Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Nice article this. Ideally Extended RAC should be implemented using real hardware to achieve better performance, but since this architecture is for research and training purposes only, this compromise is acceptable. Oracle VM Server requires only a single computer, but for installing Oracle VM Manager—a simple Web console for managing virtualized systems—we will need another PC. As of this writing, Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is still the preferred storage choice; however, Oracle introduced support for NFS shared storage for datafiles in Oracle Database 11g along with performance enhancements like Oracle Direct NFS. Due to the nature of this installation we will stick with the simpler iSCSI approach as our storage option to keep the real-world FCP concept intact. Note that in an Extended RAC scenario, you must put a third voting disk in a location other than dcA and dcB to achieve a completely fault-tolerant architecture. Note that the disk mirroring configuration in this guide is in...

Oracle is teaming with Intel to accelerate enterprise adoption of cloud computing. News of the partnership came at the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 conference in San Francisco. The idea is to make enterprise cloud computing more secure and efficient and to drive the development of standards that enable flexible deployment across public and private clouds. In particular, Oracle and Intel pledged to collaborate with each other as well as other vendors to expand standards that enable portability of virtual machine images, such as the Open Virtual Machine Format. They also plan to help create Web services standards for provisioning and management of cloud-based services. Cloud computing has become a reoccurring theme at the conference. On Monday, Oracle announced it will allow customers to license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Fusion Middleware to run on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to both companies, enterprises are already running a...

SAN FRANCISCO -- X has arrived and it's an appliance. Hyped and kept under wraps for months and promoted here with banners proclaiming, "The X is coming," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled his company's foray into hardware during a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld. The result of three years of development with HP, Oracle revealed the Exadata product line, which includes the HP Oracle Database machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers. "We really need much more performance out of our databases than we currently get," Ellison said. "Information is proliferating at an astonishingly high rate. The disk storage system available today simply cannot cope with data that has to move. Large databases are tripling in size every two to three years. That creates a fundamental problem. They can't move that data off the disks fast enough." The result is a "data bandwidth problem" moving data between the storage arrays and database servers. The answer...

All the fat cash cows that have bee fetching billions of dollars annually such as Oracle RDBMS, Office apps etc will have to make way to the light-weight apps and dbs. Small footprint VMs, all containarized and secured. Transactional VMs , maybe that's what we'll call them someday inthe clouds. One thing you won't find underlying a cloud computing initiative is a relational database. And this is no accident: Relational databases are ill-suited for use within cloud computing environments, argued Geir Magnusson, vice president of engineering at 10Gen, an on-demand platform servicer provider. Magnusson, who also helped write the Apache Geronimo application server software, spoke at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference, being held this week in New York. "Cloud computing is different kind of technology,” he said. “It is different enough it will change how we do things as developers. We will have to re-examine how we build things.” During his talk, Magnusson listed a number o...

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 22, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- Oracle OpenWorld -- News Facts -- To help customers benefit from the economies of Cloud Computing, Oracle today announced that customers can license Oracle(R) Database 11g ( http://www.oracle.com/database/index.html), Oracle Fusion ( http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/index.html) Middleware ( http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/index.html) and Oracle Enterprise Manager ( http://www.oracle.com/enterprise_manager/index.html) to run in a cloud computing environment. The first products will be available for Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011) environment. Customers can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees. -- Enabling customers to deploy Oracle solutions on Amazon EC2 quickly ...

VMware's executive vice president of research and development has quit the company and taken a job at Oracle , VMware said Tuesday. Richard Sarwal, a longtime Oracle veteran, did not stay at VMware long, having joined the company in December 2007. Source

Oracle CEO and multi-billionaire technology investor Larry Ellison has dismissed the software-as-a-service industry as unprofitable. Although his company made money from its on-demand applications business for the first time in its fourth financial quarter, Ellison said that the model had yet to become the profit driver that many had predicted. “We continue to get better at it and grow the business,” he said in an earnings call yesterday. “[But] it’s not really growing any faster than our overall business.” “We think that’s going to change over time,” he continued. “But the entire on-demand industry has to get better at making money in selling on-demand software.” He pointed to the example of Salesforce.com, the on-demand CRM provider founded by a former Oracle executive, in which Ellison has a significant investment. “If you look at the leader, Salesforce.com, they don’t make very much money and they’ve been at it for almost 10 years,” he said. More here

