Oracle Workloads – Where Eagles Dare !!!

Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLA’s, all the way from on-premises to VMware Hybrid Clouds

With increasing need for data to be “fast and furious”, customers are turning to NVMe transfer protocol for accessing data quickly from flash memory storage devices such as solid-state drives (SSDs).

NVMe, or nonvolatile memory express, is a storage access protocol and transport protocol for flash and next-generation solid-state drives (SSDs) that delivers high throughput and fast response times for a variety of traditional and modern workloads. While all-NVMe server-based storage has been available for years, the use of non-NVMe protocols for storage networking can add significant latency.

To address this performance bottleneck, NVMe over TCP or NVMe/TCP, extends NVMe’s performance and latency benefits across TCP based network fabric.

We’ve heard from our customers that they would like to run NVMe/TCP because:

• TCP/IP is ubiquitous
• Well understood – TCP is probably the most common transport
• High performance – TCP delivers excellent performance scalability
• Well suited for large scale deployments and longer distances
• Actively developed – maintenance and enhancements are developed by major players
• Inherently supports in-transit encryption

More information on NVMe/TCP Support with VMware vSphere 7 Update 3 can be found here.

More information on VMware NVMe Concepts can be found here.

Key points to take away from this blog

This blog is not meant to be a performance benchmarking-oriented blog.

This blog is meant to raise the awareness of the simplicity and seamless use of NVMe/TCP storage backed datastores provided by Lightbits Storage to provide vmdk based storage for Oracle workloads.

Oracle workloads can take advantage of NVMe/TCP storage using VM vNVME controller backed vmdk’s on those NVMe/TCP storage enhancing performance with high throughput, low latency, fast response times and reduced CPU utilization.

From an Oracle workload or pretty much any Application on VMware platform, from a functional perspective, a vmdk carved form a NVMe/TCP backed Datastore is just a regular vmdk which then gets attached to the VM and gets consumed the same way as any regular vmdk on a VMFS /vVOL / NFS / vSAN datastore.

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Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLA’s, all the way from on-premises to VMware Hybrid Clouds

Oracle RAC provides high availability and scalability by having multiple instances access a single database which prevents the server from being a single point of failure. Oracle RAC enables you to combine smaller commodity servers into a cluster to create scalable environments that support mission critical business applications.

Key points to take away from this blog

This blog showcases the validation of vMotion capability for Oracle RAC cluster on VMware vSphere Platform which can be achieved seamlessly without any issue, with appropriate settings in place

• with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled for non-shared disk
• with multi-writer attribute set for the shared vmdk’s

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“He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” – I have the power!!!! Yes, you do……with VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) using Pure Storage FlashArray X50 and Broadcom LPe36000 Fibre Channel Adapter.

Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLA’s, all the way from on-premises to VMware Hybrid Clouds

This blog is only meant to showcase the performance improvements we got in our lab by deploying Oracle workloads on VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) datastore [SCSI-vVols] on ESXi 7.0.3 using Pure Storage FlashArray X50 and Broadcom LPe36000 Fibre Channel Adapter and is by NO means a performance benchmark blog.

This blog contains results that I got in my lab running a load generator SLOB against my workload, which will be way different than any real-world customer workload, your mileage may vary.

Remember, any performance data is a result of the combination of hardware configuration, software configuration, test methodology, test tool, and workload profile used in the testing.

Continue reading →

Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLA’s, all the way from on-premises to VMware Hybrid Clouds

Oracle RAC provides high availability and scalability by having multiple instances access a single database which prevents the server from being a single point of failure. Oracle RAC enables you to combine smaller commodity servers into a cluster to create scalable environments that support mission critical business applications.

With increasing need for data to be “fast and furious”, customers are turning to NVMe transfer protocol for accessing data quickly from flash memory storage devices such as solid-state drives (SSDs).

NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe/FC) is a technology specification designed to enable NVMe-based message commands to transfer data and status information between a host computer and a target storage subsystem over a Fibre Channel network fabric, providing sustained, predictable performance and catering to low latency requirements of mission critical workloads.

KB 1034165 currently has the guidance “When using the multi-writer mode, the virtual disks must NOT be attached to the virtual NVMe controller.”.

This blog is a pre-validation of the deployment and configuration of Oracle RAC on VMware vSphere using NVMe/FC protocol with Pure X50 FlashArray and Broadcom LPe36000 Fibre Channel Adapter, pending official VMware Engineering validation efforts , currently in progress , into using vNVMe controllers for shared vmdk’s with multi-writer attribute using NVMe-oF/FC protocol.

The official guidance is that Customers deploy their Oracle RAC using vNVMe controllers for shared vmdk’s with multi-writer attribute using NVMe-oF/FC protocol , ONLY after KB 1034165 is updated.

vSAN File Service – in the service of critical Oracle workloads

Typical Day 2 operations for Oracle DBAs includes and is not limited to

• Refresh of databases between different environments (e.g., refresh non-production databases from production databases with data masking)
• Cloning of databases between different environments (e.g., clone production databases to non-prod databases with data masking)
• Backup and restore of databases between different environments
• Sharing scripts between non-production or production environments
• Backup databases to filesystem for 3^rd party backup software to consume either through direct streaming or via Snapshots

NFS services has helped immensely in this regard where data and scripts can be shared in a controlled manner by the DBAs among different environments, using NFS appliances or server/VM’s serving NFS protocols.

