Oracle Database 12c on VMware vSAN — Day 2 Operations and Management

Customers deploying production Oracle workloads have stringent requirements to support and maintain critical database operational tasks such as Backup and Recovery, Cloning, Data Refresh for Development/Test environment and Patching. These operational tasks are also known as Database Day 2 Management Operations.

With the rapid adoption of VMware vSAN™ for business-critical workloads due to highly scalable , available , reliable and high performance HCI solution. It is essential to provide features and tools for seamless Day 1 and Day 2 Operations.

vSAN offers a range of tools and features for Day 1 and Day 2 Operations. VMware vSphere^® web client provides administrator with the capability to manage their infrastructure in a unified way for deploying, provisioning, health check, and performance monitoring. vSAN 6.0 and above has improved snapshot capability, which provides users with enterprise-class snapshots and clones that can be used for Oracle database cloning use cases.

The Oracle Real Application Clusters on VMware vSAN reference architecture addresses common business challenges that CIOs face today in an online transaction processing (OLTP) environment that requires availability, reliability, scalability, predictability and cost-effective storage, which helps customers design and implement optimal configurations specifically for Oracle RAC Database on vSAN.

The Oracle Database 12c on VMware vSAN 6.2 All-Flash reference architecture addresses common business challenges that CIOs face today in an OLTP and decision-support-system (DSS) environment that requires predictable performance and cost-effective storage.

Having addressed the Day 1 operations including deployment and provisioning of critical Oracle workloads on VMware vSAN, this operation guide focuses on the Day 2 Operations of Oracle on vSAN including backup and recovery, database cloning, database refresh for test and development environment and database patching.

VMware vSAN snapshot and clone technologies are primarily used for providing support to Oracle Day 2 Operations. VMware vSAN snapshot and clone technologies used with inherent Oracle tools provide efficient Day 2 Operations for business-critical Oracle database.

Check out the recently published Oracle Database 12c on VMware vSAN — Day 2 Operations and Management  operation guide that provides solutions and operation procedures for Oracle Database Day 2 Operations including below key oracle database tasks using vSAN snapshots and clones:

• Backup and recovery
• Cloning
• Data refresh for development and test environment from production
• Patching

While the operation guide provides above solutions natively for the Oracle database on vSAN environment. There are backup vendors who provide Oracle application-level integration along with VADP (VMware vSphere Storage APIs – for Data Protection) API integration, which can help in ease of backup/cloning, greater levels of manageability and control in vSphere environment including vSAN. These third-party backup solutions can also be used for these use cases.

Further, with the announcement of VMware Ready for vSAN program that offers partners a set of tools, resources, and processes needed to certify Data Protection products with VMware vSAN. This certification program will provide confidence with the partner data protection solutions deployed in VMware vSAN environments for seamless operation.

“Come with me if you want to live” – famous words from the Terminator series.

It’s also the very reason IT companies are adopting the ‘Virtualize First’ policy to reap all of the benefits of virtualization and move away from the soon to be legacy bare metal architecture world and ‘save a bunch of money’ , just as the Gecko said.

As part of the Virtualization journey, one of the tools VMware Professional Services (PSO), Partners and Customers use to migrate applications from physical x86 servers (Windows & Linux) to VMware Virtual Machine (VM) is using the VMware Convertor tool, the process known as P2V (Physical to Virtual). It transforms the Windows- and Linux-based physical machines and third-party image formats to VMware virtual machines.

One of the most common question I get talking the VMware field, Partners & Customers as part of my role is ‘Can I use VMware Convertor to migrate Oracle databases from physical x86 running  Linux / Oracle OVM running Linux to VMware vSphere platform ?’ , the answer, famous 2 words , ‘it depends !!’ .

Let me explain why I said that.

Database Re-Platforming

Oracle databases, being the sophisticated ‘beasts of burden’, there are many key factors to be kept in mind when we embark on an Oracle database re-platforming exercise, either between same / different system architectures, bare metal to bare metal / physical to virtual architecture, some of them include:

• source and destination system architecture
  • are we moving between like architectures (x86 to x86)
  • are we moving between from a big endian system to a little endian system (Solaris / AIX / HP-UX to x86)
• size and operating nature of the database (terabytes / production, pre-prod, dev, test etc)
• database storage (File system / Oracle ASM)

More information on Handiness can be found in the link below
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness

So, if your use case is moving Oracle databases from a big endian system to a little endian system (Solaris / AIX / HP-UX to x86), Stop Right here, you cannot use the VMware Convertor tool to migrate databases between RISC Unix and Linux x86. You need an Oracle Plan and Design exercise to migrate Oracle databases between these 2 systems.

Keep reading if you are replatforming Oracle database between x86 platforms i.e. Physical server / Virtual machine (VMware vSphere / Oracle OVM) to VMware Virtual Machine (VMware).

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Our team has been working on building solutions for NSX with Business Critical Applications around Zero trust security, application mobility, operational efficiency, increased security and more .

