Technical Presentation

1© Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

MAXIMIZE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY FOR ORACLE RAC WITH EMC SYMMETRIX FAST VP (AUTOMATED TIERING) AND VMWARE VSPHERE

Technical Presentation

2© Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. 2

Agenda• Business challenge

• Solution overview

• Key technology components

• Symmetrix VMAX with Enginuity 5875

• Virtualization components

• EMC Virtual Provisioning

• EMC FAST VP

• Solution use case

• VMware ESX and virtual machine design

• Live migration from physical to virtual Oracle RAC

• Configuring FAST VP

• Test procedure

• Test results

• Solution benefits


EMC Proven Solutions

Combine EMC’s best-of-breed products and services with key third-party offerings

Provide tested, documented, and demonstrable solutions with reference architectures and best practices

Utilize subject matter experts who work closely with customers and who fully support each solution

Leverage deep, strategic relationships —Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, VMware

Help customersidentify andovercome

their businesschallenges

Reduce risk anddeliver faster

implementations

Address uniqueindustry

challenges

Simplify managementof complexapplication

environments


Business challengeChallenge Solution

Business needs To advance workforce productivity and enable business transformation by:

• Increasing operational efficiency• Improving quality of service

Meeting the challenge

Changes in IT models and infrastructure solutions to:• Provide more agile service delivery • Design for the future

Technologies being applied

• Resource pooling• Virtualization • Dynamic and thin provisioning

Infrastructure foundation requirements

Infrastructure and tools must:• Simplify storage management• Improve capacity utilization

EMC solution EMC Symmetrix VMAX with Enginuity 5875, and associated management tools, have been developed to be the foundation of this infrastructure

Use case • Automated storage tiering for Oracle RAC 11g databases, virtualized with VMware vSphere, and residing on EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage. • A method for nondisruptive migration from a physical RAC

environment

}• Storage tiering• Commodity

computing

while still cost-effectively managing existing business requirements and service levels


Solution overviewChallenge Solution

Optimized performance tuning

• Symmetrix Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) offers highly granular sub-LUN data movement across a mix of drive technologies and RAID levels.

Optimized storage capacity utilization

• F AST VP automatically identifies highly active data and moves it to a high- performing tier, such as EFDs.• FAST VP moves inactive or less active data to a storage tier more

suited to its performance requirements, such as FC or SATA.

Simplified management and operations

• FAST VP uses EMC Virtual Provisioning thin pools to provision storage. • EMC Symmetrix Management Console provides simple setup and

administration.

Flexibility • Symmetrix VMAX supports EFD, FC, and SATA, and extensive range of RAID types. • Virtual Provisioning supports nondisruptive, on-demand provisioning.• Virtual LUN VP Mobility supports manual movement of devices

between storage tiers with different performance characteristics.

Management of Oracle Database 11g environments

• Virtualization with VMware vSphere enables efficient use of system resources.• Operating a RAC database in a VMware environment improves

operational agility and response to both vertical and horizontal scaling needs.• Together Oracle RAC and vSphere provide HA at both virtual and

physical levels.• VMware vCenter Server, together with EMC Virtual Storage Integrator

(VSI), provides a single interface for virtualization and storage management.


Key technology components• EMC components:

– Symmetrix VMAX with Enginuity 5875

– Symmetrix Management Console (SMC)

– Symmetrix Performance Analyzer (SPA)

– Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning

– Virtual LUN VP Mobility– Symmetrix FAST VP– PowerPath/Virtual Edition

(PowerPath/VE)– Virtual Storage Integrator

(VSI)

• VMware components– VMware vSphere

– VMware vCenter

– VMware templates

• Oracle components– Oracle Database 11g R2

Enterprise Edition

– Oracle Grid Infrastructure

– Oracle RAC

• Brocade components– Brocade 5100 switches


Symmetrix VMAX with Enginuity 5875

• High-end, enterprise storage array, with simple, intelligent, modular design that enables system to grow seamlessly and cost-effectively from entry-level configuration to world’s largest storage array.

• Supports EFDs, and FC and SATA drives within single array, and extensive range of RAID types.

• Virtual Provisioning provides nondisruptive, on-demand thin provisioning.

• FAST VP provides automatic storage tiering at the sub-LUN level.

