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Oracle RAC Virtualization on VMware vSphere Eisen Kung 2014

Oracle RAC Virtualization

• Leverage VMware vSphere 5.5 to virtualize Oracle

RAC clusters

• Improve efficiency, agility, availability, and scalability

• Reduce hardware footprint in data center

• Complete IT journey toward 100 percent virtualization

of IT production business applications

• Demonstrate vSphere as a production-worthy platform

for mission-critical, high-load, high-IO Oracle RAC

cluster

Business Need

• VMware on VMware initiative directs IT to move along IT Journey toward achieving 100% virtualization of its corporate data centers

• Virtualizing all business applications is part of that journey

• Attain performance equal to or better than its physical instance

• Simplify disaster recovery solution

Benefits

• Increased availability, agility, efficiency, and scalability to support VMware’s rapid growth

• Maximized the use of hardware resources without compromising application performance

• Testing at peak loads resulted in equal or better performance than physical clusters

• Improved reliability and resiliency of mission-critical Oracle RAC

• Simplified DR solution using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

4

Benefits

• Virtualizing our Oracle RAC databases is a powerful use case for VMware

• Gain cloud-readiness for Oracle RAC

• Simplified disaster recovery by using SRM

5

The Software Environment

• vSphere 5.5 with vSphere API; EMC PowerPath / VE 5.9; Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.2; Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.3; Oracle Enterprise Edition 11.2.0.3

• To minimize downtime during the migration to virtual RAC, Oracle Data Guard was configured on its associated virtual RAC database

– Expedited our switchover to virtual RAC

– Kept the switchover to 5 minutes

– Kept applications downtime to 30 minutes

6

Hardware/VM Environment

EBS Applications Diagram

8

EBS RAC Service Configuration • Multiple customer services are defined in RAC to distribute

the load across different nodes

• Nodes 1 and 2 primarily handle OLTP

• Nodes 3,4 and 5 handle batch jobs and reports

Configuration Hardware

Server • HP Blade BL660c Gen 8

Server

o 4 Sockets x 8 Cores (32 Cores, 64 Threads)

o 512 GB DDR3 Memory

o 2 x2-Port FlexibleLOM Adapters

• Smart Array P220i Controller

o Local Disk RAID 1/Raid 1+0, 279 GB Capacity

Network • 2 Flex-10D Modules

• Dual-Port 8Gb QLogic HBA

Storage

• SAN Fabric: Brocade DCX 8510

16 Gb (Dual-Fabric)

• SAN Fabric: Brocade DCX 8510

16 Gb (Dual-Fabric)

• VPLEX VS2 4 Engine: Virtualized

Storage (Front End)

• VMAX-40 8 Engine (Backend)

o Device Types: EFD, R10K

SAS, SATA

o Fully Automated Storage

Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST

VP)

o FAST VP 20 EFD/100 SAS

and 80 SATA

o 1 TB Standard for Database

RDM DB EBS RAC Configuration

5 Node RAC, each node has

• 24 vCPU

• 256GB RAM

Database is 14TB

On Measuring Performance – Compare Apples to Apples

• Performance was measured against the physical RAC baseline captured from the same code base

• HP’s Load Runner tool was used to perform load and endurance testing

• Performed testing at normal and peak loads and at varying numbers of concurrent users

10

Lessons Learned

• Purchased all hardware at the same time – otherwise there is a chance firmware versions would be different

• Dedicate more time and identify more scenarios for VMware vMotion testing

• Have dedicated and skilled Linux resources

11

Physical Environment

Model Count Cost per unit Total

BL620c G7 5 $17,500 $87,500

BL490c G7 10 $6,700 $67,000

C7000 Chassis

2 $40,000 $80,000

Grand Total $234,500

Virtual Environment

Model Count Cost per unit Total

BL660 Gen8 6 $24,500 $147,000

C7000 Chassis

1 $40,000 $40,000

Grand Total $187,000

Cost Savings per Environment $47,500

Hardware Footprint/Cost Savings

For more information, contact Eisen Kung ekung@vmware.com