The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF(R)), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced the addition of three new companies to its board of directors. Oracle, VMware and CA step up to the board level - joining industry heavyweights AMD, Broadcom, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, Ltd., IBM, Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Symantec Corporation - to help drive the overall direction, strategy and activity of DMTF. These three new board members join DMTF to collaborate with other industry-leading companies on systems management-specification development, validation, promotion and industry-wide adoption. Together the board of directors will collaborate to set cross-industry priorities, promote interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments, foster alliance partnerships, and lead the organization's committee work. Link

LiveSync Peer-To-Peer storage technology enables Enterprise Grade features such as High Availability Backup VM Server with Automatic Failover and Live Migration. The EnSpeed LiveSync technology is also compatible with other standard Linux distributions such as RedHat 5.1 and CentOS 5.1. LiveSync is also included in EnSpeed VMM with LiveSync, stand-alone VM Server software that installs on bare metal. In addition, Thinsy Corporation also announced the availability of a new version of EnSpeed VM Orchestrator, their VM Management Server that provides an intuitive web browser GUI for managing LiveSync VM Servers. This new version of EnSpeed VM Orchestrator has been enhanced with support for Cloned VMs and full SSL secured connections. For additional information on EnSpeed VMM with LiveSync, please visit http://www.thinsy.com/ . Free downloads of the fully functional LiveSync rpm for Oracle VM Server 2.1.1 and RedHat 5.1, EnSpeed VMM with LiveSync, and EnSpeed VM Orchestrator are availabl...

And it also turned out into a "cat" and "tortoise" fight ;-) Mr Ellison has been characteristically dismissive. He recently compared the company to Netscape, and predicted that Microsoft would quickly eclipse it as it did the browser pioneer. For good measure, he added that the base layer of software on which virtualisation depends, called a hypervisor, was so simple that his cat could write it. Ms Greene’s tart response, delivered during an interview with the Financial Times at VMware’s Silicon Valley headquarters: “If his very smart cat could write it, my very smart tortoise could write his database.” I am thinking of making a cool cartoon of this one (giggle's evilly). But seriously, industry leaders are taking a huge notice to this and you know what that means. Yea, my mother-of-all prediction is coming. I'll share it on the ITtoolbox blogs tonight. For now, here'as the FT post.

Oracle's press release here: So we are now entering the pre-Virtualization 3.0 phase. I had , sort of , expected VMware to go for BEA but for now we'll see who VMware will see worthy of the middleware market. I'm sure it'll be yet again some cool, thin, flat and with a smaller footprint middleware shop. Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire all outstanding shares of BEA for $19.375 per share in cash. The offer is valued at approximately $8.5 billion, or $7.2 billion net of BEA's cash on hand of $1.3 billion. "We expect this deal to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 1-2 cents on a non-GAAP basis in its first full year after closing," said Oracle President and Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz. "The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle's Fusion middleware software su...

So what will VMware release to get this up again? Q4 results coming soon and should they be any less than expected (I'm sure the investors are expecting more than ever) may be yet another blow to the NYSE run. But do also note the markets are terribly volatile and not to forget that competition from Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's XenServer, Sun's xVM, Oracle's VM, Virtual Iron etc is getting hotter in 2008. Microsoft has 8 Million customers and they all will get the Hyper-V in their shops on CD/DVDs. Here the live coverage at Google Finance. , Link Graph here

So what is this TES? Tidal Software offers the easiest-to-use enterprise job scheduler – Tidal Enterprise Scheduler™ - for completely automating even the most complex batch processing across the complete enterprise. Customers consistently cite Tidal’s enterprise job scheduling software’s ease-of-use, support for complex heterogeneous environments and flexibility as reasons for selecting Tidal. Tidal's job scheduling software has dramatically improved the performance of a wide range of systems for customers such as: order management, business intelligence, customer reporting, and more. Tidal Software, a leading provider of application scheduling and performance management software, today announced the availability of Tidal Enterprise Scheduler 5.3.1. The release extends the 5.3 version of this popular job scheduler with support for the latest versions of enterprise systems and applications from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and VMWare. Support for these latest versions further simplifies ...

I spoke to some of my Oracle buddies and were able to get Oracle to the event. Special thanks to my Oracle SaaS contact there ;-) Get registered now and/or if you want to sponsor, please contact us and we'll see if we can find a place for you on the program. Hurry as time is running out!

