Architecting Oracle Workloads on VMware Technologies 

On a mission to arm yourself with the latest knowledge and skills needed to master virtualizing Oracle on VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) along with moving workloads to the VMware Cloud on AWS ?

VMworld Customer bootcamps can get you in shape to lead the virtualization charge in your organization, with Instructor-led demos and In-depth course work designed to put you in the ranks of the IT elite.

Oracle on vSphere
The Oracle on VMware SDDC Bootcamp will provide the attendee the opportunity to learn the essential skills necessary to run Oracle implementations on VMware SDDC with a well defined journey to running the same Oracle workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS.

The best practices and optimal approaches to deployment, operation and management of Oracle database and application software will be presented by VMware expert Sudhir Balasubramanian , Oracle Practice lead, who will be joined by other VMware and Industry Experts.

This technical workshop will exceed the standard breakout session format by delivering “real-life,” instructor-led, live training and incorporating the recommended design and configuration practices for architecting Business Critical Databases on VMware SDDC  infrastructure and VMware Cloud on AWS.

Subjects such as running Oracle workloads e.g Single Instance / Real Applications Clusters (RAC) using Automatic Storage Management (ASM) on vSphere 6.7 with all the new features like Para Virtualized RDMA , Persistent Memory etc , HCI vSAN , VAIO , VVOL, NSX etc as well as running Oracle workloads on VMware Cloud on AWS will be covered in depth.

Learn More

https://www.vmworld.com/en/us/learning/sessions.html#workshops

https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld18us/uscatalog?search=&search.sessiontype=1519781576201001xNZQ

Details

Cost: $800 / seat

Schedule:
Sunday August 26, 2018
8:00am to 5:00pm
(registration opens at 6:30am)

Location:
Mandalay Bay, South Convention Centre
Level 2 , Room Number (will be posted as soon as it is made available)

Registration

Be sure to add the Bootcamp in step 4 of your VMworld conference registration, under Educational Offerings, after you’ve selected your conferences pass.

Registration is open, seating is limited! Lunch and breaks provided.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

vSphere 6.7 introduces new storage and networking features which have a major impact on the performance of  Enterprise Applications – these include support for Persistent Memory (PMEM) and enhanced support for Remote Directory Memory Access (RDMA).

Persistent Memory (PMEM)

With vSphere Persistent Memory (PMEM) , customers using supported hardware servers, can get the benefits of ultra-high-speed storage at a price point closer to DRAM-like speeds at flash-like prices.

The following diagram shows the convergence of memory and storage.

Technology at the top of the pyramid (comprised of DRAM and the CPU cache and registers) have the shortest latency (best performance) but this comes at a higher cost relative to the items at the bottom of the pyramid.    All of these components are accessed directly by the application – also known as load/storage access.

Technology at the bottom of the pyramid – represented by Magnetic media (HDDs and tape) and NAND flash (represented by SSDs and PCIe Workload Accelerators) have longer latency and lower costs relative to the technology at the top of the pyramid.  These technology components have block access meaning data is typically communicated in blocks of data and the applications are not accessed directly.

PMEM is a new layer called Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) and sits between NAND flash and DRAM, providing faster performance relative to NAND flash but also providing the non-volatility not typically found in traditional memory offerings.  This technology layer provides the performance of memory with the persistence of traditional storage.

Enterprise Applications can be deployed in virtual machines which are exposed to PMEM datastores.  PMEM datastores are created from NVM storage attached locally to each server. Performance benefits can then be attained as follows:

• vSphere can allocate piece of the PMEM datastore and present it to the virtual machine as a disk -virtual persistent memory disk which is used as an ultra-fast disk. In this mode no guest-OS or application change is required.
• vSphere can allocate a piece of the PMEM datastore in a server and present it to a virtual machine as a virtual NVDIMM. This type of virtual device exposes a byte addressable persistent memory to the virtual machine.
  • Virtual NVDIMM is compatible with latest Guest Operating Systems which support persistent memory. Applications do not change and experience faster file access as the modified OS filesystem bypasses the buffer cache.
  • Applications can be modified to take advantage of PMEM and experience the highest increase in performance via direct and uninterrupted access to hardware.

