Oracle Workloads – Where Eagles Dare !!!

VMware has created separate best practice documents for compute, storage, networking, and performance. The latest guide can be found at Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere.

The BCA team (Sudhir Balasubramanian , Oleg Ulyanov and Deji Akomolafe) has undertaken a major overhaul of the Common BCA Best Practices in 2021.

The General BCA Best Practices guide released Nov , 2021 Architecting Business Critical Applications on VMware Hybrid Multi-Clouds provides best practice general guidelines for designing and implementing business-critical application (BCA) workloads on VMware vSphere platforms. The recommendations are not specific to a particular hardware set, nor to the size and scope of a particular BCA workload implementation.

The examples and considerations in this document provide guidance only and do not represent strict design requirements, as varying application requirements can result in many valid configuration possibilities.

The General BCA Best Practices guide Architecting Business Critical Applications on VMware Hybrid Multi-Clouds holds good for all General Best Practices for deploying any Applications on VMware vSphere platform.

In addition to the above General BCA Best Practices guide , the Oracle on VMware Best Practices guide has been revamped and released on November, 2021 by Sudhir Balasubramanian. It holds good for all versions of Oracle starting 11gR2 and all versions of VMware vSphere starting 5.x.

The Oracle on VMware Best Practices guide can be found at Architecting Oracle Workloads on VMware Hybrid Multi-Clouds BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

On December 15th , 2020 , there was recent changes made to the Oracle document  – “Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) Support on Third-Party Clouds – An Overview and Clarification – Revision 2020.06.14”.

“Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) Support on Third-Party Clouds – An Overview and Clarification – Revision 2020.06.14”.

The document My Oracle Support Note 2688277.1 “Oracle Database Support for Non-Oracle Public Cloud Environments”. is as below

As per the above Note  – “Oracle does not support Oracle RAC or Oracle RAC One Node running on Non-Oracle Public Cloud Environments”

Please reach out to your Oracle Representative for further clarification in this regard.

Customers have successfully run their business-critical Oracle workloads with high-performance demands on VMware vSphere for many years.

Common concerns that often delay virtualization of business-critical database workloads include:

• Rapid database growth and the need to reduce backup windows to meet performance and business SLAs
• The size of modern databases makes it harder to regularly clone and refresh data from production to QA and other environments
• Choosing the optimum business continuity plan to ensure rapid recovery from significant disruption to the operations
• Making the Correct choice of disaster recovery technology to ensure business needs of RTO and RPO are met

Solution

This paper describes the configuration and implementation of various business continuity and disaster recovery options (Native Oracle , SRM, vSphere Replication, Array based using VMFS/vVOLS, VSR , VCDR) across the application, VMware platform, and storage levels of Oracle single instance and Real Application Cluster (RAC) workloads on the VMware vSphere hybrid multi-cloud platform. This includes on-premises and VMware clouds, with an emphasis on VMware Cloud™ on AWS.

Deploying and managing an Oracle DB environment is not a trivial undertaking. Oracle infrastructure tends to have stringent performance, business continuity, and backup and recovery requirements. To support these requirements, IT departments often are tasked with maintaining sprawling infrastructure for production, disaster recovery, backup, quality assurance, test, training, development, and sandbox.

Enterprise customers have identified Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) as a key initiative that will enable higher levels of agility via rapid application development. The idea is to allow database consumers such as application developers, testers, and architects to provision databases easily using an on-demand, self-service platform.

DBaaS will greatly simplify the deployment and management of a robust Oracle environment, while delivering higher levels of efficiency and flexibility for IT departments throughout the application lifecycle—implementation, migrations, consolidations, upgrades, and ongoing maintenance , thus allowing DBA’s to focus on more important pressing issues – Moving away from DBA-as-a-Service to Database as a Service (DBaaS) model.

This blog focuses on VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) using Pure Storage and how vVols can greatly enhance DBaaS to provide higher levels of agility via rapid application development for both on-premises and the cloud for Oracle workloads on VMware Hybrid Platform.