VMware vSAN file services

• can be used to create file shares in the vSAN datastore that client workstations or VMs can access. The data stored in a file share can be accessed from any device that has access rights.
• has a built-in feature that allows you to create a point- in-time image of the vSAN file share. When the vSAN File Service is enabled, you can create up to 32 snapshots per share. A vSAN file share snapshot is a file system snapshot that provides a point-in-time image of a vSAN file share.

This blog addresses the advantages of using VMware vSAN File Service for above mentioned Oracle database day 2 operations for simplifying operational process and achieving efficiency.

Techopedia – “While scaling out involves adding more discrete units to a system in order to add capacity, scaling up involves building existing units by integrating resources into them”

Business-critical production Oracle workload are very resource intensive and large memory sizes are characteristics of production databases to ensure that the working set of the database fits into DRAM for fast access to data.

Let us look at the different options we have currently with the demand for memory increase for Oracle workloads –

• Increased Cost with buying more DRAM ($$$) – cost to adding additional DRAM to beef up the system for large memory allocations
• Memory Latency with sizing workloads across multiple NUMA nodes to take advantage of remote memory to fulfill memory needs – With NUMA servers, one has an option of accessing memory from remote NUMA nodes across QPI/UPI interconnects but …. there is memory latency that one would encounter with remote memory accesses.

Ok, let’s look at our choices – Increased cost ($$$) OR Memory Latency for critical workloads ?

Enter VMware vSphere platform with Intel DC Optane PMM in Memory Mode.

VMware vSphere usage of Intel Optane PMem in Memory Mode can offer increased memory capacity and TCO improvements for large memory bound workloads without having to buy expensive DRAM’s or size workloads across NUMA modes for added memory needs.

This blog demonstrates how one can achieve similar performance running Oracle workloads on VMware vSphere with Intel Optane PMEM in Memory Mode as compared to running the same workloads on VMware platform by spreading memory across NUMA nodes (or adding expensive DRAM – this blog focused on comparing Memory Mode v/s NUMA access) to satisfy the memory demand – with the advantage of not needing to buy expensive DRAM or going across NUMA nodes for added memory increase.

Intel Vision 2022 (May 10-11, 2022) is the latest in the Intel ON Series – dedicated to the future of business and technology. This two-day event will feature product and partner solution-driven content, leadership insights, demos, and peer-to-peer networking. More information can be found at the link here.

VMware is one of the silver sponsors at Intel Vision 2022, we are located at Booth #800 at the Exhibition Floor where VMware SME’s will be presenting Booth Theatre sessions along with Demos and answering questions.

Wikipedia – Nicknamed the “Scarlet Speedster”, all incarnations of the Flash possess “super speed“, which includes the ability to run, move, and think extremely fast, use superhuman reflexes, and seemingly violate certain laws of physics.

This blog demonstrates how performance of Oracle Smart Flash Cache can be accelerated using Persistent Memory (PMEM) technology by using Intel Optane DC PMM in App Direct mode backed Oracle 21c Persistent Memory Filestore on VMware vSphere platform.

This blog is the 2^nd blog in this series of accelerating Oracle workloads using Intel Optane DC PMM in App Direct mode backed Oracle 21c Persistent Memory Filestore on VMware vSphere platform.

The 1^st blog of the series was Accelerate Oracle Redo performance using Intel Optane DC PMM backed Oracle 21c Persistent Memory Filestore on VMware vSphere

Yes, your Oracle workload is now truly a “Speed King”.

Pulling a rabbit out from a hat when you thought the magician had magically whisked him away forever to a far far away land – all of us have seen that.

What if we tell you data in memory persists across server reboots – that’s our rabbit magically reappearing every time the magician waves his magic wand and says ‘abracadabra’.

Enter Persistent Memory Technology where Persistent Memory (PMEM) resides between DRAM and disk storage in the data storage hierarchy. This  technology enables byte-addressable updates and does not lose data if power is lost.

PMEM is a byte-addressable form of computer memory that has the following characteristics:

• DRAM-like latency and bandwidth
• Regular load/store CPU instructions
• Paged/mapped by operating system just like DRAM
• Data is persistent across reboots

Business Critical Oracle databases would benefit from using  Persistent Memory technology to provide the resilience and SLA guarantee for critical workloads along with DRAM like latency and bandwidth.

This blog demonstrates how performance of Oracle Redo Logs can be accelerated using  Persistent Memory technology by using Intel Optane DC PMM in App Direct mode backed Oracle 21c Persistent Memory Filestore on VMware vSphere platform.

Yes, you can have your cake and eat it too !!