Oracle on VMware Cloud on AWS – Custom CPU Core Count

Posted on February 19, 2019 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

Oracle on VMware Cloud on AWS – Custom CPU Core Count

VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables customers to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this service integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with VMware vCenter management, and is optimized to run on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. ESXi hosts in VMware Cloud on AWS reside in an AWS availability Zone (AZ) and are protected by vSphere HA.

The use case for deploying VMware Cloud on AWS are multi-fold namely

  • Data Center Extension & DR
  • Cloud Migration
  • Application modernization & Next-Generation Apps build out

The following topics are covered in this blog post in the following order –

  • VMware Cloud on AWS –Initial availability model
  • Brand New Feature – Custom CPU Core Count – February 12th, 2019 (SDDC Version 1.6)
  • Important considerations regarding Custom CPU Core Count capability
  • Oracle Licensing Considerations with ‘Custom CPU Core Count’ feature
  • Understanding Oracle Licensing on the VMware Cloud on AWS with ‘Custom CPU Core Count’
  • Understanding Oracle Licensing on the VMware Cloud on AWS

Key Points to take away from this blog

As has been very well documented in the previous blog post , Oracle licensing is not based on Memory, Storage, Cluster, vCenter or Network.  It is either User-based (Named User Plus) or Processor-based (Socket-based in case of Standard Edition 2 (SE2) or core-based in case of Enterprise Edition (EE) ).

There are only 3 documents which are relevant for any Oracle licensing discussion and contract:

The OLSA/OMA states “Processor: shall be defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running.”

Oracle licensing does not change from a licensing perspective, whether you run Oracle workloads on a classic vSphere environment, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution like vSAN, or VMware Cloud on AWS.

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Oracle Java SE 8 Support Update – What it means to VMware customers

Posted on December 8, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

Introduction

This blog attempts to address the concerns around the recent Java SE 8 public updates and what it means to VMware customers who use Java in their environment.

The below content is a collection of updates from Oracle Corporation which has been accumulated and posted in this blog for ease of reading for the viewers.

Oracle has announced that, effective January 2019, Java SE 8 public updates will no longer be available for “Business, Commercial or Production use” without a commercial license.

VMware has a commercial license and support agreement with Oracle for Java SE for Embedded Use and our commercial license allows for distribution until November 4, 2022.

What this means is

  • For any VMware product , which is part of the VMware suite of products and which the customer is licensed to use by VMware, if that VMware product has a Java component/s ie if that VMware product has Java bundled with it as a product , VMware’s commercial license agreement till Nov 4, 2022 will cover all VMware core products including Java.
  • For any non-VMware product , whether its a custom Java application deployed in a Guest VM or a 3rd part non-VMware product , both not part of the VMware suite of products, having a Java component/s, responsibility of licensing that Java component/s is ON the Customer. This change in licensing policy is a solely and wholly because of the fallout of the changes in Oracle Java licensing rules
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Oracle and vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM) – Oracle Instance Recovery – An Investigation

Posted on November 23, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

Introduction to VMware Persistent Memory (PMEM)

 

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.

Instead of having nonvolatile storage at the bottom with the largest capacity but the slowest performance, nonvolatile storage is now very close to DRAM in terms of performance.

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

More information about Persistent Memory (PMEM)  and how vSphere 6.7 can take advantage of PMEM technology to accelerate IO-intensive Oracle workloads can be found here.

The Accelerating Oracle Performance using vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM) paper examines the performance of Oracle databases using VMware vSphere 6.7 Persistent Memory feature in different modes for below uses cases for

  • Improved performance of Oracle Redo Log using vPMEM Disk-backed vmdks/vPMEM disks in DAX mode
  • Accelerating Performance using Oracle Smart Flash Cache
  • Potential reduction in Oracle Licensing

In the blog article Oracle and vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM) – vPMEM v/s vPMEMDisk ,  we demonstrate the performance improvement in Redo log activity when redo log files are placed on vPMEM Disk-backed vmdks/vPMEM disks in DAX mode over redo logs on vPMEMDisk backed vmdks.

 

 

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Accelerating Oracle workloads with vSphere 6.7 Guest 1GB Huge Pages – An Investigation

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

Introduction to Linux Huge Pages

 

  

 

Much has been written and spoken about Linux Huge Page feature.