In the world of Business-Critical Applications, especially IO intensive Oracle workloads, there is always a need for storage migration, based on the ever-demanding workload profile. For example,

• Migrate storage from one Tier to another Tier within a storage array
• Migrate storage from one array to another array (within a datacenter and even between datacenters as part of DC relocation)

This approach is independent of whether those workloads are virtualized or not. The end goal is to ensure that the underlying storage architecture can provide and sustain the demanding needs of the Application.

This article describes how storage migration can be performed for Oracle database running on VMware vSphere, for any types of underlying storage.  The migration is done using a combination of two key technologies depending on the database deployment model

• VMware Storage vMotion
• Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM).

Before describing this technique, we first review some key ideas, including the deployment model of Oracle on vSphere and the fundamentals of Storage vMotion.

This blog focuses on Storage vMotion of Oracle Non-RAC workloads within the same vSphere Cluster.

The previous blog On Demand Scaling up resources for Oracle production workloads – Hot Add CPU and Hot Add Memory focused on how to stop hoarding much needed infrastructure resources and live wisely ever after by scaling up as needed effectively.

This blog focuses on the Hot Remove CPU and Memory aspect of Oracle Workloads and the current limitations associated with these technologies.

Join us at VMworld 2021 to learn how Business Critical Apps benefit from our latest platforms  

VMworld 2021 will be a global online event starting October 5-7, 2021, While the program will be adapted to fit the new digital format, VMworld will still be the place to learn about innovative new technology solutions, hear perspectives from VMware executives, dive into educational and technical content, and engage with experts across the industry ecosystem.

At VMworld 2021 you can immerse yourself in learning about Workload/Business Critical Applications (BCA) with a rich line up of Breakout Sessions, Expert Round tables and Demos.  Discover how fast and efficient it is to expand to a hybrid cloud to offer flexibility across many workloads diverse as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence featured in the session lineup.

Checkout the must-see sessions, expert round tables and demos below for Workloads/BCA:

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Breakout Sessions
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Oracle

• MCL1089 Streamlining Oracle Workloads from On Premises to the VMware Hybrid Multi-Clouds

Microsoft

• 1318 – Virtualizing Microsoft SQL Server on vSphere – Stories from the Trenches
• 1198 – Virtualizing Active Directory – Doing it Right!

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Expert Round tables
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Oracle

• MCL1144 Architecting Oracle Workloads on VMware Hybrid Cloud with Best Practices

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vBrownbag
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Oracle

• Streamlining Oracle Workloads from on-premises to the VMware Hybrid Cloud
• Accelerating Oracle workloads on VMware Hybrid Clouds

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Demos
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The previous blog No downtime Storage vMotion of Oracle RAC Cluster using shared vmdk’s with multi-writer attribute from one vSAN to another vSAN Cluster using VMware HCI Mesh demonstrated how we can achieve Storage vMotion of Oracle RAC Cluster using shared vmdk’s with multi-writer attribute ONLINE , with NO downtime, from one vSAN to another vSAN Cluster using VMware HCI Mesh.

The previous blog also touched on briefly a very important use case for Oracle workloads on any architecture, Oracle Licensing.

With vSAN HCI Mesh introduced in vSAN 7 Update 1 capability, one could seamlessly and transparently

• move Oracle compute into smaller density (Physical sockets / cores) servers in a different vSAN cluster, thereby significantly reducing their Oracle Licensing costs
• move the Storage for Oracle workloads into a different vSAN cluster, if needed, where excess storage capacity is available

With vSAN 7 Update 2, VMware introduces a significant new capability to vSAN HCI Mesh where traditional vSphere clusters can now mount a remote vSAN datastore.

Yes, we have a winner

This blog demonstrates how we can provision separate Compute and Storage resources for Oracle workloads on vSAN 7 Update 2 Cluster, disaggregating Compute and Storage, with Compute on traditional vSphere Clusters / vSAN Clusters and Storage on vSAN Storage , with a focus on reducing Oracle licensing using HCI Mesh Compute Clusters.