• Virtual LUN VP Mobility enables manual moving of thin LUNs between pools, transparently and with no host or application impact, including ability to re-gather a thin volume’s many thin device extents from multiple thin pools and move all to a single pool, regardless of underlying disk technology or RAID type.

• EMC PowerPath/VE supports multiple I/O paths to logical devices and intelligently distributing I/O requests across all available paths.

• Configured and managed by Symmetrix Management Console (SMC), Symmetrix Solutions Enabler, and Symmetrix Performance Analyzer (SPA).

EFD

FC

SATA

Symmetrix VMAX array with

new Enginuity 5875 operating

environment


Virtualization components• VMware vSphere 4—abstracts applications and information from the

complexity of underlying infrastructure, through comprehensive virtualization of server, storage, and networking hardware.

• VMware vCenter—scalable and extensible platform for centralized management of VMware vSphere environments.

• VMware virtual machine template—a master copy of a virtual machine that can be used to quickly create and provision virtual machines.

• EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI)—a plug-in to VMware vCenter that provides a single management interface for managing EMC storage within vSphere environment.

– Storage Viewer—presents underlying storage details to virtual data center administrator, merging the data of several different storage mapping tools into a few seamless vSphere Client views.

– Path Management—enables management of multipathing at both PowerPath/VE and NMP level through single interface.


EMC Virtual Provisioning overview

• Improves storage utilization• Reduces storage provisioning complexity and

overhead• Automates processes to easily grow storage

– Overprovision storage to last lifetime of application, without providing all the physical storage up front

– Add capacity nondisruptively and on demand

– Automatically rebalance thin pools to maintain performance

• Simplifies storage management with Symmetrix Management Console, Symmetrix Performance Analyzer, and Solutions Enabler

ESX 310 TB

ESX 210 TB

ESX 1 10 TB

3 TB4 TB

Physicalallocation

3 TB

CommonStorage Pool


EMC Virtual Provisioning elementsThin devices (TDevs)

• Cache-only devices that are presented to a host.

Data devices

• Special devices that provide physical storage for thin devices.

Virtual pools

• Collections of data devices that provide storage capacity for the thin devices bound to a pool.

• All data devices in a pool have same drive type and RAID level.

• Data is automatically striped across all data devices in a pool, balancing workload across physical storage devices.

• Pools can be automatically rebalanced after adding/removing data devices. Virtual pools provide

the storage tiers used by FAST VP


EMC Symmetrix FAST VP – overview• Automatic storage tiering for Virtual

Provisioning thin pools

• Analysis and data movement at sub-LUN level:– Spreads data from a single thin device

across multiple pools

– Places very active parts of a LUN on high-performing EFDs

– Places less active parts of a LUN on higher-capacity, more cost-effective FC or SATA drives

– Moves data at the extent group level (7,680 KB)

• Moves data based on user-defined policies and application performance needs

• Data movement is automatic and nondisruptive

SATA

FC

EFD

• Radically simplifies storage management

• Optimizes performance

• Increases storage efficiency

Symmetrix VMAX with FAST VP – Getting the right data, to the right place, at the right time


Symmetrix FAST VP – components• Storage tier: A set of one or

more virtual pools containing devices with the same technology type and RAID protection level.

• Storage group: A logical grouping of storage devices for common management.

• FAST policies: A set of tier usage rules that is applied to associated storage groups.

A policy assigns an upper usage limit for each tier, specifying how much data from a storage group can reside on each tier.

Administrators can set:• High-performance policies that use more

Flash drive capacity for critical applications

• Cost-optimized policies that use more SATA drive capacity for less-critical applications


Symmetrix FAST VP – before and after


Use case architecture (physical environment)

Live, nondisruptive migration carried out from this environment


Use case architecture (virtual environment)

Live, nondisruptive migration carried out to this environment


Use case overview• Implements Oracle Database 11g R2 RAC in a virtualized environment

optimized by FAST VP.

• Underlying physical storage provided by Symmetrix VMAX array with Enginuity 5875.

• Live, nondisruptive migration:– From a physical 2-node Oracle RAC 11g R2 database

– To a virtualized 8-node Oracle RAC 11g R2 database running on a VMware HA cluster, with identical hardware specifications to source physical nodes

• Using Swingbench, workload was generated against two identical schemas and a baseline was established.