Hardware virtualization is not new. Chip makers are struggling hard to make it a reality. It will become a reality. Today virtualization vendors are dancing to the tunes of market developments and community needs. "Do we given them para-virtualization?", "do we keep going strong with full virtualization?'. Questions that plague not only market leader today such as VMware but also the competitors. Oracle and Sun have spoken about it in the past as well. Sun was right when it said: "The Network is the computer" and when I looked up (on FindArticles, a good place BTW to look for the "future", if you know what I mean) for some information about a Os-less application stack, I came across Oracle's "RAW Iron" project. Quoting this older news from 1998: By picking his Nov. 16 keynote speech to unveil the Raw Iron project, Ellison timed the announcement for the same day as Microsoft's heavily promoted launch of SQL Server 7.0, a major up...

Mark thinks so. With Oracle's announcement of the VM and its own virtualization strategy, many doors to exixting and new (untracked) customers may open. So what is Oracle's strategy? The Oracle VM is free to download and use; those wanting support will have to sign up for a paid plan. But Oracle says that its virtualization solution is still cheaper than Red Hat’s. RHEL supports some virtualization (at no extra cost), but full-blown implementation requires an additional product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. The Red Hat solution calls for Red Hat-certified products from third parties, but an Oracle VM will run only Oracle databases, middleware and applications. By releasing its own VM, Oracle avoids third-party complications (such as software dependencies and support finger-pointing) and third-party payments. It also ends up controlling the software stack from top to bottom, including virtualization. One can presumably find Oracle VM customers among the 1,500 tha...

"Oracle has not certified any Oracle software on VMware virtualized environments," the company said in a statement. Thus, "Oracle support will assist customers running Oracle software on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS without virtualization, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running VMware. If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS without virtualization. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for support." In other words, customers can expect Oracle's help only if they can prove that a bug is totally unrelated to the virtualization platform they are using. Link

Shreck predicted that non-Oracle sites will continue to turn to established virtualization technology from companies such as VMware, Microsoft Corp. or Citrix Systems Inc. Oracle, he said, lacks the systems management capabilities and independent software vendor partner relationships needed to create a virtualization platform for the masses. “I don’t think Oracle can keep up” with the virtualization capabilities of market leader VMware, or even Microsoft and Citrix, Shreck added. Oracle’s decision not to support its own software running on the virtualization servers of other vendors may give it an advantage in its installed base, users noted. But people should not forget this, Oracle doesn't care about "generic" virtualization, they are concerned about their own Oracle RAC and Grid project. This is giving Oracle a platform to build its grid upon, obviously they should tie-up with VMware, Citrix and other vendors, but you never know, maybe they have something we still have...

Go and see for yourself. These ones are all pre-baked! Oracle VM Template ================== The following Oracle VM templates are available: Template Kernel vcpu RAM Storage ------------------------- ------------------------- ---- --- ------- OVM_EL4U5_X86_HVM_10GB 2.6.9-55.0.12.100.1.ELsmp 2 2GB 10GB OVM_EL4U5_X86_64_HVM_10GB 2.6.9-55.0.12.100.1.ELsmp 2 2GB 10GB OVM_EL4U5_X86_HVM_4GB 2.6.9-55.0.12.100.1.ELsmp 1 1GB 4GB OVM_EL4U5_X86_64_HVM_4GB 2.6.9-55.0.12.100.1.ELsmp 1 1GB 4GB

This one things thinks ( just hate those typos when the mind is running faster than those clumsy fingers..where is my AI Assistant, right now good friend Kris is burdened with the spell-check thing!) yes in the long run. It's still early days for Oracle VM, however, with demand for virtualizing enterprise applications just ramping up, Wolf said. And on the management front at least, there are several efforts afoot to create parity between Xen-based platforms and ESX. Wolf cites standards efforts from the Distributed Management Task Force Inc., such as the Open Virtual Machine Format and its Common Information Model, or CIM, management profiles for virtualization. "In a couple of years, running multiple different virtualization platforms might not be that big of a deal," Wolf said. Despite VMware ESX's huge lead, "Oracle is off to a very good start," and a lot of Oracle shops will probably bite on Oracle VM, Wolf said. "Oracle has a lot of clout. If th...