, you and Oracle. Nobody else is a party to the contract or legally bound by it. But by doing some simple things, like reading your contract from cover to cover, and applying some common sense, you can avoid license compliance issues, and avoid paying more than you need. Get your own legal advice, get it early. Check out my Oracle Page for many more entertaining stories about Oracle FUD, Design Tips, Performance Best Practices and more.

—

This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2015 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.