In a previous post I published a demo about database cloning and enforcing dynamic security policies using NSX: http://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2016/04/dynamically-enforcing-security-on-a-hot-cloned-sql-server-with-vmware-nsx.html

In this blog post we are showcasing the ability to stretch an Oracle RAC solution in an Extended Oracle RAC deployment between multi-datacenter and using VMware NSX for L2 Adjacency.

With Extended Oracle RAC , both Storage and Network virtualization needs to be deployed to provided high availability, workload Mobility, workload balancing and effective Site Maintenance between sites.

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Hey Oracle on VMware folks!!!

Earlier, we had blogged about Oracle RAC on VMware Virtual SAN Hybrid which is VMware software-defined storage solution for hyper-converged infrastructure and is available at Oracle RAC on Hybrid VSAN

In this blog post, we would like give you a glimpse of the “Oracle 12c OLTP workloads on VMware All Flash Virtual SAN 6.2”.

As some of you may know, in VMware Virtual SAN 6.2, we introduced a suite of new features for data integrity and space efficiency including Checksum, Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression. Using these features we developed an architecture for deploying and running Oracle 12c OLTP and DSS workloads on VMware All Flash Virtual SAN 6.2.

Before going into some of the results, let’s take a look as to why it is compelling to deploy heavy IO Oracle workloads on a VMware Virtual SAN All Flash solution.

• Extreme Performance – Virtual SAN is built into the vSphere kernel which optimizes the I/O path to provide excellent performance.
• Built in Data Reduction Technologies – Deduplication, Compression and Erasure Coding reduces data footprint and lowers cost, both capex and opex, further lowering the TCO of the solution.
• Availability for Business Critical Applications – Minimizes downtime with features like vMotion, vSphere HA, Virtual SAN Stretched Clustering.
• Redundancy for Business Critical Applications – Provides high level of redundancy thereby avoiding single point of failures (SPOF) with features like Failure to Tolerate (FTT), Fault Domain

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Business Critical Applications (BCA) are at the heart of an organization; their performance, availability and reliability are vital to the success of the business. Significant advances in hardware are far outpacing the performance requirements of even the most intensive business-critical applications, including Oracle Database.

VMware has kept pace with these hardware improvements by engineering significant performance advances in vSphere 6.0. Best Practices are key in ensuring that business SLA’s, uptime, QoS are met with when deploying Oracle on VMware vsphere.

Successful virtualization of any Business Critical Application (BCA) required best practices inculcated in every layer of the stack.

We are pleased to announce the updated version of the “Oracle Databases on VMware Best Practices Guide” which can be found in the below URL. Thanks to everyone who participated in this exercise

In this guide there are also references to other VMware and third-party documents which we encourage the reader to consult for better understanding of the topics discussed.

Click here to download the guide.

Virtual Volumes and Storage Policy-Based Management for Databases

In the first part of this series we provided a high level view of the benefits of using Virtual Volumes enabled storage for database operations. In the second part of this series we examined in more detail how Virtual Volumes can improve the backup and recovery capabilities for business critical databases, specifically Oracle .In the third part of this series we examined in more detail how Virtual Volumes works in a crash consistent manner for backup and for cloning operations.

Virtual Volumes integrates with Storage Policy-Based Management, the same framework to manage data services in vSphere. In this part we will look at how Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) can be leveraged to manage mission critical databases.

The Setup:

 The setup of the infrastructure is the same as discussed in the second part of this series. Please refer to setup section for details of the infrastructure and the database configuration.

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Crash consistent backups and database cloning with Virtual Volumes

In the first part of this series we provided a high level view of the benefits of using Virtual Volumes enabled storage for database operations. In the second part of this series we examined in more detail how Virtual Volumes can improve the backup and recovery capabilities for business critical databases, specifically Oracle.

The backups for Oracle can be Database consistent or Crash consistent. In this part we will look at Crash consistent backup and recovery and also how database cloning is simplified by the use of VVol.

The Setup:

 The setup of the infrastructure is the same as discussed in the second part of this series. Please refer to setup section for details of the infrastructure and the database configuration.

Database Crash Consistent Recovery and cloning use case Scenarios:

Crash Database Backup & Recovery using VVol Snapshots:

 Crash Consistent Backup:

A crash consistent backup is the backup of a point-in-time image of an Oracle database that is equivalent to a database crash induced by a power outage, other failures or a shutdown abort.

This is the most common backup method used for storage based backups and is fully supported by Oracle as long as the following conditions are met.

From the “Supported Backup, Restore and Recovery Operations using Third Party Snapshot Technologies (Doc ID 604683.1)”:

The third party vendor needs to guarantee and held accountable that their snapshots conform to all the following requirements:

• Integrated with Oracle’s recommended restore and recovery operations above
• Database crash consistent at the point of the snapshot
• Write ordering is preserved for each file within a snapshot

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