• A storage group was defined for all required devices.

• A FAST policy was associated with the storage group, and the performance characteristics before and after applying the policy were compared.

• Testing was performed with the goal of emulating a tier-1 database workload that exceeds performance requirements of most organizations.


Use case hardware and software

Software Description

Enginuity 5875 Operating system for Symmetrix VMAX storage arrays

EMC PowerPath/VE 5.4.2Multipathing/fault tolerance for storage connections on VMware vSphere servers

Solutions Enabler 7.2 Symmetrix VMAX management software

EMC Symmetrix Performance Analyzer 2.0.1.4 Symmetrix VMAX performance analysis tool

Symmetrix Management Console 7.2 Symmetrix VMAX configuration and management tool

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator 4.0Plug-in for VMware vCenter for managing storage from EMC storage arrays

VMware vSphere 4.1 Hypervisor hosting all virtual machines

VMware vCenter Management of VMWare vSphere

Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition 11.2.0.2 (with Oracle RAC and Oracle Grid Infrastructure)

Oracle cluster database software for grid computing

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 OS for Oracle RAC database servers

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 OS for management virtual machines

Swingbench 2.4 Database workload generation tool

Storage array(1)

VMware ESX servers (2)

Oracle RAC database servers

(2)

FC switches (2)

Ethernet switches

(2)HBAs (8)

Symmetrix VMAX with Enginuity 5875, 2 x VMAX 64 GB engines, 8 Gb FC connectivity, 128 x 300 GB, 15k FC drives, 28 x 2 TB, 7,200 rpm SATA drives, 8 x 200 GB EFDs

4 x eight-core CPUs, 128 GB RAM, 2 x quad-port 1 Gb NICs

4 x eight-core CPUs, 128 GB RAM, 2 x quad-port 1 Gb NICs

Brocade 5100 switches, 40 ports per switch

Gigabit Ethernet switches

8 Gb quad-port HBAs (2 per physical server)


ASM disk groupVirtual pool

RAID protection

TDev hyper size

No. of TDevs

Provisioned capacity

+DATA (system, sysaux, and undo)

RAID5_FC RAID 5 (3+1) 64 GB 2 128 GB

+SOE1 RAID5_FC RAID 5 (3+1) 64 GB 15 960 GB

+SOE2 RAID5_FC RAID 5 (3+1) 64 GB 15 960 GB

+REDO RAID1_FC RAID 1 64 GB 1 64 GB

+CRS RAID1_FC RAID 1 5 GB 5 25 GB

+FRA RAID6_SATA RAID 6 (6+2) 64 GB 4 256 GB

+TEMP RAID5_FC RAID 5 (3+1) 64 GB 1 64 GB

Use case storage configurationProfile characteristic

Details

Database schema size

1 TB each

Database profile OLTP

Benchmark profileSwingbench Order Entry benchmark

User scalingDatabase scale to keep host CPU utilization in the range of 70%

Response time SLA <=10 ms

Virtual allocation of hardware resourcesVirtual machine

roleQty

Configuration

Oracle RAC node 86 vCPUs, 24 GB RAM, RHEL 5.5

VMware vCenter server

12 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, Windows Server 2008 SP2

EMC SMC/SPA server

12 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM, Windows Server 2008 SP2

Swingbench server 14 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, Windows Server 2008 SP2

Database storage layout for thin devices

Use case profile


Virtual environment overview


VMware ESX and virtual machine design• A virtual switch, dedicated to the cluster interconnect, was created

on each ESX Server, with NIC teaming for load balancing and failover.

• Oracle Services were balanced over virtual machines on the same ESX Server, where possible.

• Each virtual machine was assigned 24 GB of memory.

• Each virtual database instance was given a memory target of 10 GB.

• 12 GB of memory reservation was made for each virtual machine.

• 6 virtual machines were used for all testing. 2 unused virtual machines remained available for horizontal scaling.

• With only 48 cores used across both ESX servers, there was capacity for an additional 2 virtual machines of same specification, if required.


Live migration from physical to virtual Oracle RAC• Using SMC, add ESX servers to Auto-provisioning View to enable

access to storage devices from VMAX.

• Prepare ESX servers for deployment of virtualized Oracle Clusterware nodes.

