Industry Trends in Oracle, & Virtualization

Nathan Biggs, CEO

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

About HoB
!! House of Brick is a 13 year old Omaha-based company that has more tier-1 virtualization and replatforming experience than anyone else in the industry !! We have built a rock-solid reputation for optimizing the entire system stack to maximize tier-1 performance !! House of Brick key service value components
!! Hybrid/private cloud architectures for complex tier-1 workloads !! Legacy to virtualization, and private/hybrid cloud system replatforming !! Oracle and SQL Server virtualization specialties !! Oracle license review & optimized utilization !! Short term assessments and proof-of-concept projects !! Long-term project analysis, PM, implementation, & validation
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Databases in use
! Most shops have multiple database types and versions in use ! 11g adoption increasing almost 20% on 11gR2 and more upgrades planned this year ! Significant MySQL user base (lots of concern over its future)
Which of these DATABASE products and services does your organization use? Check all that apply. n=367

Oracle Database 10g Microsoft SQL Server Oracle Database 9i MySQL Oracle Database 11g IBM DB2 Oracle Database 8i or earlier Oracle Database 11g R2 PostgreSQL IBM Informix Berkeley Sybase Other

7% 6% 2% 1% 3%

24% 20% 18%

39% 37%

63% 55%
Only 23% in 09

85%

Corporate database standards

! Fewer organizations have a corporate database standard than years past (squares with other data showing very heterogeneous database environments)
! More organizations using different databases for different purposes, depending on functional requirements, cost, etc.
Do you have an IT or corporate standard for database platform/version? Select one. n=367

No standard; 40%
In 2009, 27% had no standard

Oracle Database 10g; 32% Oracle, 50%

10g remains the database of choice, despite 11g availability since 07
Oracle Database 11g; 12% Oracle Database 9i; 5% Oracle Database 8i or earlier; 1%

Microsoft SQL Server; 6%

Other; 2% IBM DB2; 2% MySQL; 1%

Database plans
! Upgrades to 11g the major focus this year, some consolidation and migration between platforms
How do you expect your organizations use of Oracle DATABASE platforms to change this year? Check all that apply. n=367

Upgrading Oracle databases

59%

10g to 11g
9i to 10g 9i to 11g 11g to 11g R2 8/8i to 10g
Point releases within any version

73%
29% 25% 17% 12% 7% 1%

No change expected

26%

8i to 11g

Consolidating Oracle databases

23%

Migrating AWAY from Oracle databases

8%

Top consolidation drivers are reducing costs (37%) and consolidating data (19%)

Migrating TO more Oracle databases

7%

Migration to and from Oracle

! Most movement between Oracle and MSFT SQL Server (all data very similar to 09.) most notable changes YOY are with IBM DB2. Are more migrating away from DB2 in 2010?
Which other database platform(s) are you migrating TO? Check all that apply. n=29 What database platform(s) are you migrating FROM? Check all that apply. n=24 76% 28% 10% 7% 3%
Compare to 17% in 2009

Microsoft SQL Server MySQL PostgreSQL IBM DB2 Other

Microsoft SQL Server IBM DB2 MySQL IBM Informix Other

4%

58% 25% 17%

Compare to 10% in 2009

16%

Whats the primary reason your organization is moving toward another database platform? n=29
Corporate standards; 17% Other; 17%

Whats the primary reason your organization is moving to an Oracle database platform? n=24
Better features and functions; 38% Performance; 17% Corporate standards; 8% Support & maintenance service/ quality, 13%

Cost / total cost of ownership (TCO); 45% Support & maintenance costs; 21%

Other; 12% Cost / total cost of ownership (TCO); 4% Administratio n ease; 8%

Tier-1 Workloads
!! This TechTarget information shows that Oracle is really the dominant underlying infrastructure to most tier-1 business-critical applications !! While most of what I will present could be applied to any tier-1 workload, I will be focusing on the Oracle virtualization trends that we have seen

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

First, What are your trends?