The Red Hat Documentation explains about the performance benefits of using Huge Pages.

Essentially , Memory is managed in blocks known as pages. CPUs have a built-in memory management unit (MMU) that contains a list of these pages, with each page referenced through a page table entry.

To manage large amounts of memory , we need to either

  • increase the number of page table entries in the MMU OR
  • increase the page size.

The first option is very expensive and results in slow performance as owning to lack of huge page support, the system falls back to slower, software-based memory management, which causes the entire system to run more slowly.

Also reading address mappings from the page table is time-consuming and resource-expensive, so CPUs are built with a cache for recently-used addresses: the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB). However, the default TLB can only cache a certain number of address mappings. If a requested address mapping is not in the TLB (that is, the TLB is missed), the system still needs to read the page table to determine the physical to virtual address mapping.

Because of the relationship between application memory requirements and the size of pages used to cache address mappings, applications with large memory requirements are more likely to suffer performance degradation from TLB misses than applications with minimal memory requirements. It is therefore important to avoid TLB misses wherever possible.

The second method is the Linux 2.6 onwards implementation of what is called Huge Pages. Enabling HugePages makes it possible to support memory pages greater than the default (usually 4 KB).  The Huge page support is built on top of multiple page size support that is provided by most modern architectures.  For example, x86 CPUs normally support 4K and 2M (1G if architecturally supported) page sizes, ia64 architecture supports multiple page sizes 4K, 8K, 64K, 256K, 1M, 4M, 16M,256M and ppc64 supports 4K and 16M.

More information on this can be found at ‘RHEL 7 Memory’ , ‘HugeTLBPage’ and ‘Page table’.

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Oracle RAC on Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS – Anti-Affinity within AZ & HA across AZs

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

Introduction

 

As mentioned in the earlier post , VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables customers to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services.

Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this service integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with VMware vCenter management, and is optimized to run on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. ESXi hosts in VMware Cloud on AWS reside in an AWS availability Zone (AZ) and are protected by vSphere HA.

The paper Migrating Oracle Workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS describes the deployment, migration options along with best practices when migrating Oracle Standalone and Oracle RAC on VMware on-premises (vSphere with traditional Storage or VMware HCI vSAN ) to Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS using the approach below

  • Validate functionality of current on-premise RAC setup
  • Migrate DR RAC ‘prddg’ from on-premise Site B to Stretched Cluster for VMware Cloud on AWS
  • Take advantage of the Stretched Cluster for VMware Cloud on AWS using the multi-AZ functionality by
    • Adding new nodes to the migrated DR RAC ‘prddg’
    • Create new Oracle RAC ‘vmcrac’

This post focuses on to effectively provide Site level HA along with Infrastructure level HA to an Oracle RAC on Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS using vSphere Tags and Attributes.

 

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Oracle Database on all-flash vSAN 6.7 Reference Architecture

Posted on October 25, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian
Customers deploying Oracle Database have requirements such as stringent SLAs, consistent performance, and high availability. It can be a major challenge for organizations to manage data storage in these environments due to these demanding business requirements. Common issues in using traditional storage solutions for business-critical applications include inability to easily scale-up and scale-out, storage inefficiency, complex management, high deployment, and operating costs.VMware®vSAN™ has been widely adopted as an Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution providing a scalable, resilient, and high-performance storage using cost-effective hardware, specifically direct-attached disks in VMware ESXi™hosts. vSAN uses storage policy-based management, which simplifies and automates complex management workflows that exist in traditional enterprise storage systems with respect to configuration and clustering.

To show the continued improvement in VMware vSAN software, we have developed this reference architecture document to demonstrate the consistent application experience by improved Oracle workload performance, scalability, and resynchronization performance.

 

This solution addresses the common business challenges that organizations face today in an online transaction processing (OLTP) environment that requires predictable performance. The solution helps customers design and implement optimal configurations specifically for Oracle Database on all-flash vSAN 6.7.

This Reference Architecture can be found here.

