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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Previously I’ve written about why the vSphere Web Client is a must when you upgrade to vSphere 5 and how to deploy the vSphere Web Client without having to purchase an additional Microsoft Windows Server License. This article will now reveal how you can increase the availability and scalability of the vSphere Web Client and also for the all important vSphere License Plug-in for an enterprise environment. The design described in this article should allow you to scale to hundreds if not a few thousand concurrent vSphere Web Client Users.
So you want to run the vSphere Web Client server but you don’t want to install the Windows version, which may require you to purchase an additional Microsoft Windows Server License? Well I have good news for you. You can download and deploy the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance, which is a SUSE Enterprise Linux based appliance and use the vSphere Web Client server instance on that to manage any other vCenter system. You don’t have to use the VCVA itslef as a vCenter server. This will give you all the features and functions of a vSphere Web Client without having to purchase an additional Windows license from Microsoft. Thanks to Barrie Seed aka @vStorage for the inspiration for this article and the original idea. Let’s walk through the procedure.
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With vSphere 5 VMware has released a greatly enhanced Web Client for Virtual Machine Administrators. People who remember the old vSphere Web Access will be blown away by how good the new vSphere Web Client is. It will allow much easier and more efficient access to staff that need it, without having to install the full vSphere Client. The Virtual Machine Administration capability of the vSphere Web Client is very functionally rich. I am not talking here about the vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA), which is a completely new product and was also released with vSphere 5, so don’t get confused. The new vSphere Web Client works with either the VCVA or the vCenter Installable and has no problem with Cisco Nexus 1000v and Distributed Switches. You can even use it with multiple vCenter servers.
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This week in Las Vegas Oracle came out in a massive show of support for VMware vSphere 5 and VMworld by purchasing advertising on all of the Taxi Cabs in the city. I think this is fantastic that Oracle is fully on board with customers running their world leading software on the industry’s most proven and robust hypervisor platform. Especially with the new Monster VM and Noisy Neighbour features built into vSphere 5 among other things. Well done Oracle. Hopefully more customers purchase your software and run it on VMware vSphere 5 to ensure the best possible experience for their end users.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com.
By Michael Webster +
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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