Skip to main content

Oracle RAC on VMware ESX 3.0.1 Server for production?



Why not! I am looking for folks who are willing to talk about their experiences about Oracle RAC with VMware. Do you think you are ready to run your RAC on ESX in production? Have you tried it? Do you as a manager and DBA (both, if you're lucky!) wonder why you didn't have that similar Staging, Test and Development environment? Sure you have that environment if you are a massive enterprise but do you want to quadruple your TCO?

Can you imagine that you can reduce your TCO hugely by getting a little creative? You could also do that on a typical 4 CPU quad core Machine with some extra space for SAN and there you go, you have your 4-way RAC (Test, Development, Staging and well someday Production too! You have sen me talking about a Virtualized Globally Deliverable RAC. I have even spoken about it on my video on Google Video sometime back.

Imagine if you have it in your development , staging or even in production? Then you are the dude! Yes, we know Oracle still does not support RAC in production. We also know that there are those cheeky time issue that may be a bit of a pain with cache fusion and coherency.

But anyways I have run a test Oracle RAC on ESX Server 2.5.3 on production. You have already noticed my series on VMware's GSX Server or VMware Server. I also have had my 2 way (vCPU) 4-node RAC on ESX 2.5.3. I am trying to find some time to do a 4-way (vCPU) 4- node RAC on ESX 3.0.1. Obviously what I really would want is :

  • That I have my VMFS3's on SAN
  • 2 ESX Servers 4 dual-core CPUs. (Honestly Intel or AMD, It shouldn't matter, until obviously you say that RAC would perform better on one of them!)
  • 32 GB RAM per box
  • Gigabit Network Cards
  • All redundant controllers, fans, power units etc
These should give me the opportunity to build 4 4-way smp nodes (8G per node) and then we can put these beasts under solid performance test. This could be a perfect business case for any DBA or Service & Delivery manager to their bosses. Start with a test and development environment and then graduate to a staging environment. I am pretty sure when the proverbial FUD is gone, you'll too be wanting to have this in your production.

Any IT shop with a RACs should be testing this already.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

Splunk that!

Saw this advert on Slashdot and went on to look for it and found the tour pretty neat to look at. Check out the demo too! So why would I need it? WHY NOT? I'd say. As an organization grows , new services, new data comes by, new logs start accumulating on the servers and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at all those logs, leave alone that you'd have time to read them and who cares about analysis as the time to look for those log files already makes your day, isn't it? Well a solution like this is a cool option to have your sysadmins/operators look at ONE PLACE and thus you don't have your administrators lurking around in your physical servers and *accidentally* messing up things there. Go ahead and give it a shot by downloading it and testing it. I'll give it a shot myself! Ok so I went ahead and installed it. Do this... [root@tarrydev Software]# ./splunk-Server-1.0.1-linux-installer.bin to install and this (if you screw up) [root@tarrydev Software]# /op
Post a Comment
Read more

Virtualization is hot and sexy!

If this does not convince you to virtualize, believe me, nothing will :-) As you will hear these gorgeous women mention VMware, Akkori, Pano Logic, Microsoft and VKernel. They forgot to mention rackspace ;-) virtualization girl video I'm convinced, aren't you? Check out their site as well!
Post a Comment
Read more