!! How many of you have a virtualization strategy? !! How many of you have tried to virtualize Oracle? !! Was it successful? !! How many of you have virtualized Oracle in production? !! Why not? !! How many include all production, tier-1 in your virtualization strategy?
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Were not going to virtualize our prod Oracle stacks.

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

We know were going to have to virtualize our prod Oracle stacks.

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

How can I do it best?

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

The Chasm

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Virtualization Adoption Lifecycle

Tier-2/3

Tier-1, Business Critical Workloads

The Chasm

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Virtualization adoption

in Oracle environments

! Virtualization use growing YOY now in use by more than half for transactional apps and DBs.
! Other open text write-ins indicated that many are using virtualization on application servers. Some also specifically wrote in that they are not using virtualization for databases.
Does your organization use any virtualization technology? n=438 Which kinds of virtualization technology does your organization use (or are you planning to use)? Check all that apply. n=257 Please describe your organizations use of server virtualization technology. n=239

No; 34%
Other; 14%

Interested but no plans; 8%

Types of virtualization in use

Server virtualization
Application virtualization Database virtualization Storage Virtualization

Use for less critical databases/ applications Use broadly for transactional databases/applications Use for a few transactionintensive databases/ applications Other

38% 29% 22% 11%

92%
26% 17% 1%

Yes; 52%
Compare to: 2009 = 44% 2008 = 27%

Planning to add in next year; 6%

Virtualization drivers
in Oracle environments

! Server consolidation driving virtualization purchases in Oracle environments

! We believe many readers picked this option because it encompasses many goals at once reducing hardware, reducing data center space/energy requirements and reducing costs.
n=239

What is driving your decision to adopt virtualization? Check all that apply.

Server hardware consolidation Operations benefits Energy savings Disaster recovery Server software consolidation Licensing / costs Other
2% 2% 42% 41% 35% 53%

84%

The Tier-1 Virtualization Chasm

!!What are the typical barriers in the Tier-1 Virtualization Chasm? !!What are they for you? !!At House of Brick, we hear many reasons from our customers !!Those can fit into three typical barriers

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

The 3 Barriers of Oracle Virtualization

!!The barriers we encounter most frequently with our customers are really just myths:

1.!Oracle does not support VMware 2.!Oracle workloads do not perform sufficiently on VMware 3.!Oracle licensing is not VMwarefriendly
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Myth 1: Oracle Does Not Support VMware

!!Oracle does support VMware (Oracle note 249212.1)
!! Larry Ellison, in November 2007 analyst call confirmed !! They do not certify VMware (or any hardware platform) !! Oracle only certifies entities above the OS (like OVM) !! 11.08.2010 Oracle added full support for all technologies

!!Oracle software sales may tell customers that there is no support; but they are starting to soften that stance
!!House of Brick has never had Oracle turn away a customer issue that they knew was on vmware
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Myth 2: Oracle Does Not Perform on VMware

!!In all of our customer experience at HoB, production Oracle performance on vmware has been excellent !!We performance tune all kinds of systems. Never have we run into an issue that was VMware-related. Problems are typically IOrelated.
!! The IO virtualization latency wedge is 1.4% from hardware to VMware ESX 3.5 as measured on EMC Clariion storage !! This is insignificant for our best practices
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Myth 3: Oracle Licensing is Not vmware-Friendly

!! While Oracle is always free to change their licensing policy, currently it is quite friendly to vmware !! Oracle has Two Licensing Models

Named User Plus

!! Oracle is licensed by named user !! No different on hardware or vmware !! Cost neutral

Processor-Based
!! Must license full-machine !! No limit on the number of VMs that can go on that machine running Oracle !! Cost positive

