Server Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Joseph D’AntoniSynthes

Virginia Oracle Users Group14 October 2010

About Me

DBA with 10+ years of experience Primarily in health care I like to talk about and use new

technologies @jdanton on Twitter

Overview

How these two topics ties togetherServer VirtualizationCloud ComputingOptions for Cloud Database computing

Virtualization Agenda

Definition of Server VirtualizationDo’s and Don’ts with VMs

Major VM Vendors

Gartner on Virtualization

Definitions

Host

Hypervisor

Guest Guest Guest

Benefits of Virtualization

Reduced physical footprint Reduced power and coolingIncreased Hardware utilizationCan be used for HA configurationsRapid Deployment of new environmentsUse Gold Standard servers and rollout

High Availability

Can move virtual servers between virtual hosts, across sites if needed, with minimal downtime

Can snapshot server before patches or application upgrades

Snapshots are good, but can take a lot of storage

VMWare Architecture

DR Scenario with ESX

Typical Host Server(s)

2 Quad Core 2.8 Ghz Processors60 Gb Memory1 Tb SAN Storage

CPU Scheduling

Host Server

CPU 1 CPU 2

Guest Guest Guest Guest Guest

Thin Provisioning

Allows over allocation of resourcesIncreases storage provisioningManagement console allows for easy

management of this along with SAN.

Maintaining Performance

Never over allocate CPUs

Memory can be over allocated

Hypervisor handles it by DE duplicating memory.

Host Page Files

I/O Performance

IO is nearly always the limiting factor to DB performance

Can be extremely tricky to track down in a VM environment

Work with storage and VM teams to monitor at each level.

Limitations of Virtualization

Not ideal for high utilization database servers

I/O contention (VMs like fast disks)Licensing costs (mainly Oracle, but

Microsoft is changing their licensing model for SQL 2008 R2)

VMWare isn’t free either—management server and license for each VM CPU.

Oracle Licensing on VMWare

Eleven syndicates campaigned this year in the three-month Louis Vuitton Cup series for the right to challenge Alinghi, the 2003 America's Cup winner. Cannon estimates the combined cost of the fleet at about $1 billion, with high-rollers like Oracle

Corp. founder Larry Ellison's BMW Oracle Racing team spending upward of $130 million before being eliminated in the semifinals.

Licensing

As a result, soft partitioning is not permitted as a means to determine or limit the number of software licenses required for any given server.

Examples of such partitioning type include…Oracle VM, VMWare.

Source: Oracle Partitioning GuideJuly 13, 2010

Licensing

Oracle’s official position is that all physical CPUs accessible to the guest OS must be licensed…but YMMV

VMWare is licensed at the host level, with several cost options

Oracle Support Position

Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized environments.

Oracle Support will assist customers running Oracle products on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware. If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for support.

Metalink [ID 249212.1]

Why these two topics?

Server virtualization is the engine that drives cloud computing

Allows dynamic resource allocation

Cloud Overview

Types of Cloud Computing

Three majors types of cloud computing◦Software as a service (SAAS) – Salesforce.com,

Gmail◦Platform as a service (PAAS) – SQL Azure, Amazon

EC2 ◦ Infrastructure as a service – Hosted Servers◦Private Clouds – Exadata, Exalogic

Given our audience we will focus on the PAAS part of this.

Cloud Database Providers

SQL Azure

• Microsoft’s SQL Specific Platform Offering

• Limited Selection of SQL Server Features

• 50 Gb size limit for an individual database

• No native backup command

• MS guarantees 99.95% availability

Amazon Web Services

• More platforms available than Microsoft (Linux, Oracle, SQL Express)

• More complex pricing model

• More robust feature set (full installation of RDBMS)

• Server is managed by you, not Amazon

• Require Licensing for O/S and Database

Costs at Amazon

Large Instance

7.5 GB memory

4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)

850 GB instance storage

64-bit platformI/O Performance: High

API name: m1.large

$910/yr base$ .12/hour usage$ .15/Gb Data

Transfer Out (loads are currently free)

Total Annual Costs~ $2100*

Does not include Oracle licensing.

Hosted Oracle

These fall somewhere in the middle. Pay a monthly fee for some amount of

tablespace and transactional activity.The provider below guarantees 99.9%

uptime—not really enough for dedicated e-commerce

Costs from an Oracle Provider

Hosting Plan Oracle 11G Platinum

 

Monthly $259.95

3 Months $729.85 (save $50)

Yearly $2808 (save $300)

Setup Fees $0.00

 

Account Features

Oracle 11G Database YES

Oracle Table Space size 1500MB

Report Printing with Oracle BI Publisher Included

Reasons for Using Cloud Provider

Lower upfront capital costsReduces costs of offsite backupPotentially reduce employee costsQuicker spin up of new environments

Yeah, Legal?

A good friend of mine, who shall remain nameless…

“In theory, you have the same legal protection in the cloud, that you do in your own data center, but….Amazon doesn’t care as much about your data as getting the AG off of their back”

--General Counsel of medium size healthcare company

Questions

Summary

Reasons for virtualizationHow to optimize database workloads in a

VM environmentWhy Cloud?Cloud benefits and problems