Virtual Geek

Oracle, x86, VMware and update on support

Yup – it’s that topic again!  Everywhere I go, customers are successfully virtualizing Oracle on VMware.   Yet, the conversation about Oracle’s support stance continues unabated as well.

Well, I wasn’t just tilting at windmills in this post, and then in this post, and finally in this post.

Between EMC and VMware – we haven’t been sitting idle.   See this PR from today.

What have we done?

1. We’ve updated our support mutual positions – for the first time explicitly calling out on the VMware HCL and the EMC eLab Matrix that Oracle 11g (single instance for now, RAC via RPQ) is officially supported.   Also, we’ve setup a specific Virtual Escalation Team process for Oracle on vSphere on EMC.  
2. We’ve completed and documented a TON of solutions validation work to show how, across all EMC platforms and protocols (ASM and dNFS use cases), a simple solution can be designed to enable instant VtoP if absolutely needed – think of this as a “get out of jail free” card.

Oh – we also showed how using Fully Automated Storage Tiering, Solid State storage, and deduplication using Data Domain we could lower the acquisition cost by 30%, and the operating costs of Oracle 11g by 45% – while delivering equal or better performance.

Want to hear why virtualized Oracle is important from someone other than me?  Read the results of the Independent Oracle User’s Group survey of 400 individuals here.

My favorite quote:

“Sixty two per cent with Oracle on x86 use virtualization compared to 43 per cent for non x86-based Oracle sites. Cost savings associated with server hardware virtualization and an overall reduction in hardware costs were given as the leading reasons for companies adopting virtualization - 76 per cent and 59 per cent, respectively.”

So why have we done even more?  We’ve done this because our customers have asked us to.

So, trying to be customer-focused, we’ve put our money (all this work – well underway when I posted the earlier articles – is to tune of several million dollars work of expense) where our mouth is.  

If you just want to get on to business, virtualize Oracle with VMware vSphere and EMC Storage, snapshots and Replication Manager with confidence. For those looking for more details, read on…

New Celerra SRA (4.0.19) and SRM matrix fixes

It’s been ridiculously long since I’ve done a post – I have been working on about 10 posts all batched up as we get close to, and ultimately through EMC world.  There’s so much, it’s almost ridiculous :-)

This is a short post though, and an important one – there’s an important update that finally weaved it’s way through the very tight (which is a good thing) VMware SRM storage replication adapter certification process.   You can download the v4.0.19 SRA directly from VMware which is always recommended.   You can download the SRA here.

BTW – the SRM Compatibility Matrix here (Site Recovery Manager Storage Partner Compatibility Matrix) had some snafus with V-Max and RP listings – these are resolved as of yesterday’s update.

Since I know many of you use the SRA with the Celerra VSA (which as always is freely available here, never times out, and you can add as much storage to it as you would like – oh, and it’s feature equivalent to the physical platform)… There’s one more thing…..

The other thing that’s cool and right around the corner for Celerra VSA users: 1) one of our vSpecialists has figured out a MASSIVE VMware optimization (on top of the HW MMU assist in vSphere) that makes it super-fast; 2) he’s figured out how to automate the entire deployment process; 3) he’s figured out how to drop the memory footprint by about half.

Stay tuned – I’m as excited to get that next VSA rev (along with the other VSAs) out there as everyone else!

New Celerra vSphere Techbook!!!

At EMC, each platforms has a single master reference book for use with vSphere.

The engineering teams have gone to the mat in the latest versions to be complete, authoritative and exhaustive.

This last week, the EMC Celerra team updated their doc, and I would highly recommend it.   The vSpecialist crew really worked them over about past revs not being explicit enough about specific networking configuration elements, NFS specifics, and critical timeout value determinations.   Heck, we even worked collaboratively with NetApp and others to align on alignment (so our position was more in sync – obviously customers move form one platform to another, but don’t want to change VM alignment).

You can download it by clicking on the link below.

In this most recent round, the platform teams coordinated tightly on content (share best practices as much as possible).   The next revision of the docs merge EMC’s midrange documentation to further simplify.   Across EMC, we’re working hard to simplify wherever possible, and build best-of-breed purpose built solutions where it can’t get done right in one doc/one platform.

New Celerra VSA (5.6.48.701) and Updated “SRM4 in a box” guide

UPDATE – SEPT 16th, 2010 – Nick has done it again, and there is now an Celerra VSA UBER v3 (based on DART 6.0) – find more here.   Keeping this post up for comments, and also for some of the other content, but STOP using the older VSA.

UPDATE – May 22nd, 2010:  Nick Weaver has produced an incredible optimization of the Celerra VSA – the “UBER Edition”.   It makes it installable in less than 2minutes, runs faster on less hardware, and makes adding additional storage is a snap.  

I **highly** recommend it.   This means that the “HOWTO video series that walked through the more complex parts of Celerra VSA setup are no longer needed, though the SRM setup guide for the VSAs is handy (just simply skip all the stuff in the doc that dealt with the setup/customization heavy lifting).  Download location for the UBER edition is shown in the post below.

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Ok – the latest Celerra VSA is available, along with the new SRM4 end-to-end guide!

Note: make sure that if you’re using VMware vSphere 4 (or Workstation 6.5 and later), and have a platform that supports Intel VT or AMD-V to enable hardware offload – this has a massive effect on Celerra VSA performance and responsiveness.   Details here.

What’s new:

• New OVA packaging, configuration for latest VMware tools and pvSCSI config – note this makes it vSphere 4 only (the VMware Workstation versions are also provided)
• New dedupe/compression code (faster, better, stronger)
• New VM-level hardware-accelerated fast clone (snapshot) and full clone (clone)
• Support for the new vSphere NFS Plugin shown here.   That link also has instructions on where to get it.
• Better performance with less CPU, memory constrained configs
• Fixed issue in the 5.6.47.11 version that made eth2 not work right.
• And much, much more!!!

Here’s another kick-a$$ demo of the VM-level compress in action on a thinly provisioned VM…

(download the high-rez WMV version here)

Wow.   a few seconds, ~50% storage reclaim (on top of effects of thin provisioning).   If only this function was more universal across EMC nudge, nudge wink wink :-)  Your mileage may vary, but hey, try it with the VSA :-)

I’ve tested it using the OVF/OVA import in vSphere 4, and added half a terabyte of storage to it – works like a charm. 

Also, there’s a new coffee-table book for all Celerra/vSphere use cases, the Celerra Techbook for vSphere, which you can find here

Read on for more……