• Deploy all virtual machines from VMware template.

• Update all virtual machines with RDM/Shared SCSI Controller configuration.

• Start up virtual machines and configure SSH equivalency on all nodes.

• Add virtual machines to cluster and configure RAC .

• Delete Oracle RAC physical nodes.


Configuring FAST VP

Pool storage resources

Define policy

Apply to application

Time windowsCreate time windows to specify when data can be collected for performance analysis and when data movements can be executed.

Recommend to have windows always open so FAST VP can use most recent analysis to optimize data placement.


FAST VP versus manual tiering

Manual

+9 hours at regular intervals

FAST VP

One-off process, 40 minutes or less


FAST VP test procedure• Swingbench Order Entry workload generated and

run against schemas SOE1 and SOE2 concurrently.

• Initially, all storage allocated for both schemas resided on FC devices.

• Workload generated against the schemas for 2 hours to ensure that each was running a steady transaction rate.

• FAST policy created and applied.

• FAST monitoring and move windows opened.

• Database performance monitored—average host I/Os per second (IOPS) and database transactions per second (TPS) recorded.

• After storage group was compliant with FAST policy, load was continued to ensure observed performance levels were sustained.

• Number of users increased at intervals to determine how database performed following optimization of underlying storage by FAST VP.

Reduce

Risk

ReduceTotal Cost

ImproveSLAs


FAST VP rebalancing across tiers

• 5% limit on EFD tier has almost been reached

• Although policy allows for 100% of storage group to reside on FC tier, FAST VP has identified that 30% does not require that level of performance and downtiers it to SATA

• 65% of data still resides on FC tier

Effect of FAST VP rebalancing storage group across 3 tiers when policy applied


Physical & virtual Oracle RAC comparison

• Virtual environment delivered performance consistently within 4% of physical environment (without FAST VP)

• Virtual environment processed 2% more transactions after FAST policy applied


FAST VP effects on read response times

• 17% improvement in response times after FAST policy applied

• FAST VP moved most active data to EFDs, so ensuring improved response times for entire storage group

• FAST VP also moved 30% of total allocated storage for storage group to SATA with no negative impact on response times


FAST VP & user scaling effects on response times

• No. of users scaled up from 800 to 1,200 (in increments of 100)

• 50% increase in user numbers overall

• 44% increase in transactions per minute

• Response times remained within 1 ms of initial values


FAST VP effects on transactions per minute

• Increase of 25,260 transactions per minute in virtual environment when FAST policy applied (under max load tested)


FAST VP effects on energy consumption

• 33% reduction in power and cooling requirements for tiered environment, when compared to all-FC environment

• This results from introduction of more energy-efficient EFDs and more high-capacity, low-energy SATA drives

• Energy consumption figures generated by EMC Power Calculator


Solution benefits• By virtualizing the Oracle RAC 11g R2 environment on

VMware, customers are able to scale the transaction rate to within 4% of a physical machine.

• By applying a FAST policy with just 5% EFD added into the mix, the VMware vSphere 4.1 environment outperforms the physical system, and offers more efficient use of CPU, memory, and Oracle licenses.

• Adding a FAST policy enables workloads to be scaled almost linearly for a 50% increase in users and a 44% increase in database transactions, while still meeting service-level agreements.

• Using FAST VP to manage a tiered solution can deliver a 33% annual saving on power and cooling costs, when compared to an all-FC environment.

• FAST VP eliminates the need for repetitive analysis and manual retuning of storage by administrators, reducing the process to a one-off operation taking 40 minutes or less.

• Live migration of the Oracle RAC 11g R2 database from physical to virtual was achieved without loss of service.

Performance

Ease-of-use

Efficiency

Non-disruptive

Cost savings


Next steps• Step 1

Leverage EMC expertise to help assess what you have

• Step 2Review White Paper supporting technical validation

• Step 3Request complimentary workshopWhite Paper: Maximize Operational

Efficiency for Oracle RAC with EMC Symmetrix FAST VP (Automated Tiering) and VMware vSphere – An Architectural Overview

• emc.com• EMC Powerlink

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8123-oracle-rac-symmetrix-fast-vp-vsphere-wp.pdf

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/White_Paper/h8123-oracle-rac-symmetrix-fast-vp-vsphere-wp.pdf

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