Applications deployed on PMEM backed datastores can benefit from live migration (VMware vMotion) and VMware DRS – this is not possible with PMEM in physical deployments.

Remote Directory Memory Access (RDMA)

vSphere 6.7 introduces new protocol support for Remote Direct memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet, or RoCE (pronounced “rocky”) v2, a new software Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapter, and iSCSI Extension for RDMA (iSER). These features enable customers to integrate with even more high-performance storage systems providing more flexibility to use the hardware that best compliments their workloads.

RDMA support is enhanced with vSphere 6.7 to bring even more performance to enterprise workloads by leveraging kernel and OS bypass reducing latency and dependencies.  This is illustrated in the diagram below.

When virtual machines are configured with RDMA in a pass thru mode, the workload is basically tied to a physical host with no DRS capability i.e. no ability to vMotion. However customers who want to harness the power vMotion and DRS and still experience the benefits of RDMA , albeit at a  very small performance penalty can do so – with para virtualized RDMA software (PVRDMA). With PVRDMA, applications can run even in the absence of an Host Channel Adapter (HCA) card.  RDMA-based applications can be run in ESXi guests while ensuring virtual machines can be live migrated.

Use cases for this technology include distributed databases, financial applications, and Big Data.

This blog was also posted here.

More on vSphere 6.7 New features can be found here .

All Oracle on vSphere white papers including Oracle licensing on vSphere/vSAN, Oracle best practices, RAC deployment guides, workload characterization guide can be found at Oracle on VMware Collateral – One Stop Shop

This blog was authored by Sudhir Balasubramanian and Vas Mitra.

“We have nothing to fear but …”. famous words of Chief Vitalstatistix , chief of the famous Gaulish village in the famous Asterix & Obelix series.

Legend goes when the Gallic chieftains were asked by Alexander the Great what they were most afraid of in all the world, they replied that their worst fear was that the “sky might fall on their heads”.

In today’s world, the “sky” aka Cloud is the platform for bursting and sustaining application workloads with Cloud service providers offering network services, infrastructure, or business applications in the cloud, thereby helping with kicking off new projects or helping meet business needs for temporary, seasonal, or unplanned demand.

More information about it can be found here.

“To beat (something) to boredom” – To linger over or discuss something so long and to such a tedious and laborious extent that the subject is no longer of any interest or relevance and induces a bad migraine!!!

Yes, much has been written and spoken about and VMware Snapshots and Independent Persistent disks but I still get questions from customers and field regarding that, so yes, this is yet another blog to attempt to explain this in detail.

Key points to take away from this blog

Given a VM’s with non-shared dependent  and non-shared independent-persistent vmdk’s, taking a VMware snapshot will result in

• VMware snapshot for dependent vmdk’s
• VMware snapshot operation will ignore the independent-persistent vmdk’s

More information about it can be found here.

“Around the World in Eighty Days” – A classic adventure novel and one of Jules Verne’s most acclaimed works which describes how Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a wager.

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 and between datacenters)

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, VMware Storage vMotion and Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) depending on the database deployment model.

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

More information about it can be found here.

Storage – the final frontier. These are the voyages of any Business Critical Oracle database, its endless mission: to meet the business SLA, to sustain increasing workload demands and seek out new challenges, to boldly go where no database has gone before.

Storage is one of the most important aspect of any IO intensive workloads, Oracle workloads typically fit this bill and we all know how a mis-configured Storage or incorrect tuning often leads to database performance issues, irrespective of any architecture where the database is hosted on.

As part of my pre-sales Oracle Specialist role where I talk to Customers , Partners and VMware field, I always bring up the fact how we can go and procure ourselves the biggest and baddest piece of infrastructure on this face of earth and all it takes is one incorrect setting or mis-configuration and  everything goes to “Hell in a Handbasket”.

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