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Oracle and vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM) – vPMEM v/s vPMEMDisk

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

In the previous blog post Accelerating Oracle Performance using vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM)  , we demonstrated how performance of Oracle databases can be improved using VMware vSphere 6.7 Persistent Memory feature in different modes for the uses cases below

  • Improved performance of Oracle Redo Log using vPMEM Disk-backed vmdks/vPMEM disks in DAX mode
  • Accelerating Performance using Oracle Smart Flash Cache
  • Potential reduction in Oracle Licensing

In this blog, we demonstrate the performance improvement in using vPMEM over vPMEMDisk

The additional use case below shows performance improvement in Redo log activity when redo log files are placed on vPMEM Disk-backed vmdks/vPMEM disks in DAX mode over redo logs on vPMEMDisk backed vmdks.

 

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Oracle on Amazon RDS on VMware – Licensing options

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

Introduction to Amazon RDS on VMware

During VMworld 2018 US, VMware and Amazon announced Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on VMware.

Amazon RDS on VMware is a service that will make it easy for customers to set up, operate, and scale databases in VMware-based software-defined data centers and Hybrid environments and to migrate them to AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS.

AWS RDS on VMware automates database provisioning, operating system and database patching, backup, point-in-time restore, storage and compute scaling, instance health monitoring, and failover.

RDS for VMware can also be used to enable low-cost, high-availability hybrid deployments, database disaster recovery to AWS, read replica bursting to Amazon RDS, and long-term database archival in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Amazon RDS on VMware will be generally available soon and will support Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB databases.

More information  can be found here.

Key Points to take away from this blog

Oracle licensing does not change, whether you run Oracle workloads on a classic vSphere environment, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution like vSAN, or VMware Cloud on AWS.

Understanding Oracle Licensing on VMware vSphere / vSAN environments

As has been well documented, Oracle licensing is not based on Memory, Storage, Cluster, vCenter or Network.  It is either

  • User-based (Named User Plus)
  • Processor-based (Socket-based in case of Standard Edition 2 (SE2)
  • Core-based in case of Enterprise Edition (EE)

There are only 3 documents which are relevant for any Oracle licensing discussion and contract:

As per the OLSA/OMA , “Processor: shall be defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running.”

The position of House of Bricks (HoB) (and the Crowell & Moring lawyers) is these 3 above documents are the only relevant documents, and that Oracle’s efforts to introduce unilaterally , any other elements to the overall contract are not binding. However, VMware is not in a position to give legal advice to customers about their contractual relationship with Oracle.

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Oracle Workloads and VMware Cloud on AWS: Deployment, Migration, and Configuration

Posted on September 2, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

Customers deploying Oracle workloads have requirements such as stringent SLAs, continued high performance, and application availability. It is a major challenge for business organizations to manage data storage in these environments due to these rigorous business requirement.

Common issues presented when using traditional storage solutions for business-critical application (BCA) include inadequate performance, scale-in/scale-out, storage inefficiency, complex management, and high deployment and operating costs.

With more and more production servers being virtualized, the demand for highly converged server-based storage is surging. VMware Virtual SAN aims at providing a highly scalable, available, reliable, and high-performance storage using cost-effective hardware, specifically direct-attached disks in VMware ESXi hosts. Virtual SAN adheres to a new policy-based storage management paradigm, which simplifies and automates complex management workflows that exist in traditional enterprise storage systems with respect to configuration and clustering.

Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster enables active/active data centers that are separated by metro distance.

VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables customers to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this service integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with VMware vCenter management, and is optimized to run on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. ESXi hosts in VMware Cloud on AWS reside in an AWS availability Zone (AZ) and are protected by vSphere HA.

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Accelerating Oracle Performance using vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM)

Posted on September 1, 2018 by Sudhir Balasubramanian

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

Deploying IO-intensive Oracle workloads requires fast storage performance with low latency and resiliency from database failures. Latency, which is a measurement of response time, directly impacts a technology’s ability to deliver faster performance for business-critical applications.

There has been a disruptive paradigm shift in data storage called Persistent Memory (PMEM) that resides between DRAM and disk storage in the data storage hierarchy.

More information about Persistent Memory (PMEM)  and how vSphere 6.7 can take advantage of PMEM technology to accelerate IO-intensive Oracle workloads can be found here.

 

Accelerating Oracle Performance using vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM) – Reference Architecture

 

The Accelerating Oracle Performance using vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM) paper examines the performance of Oracle databases using VMware vSphere 6.7 Persistent Memory feature in different modes for redo log-enhanced performance, accelerating flash cache performance and a possibility of reducing Oracle licenses.

 

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