!! Legacy Unix Oracle core factors range from 0.75 to 1.0. x86 core factor is 0.5
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Seven Reasons to Virtualize Tier-1

any one of which would be sufficient justification
1.! Cost Reduction This comes in the form of both CapEx reductions from hardware and Oracle licensing, and OpEx reductions from improved manageability, shorter development cycles, improved QA, etc. Near 100% Reliable Disaster Recoverability Historical recovery from backup has been dicey at best. VMware provides a near 100% recoverability. Product Release Cycle Optimization Full production clones, isolated test environments, quick provisioning, dev server management, etc. High Availability (HA) Very high availability at a fraction of the cost of Oracle RAC Oracle License Optimization Load up the hardware with more Oracle workloads without paying for more licenses Production Error Capture When there is a production problem, snapshot to capture the whole environment for improved resolution (with no downtime a future feature) Security Complete isolation between systems on the same host, smaller attack target footprint, VM to processor tracing, etc.

2.!

3.! 4.! 5.! 6.!

7.!

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

So, How do you cross the chasm?

!!Review, and satisfy the emotional barriers !!Start small
!! Find a small workload that is representative of your production configuration !! Virtualize that in a proof-of-concept !! Use the House of Brick best practices that Dave Welch will present

!!Bring in some expert help

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

nbiggs@houseofbrick.com www.houseofbrick.com/oracle-on-vmware

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Tier-1 Oracle Workloads on vSphere Best Practices

Dave WelchCTO & Chief Evangelist

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Refresh on RISC?

RISC

x86 Intel/AMD

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Platform
!! 2 socket boxes !! >= 96 GB installed !! Linux !! 64-bit guests !! vSphere 4.1
!! NFS: vSphere 4.1 = 25-125% performance boost !! The Java Release! !! Handles heavy context-switch workloads !! DRS Host Affinity Rules !! IO/Network reservations

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Memory
!! Full RAM reservations for Tier-1 workloads
!! Dont over-subscribe

!! Dont radically over-allocate RAM !! Huge Pages: up to 30% performance boost with very large SGAs

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Architecture
!! One JVM / guest !! Lean toward Atomicity
!! One component per VM

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Operations
!! VMware Lab Manager
!! Becoming vCloud Director !! Ditch proprietary app stack cloning procedures

!! EMC Replication Manager

!! Datastore-level cloning !! Application-aware

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

CPU
!! Disable BIOS green settings !! Start conservative. Dont over-allocate vCPUs. !! CPU Ready Time
!! 300ms average redline !! 500ms HWM

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Storage
!! Storage performance attributes
!! <30ms average I/O times !! <50% average spindle busy !! <20 SCSI queue depths !! >60MB sustained writes

!! 1:1 LUN/workload ratio for starters

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Storage slide 2
!! ASM !! Disk block alignment !! PVSCSI Driver !! EMC PowerPath VE Driver !! EMC FAST VP !! Async I/O injection tools:
!! Orion !! Bonnie ++ !! IOmeter - Windows guest only

I/O

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Network
!!10 GbE:
!! Consolidate app and vMotion networks !! Validate drivers!

!!NFS
!! vSphere 4.1 = 25-125% performance boost !! 11g: Oracles Direct NFS (DNFS)

!!NAS on 10 GbE: Enable Jumbo Frames. 85% performance boost

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Soft Partition License A Typical Blade Configuration

! Example: A DRS Cluster with Oracle
!! Four blades, each w/4 CPU cores; each VM is 2 vCPU (2-core)

Oracle DB

!! Solution:

But Oracle tells me I have to license EVERY server in the ESX cluster!

