VMware released a new paper about Oracle technologies performance tuning in ESX virtual infrastructures. Quite easy now that Oracle and VMware have a technical partnership, uh?
With the rapid success and market penetration of Oracles Real Application Clusters (RAC), it has become increasingly critical to deploy these solutions quickly, consistently, and in a uniform manner. The successful deployment of RAC solutions requires caretul intrastructure and hardware planning. At a minimum II organization must secure the hardware and technical resources necessary to deploy multiple servers, configure public and private networks, provision storage, and create the Oracle environment itself. IT organizations must also factor in the need to replicate the RAC infrastructure for development and QA environments, as well as production.
These tasks and hardware costs can be greatly minimized with the use ofVMwares product offerings. ESX Server can be used to create a virtual RAC infrastructure. ESX Server accomplishes this by transforming a physical system into a pool of logical computing resources. Each RAC nodes operating system and Oracle software are encapsulated into isolated virtual machines. These virtual machines, in turn, can reside on a single server.
In addition, VirtualCenter will be used to manage, monitor, and provision resources within the virtual RAC infrastructure. VirtualCenter can clone the virtual RAC nodes, thereby scaling the existing cluster or replicating the cluster for development or test purposes.
By using VMwares virtualization technology and the techniques described in this pape RAC deployments can be reduced to basic Database and System Administration tasks. This greatly reduces the complexity and costs associated with a traditional RAC infrastructure. Oracle administrators no longer must set up individual nodes of a cluster, but can instead clone a master to create new nodes. Moreover, the use of VMware ESX Server allows multiple virtual machines to coexist on a single piece of hardware, thus massively reducing hardware costs for deploy ment. Using the described methodology, operational Real Application Clusters can be created in the time it takes to clone nodes and edit a few files entries (approximately 30 minutes per node).
The architecture and design outlined in this white paper was created as a proof of concept to demonstrate the capabilities ofVMware technologies with Oracle Real Application Cluster. When implementing and planning production environments please refer to the appropriate vendor support matrix for official support statements on product integration.
You can get it here.