!! Both ORACLE HOSTS must be licensed for all 8 cores on 2 blades !! Same physical or virtual: (8 cores) x (0.5 x86 factor) = 4 licenses !! Free to move that Oracle DB VM back & forth between Host 1 & 2 !! Do not let Oracle DB VMs migrate to App Host 3 or App Host 4! !! Isolate: vCenter logical clusters, or DRS 4.1 Host Affinity Rules !! See Gartner Research Doc ID #G00165003 for similar guidance
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Data Guard vs. Replication

!! ~100% DR reliability !! License host if Oracle installed and/or run

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/ pricing/data-recoverylicensing-070587.pdf

2!3$!/&4/&$

%&'()*+',$!-./$

!"#$%&'% ()*+,)-.%
!"#$ 567%+.*+%&'% ()*+,)-.% /*0)-% 53#8%9/:% ;2)<=% />+#?,@-% 567%1.)-.%

!! Potential Oracle License Savings

2!3$!/&4/&$

!"#$
2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

1,23#4."% &'% ()*+,)-.%

01$!-./$

VLDB Re-platforming Prep

!! Golden Gate unsupported types
!! ORDDICOM !! ANYDATA !! ANYDATASET !! ANYTYPE !! BFILE !! MLSLABEL !! TIMEZONE_ABBR !! TIMEZONE_REGION !! URITYPE !! UROWID

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Re-platforming Methods
!!Transportable Tablespaces !!Data Pump
!! Inadequate parallel attributes !! Single-threaded via NFS stage: days? !! House of Bricks Replatforming Tool !! exp/imp !! Named Pipes !! Load Balancer !! PERL: existing object DDL !! Balance! !! Rows by Schema !! Objects by schema/status/ type

!!Streams/Golden Gate

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Load Testing
!!Benchmarks are unusual !!Most workloads will have any CPU pressure at DB tier !!Streamlined load test (IU example)
!! Trace capture/awk !! 75 injectors, 9M transactions, 2 hours !! 3,000 errors (insignificant)

100

!!PL/SQL Compile Time = ~25%

p570
0

VM

% of needed headroom

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

 2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Production RAC Criteria

!! Explicit SLA <4 Minutes? !! Rolling Upgrade Framework? !! Middle Tier ONS/FCF-literate? !! Horizontal Scalability? !! If not, consider Single-instance/VMware HA !! In fairness, we note this rebuttal: VMware HA is not RAC

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Channel Blade Technologies

May 2007
PRODUCTION Bethlehem, PA
ESX Server 3.0.1

Sun Opteron 4 core 2.6 GHz servers, 32 GB RAM

ESX Server 3.0.1 ESX Server 3.0.1

RAC 10.2.0.3 SLES 10.2

RAC 10.2.0.3 SLES 10.2

RAC 10.2.0.3

DR SITE Virginia Beach, VA

Sun Opteron 4 core 2.6 GHz servers
10.2.0.3 Redo Apply
ESX Server 3.0.1

SLES 10.2

10g Grid SLES 10

SLES 9

Storagetek 6140 SAN 100 Mbit 300 miles

Storagetek 3510 SAN

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Storage Virtual Tooling

! Maximum ESX tooling ! ASM ! Allows Fibre Channel--max I/O performance

VMFS

RDM

! More configuration/management overhead ! ASM

In-guest

! No ESX tooling ! No ASM

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Storage Oracle Support

In-guest

!Hot-fork a branch to native

RDM

!No storage reformatting !Minimal downtime !Could script RDM link removal

VMFS

!Downtime to reformat storage

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Organizational
!! Tell folks youre going to virtualize them before you do it !! Put your DBAs through vSphere Install & Config class !! DR trial via VMware Site Recovery Manager

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Resources
Oracle on vSphere: Re-Platforming Tier 1 Oracle Databases from UNIX to vSphere at Indiana University (VMworld 2010) Oracle Enterprise Workloads on VMware How-To (VMworld 2009) House of Brick Oracle VMware Support Position Paper www.vmware.com/oracle

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Contacts
Dave Welch
!! dwelch@houseofbrick.com !! www.houseofbrick.com

Nathan Biggs
!! nbiggs@houseofbrick.com !! www.houseofbrick.com

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC

Copyright
Copyright 2011 House of Brick Technologies. This work is the intellectual property of House of Brick Technologies, LLC. To disseminate or to republish requires written permission from the copyright owner.

2011 House of Brick Technologies, LLC