Leave The Dark Ages Behind - Big Oracle RAC is Ready For The Light

Remember way back, a long time ago, when people were afraid to run Oracle RAC virtualized and Oracle didn't want to support it?  It's been supported now for almost 2 years and I have talked to lots of customers that are doing it without issue or support concerns.

We are out of the dark ages and into the light.  Oracle RAC administrators can get the same awesome features and benefits as their other IT brethren.

I think that the question of performance for really really BIG Oracle RAC databases on VMware vSphere might still be lingering for some.  They might be thinking that their Oracle RAC database is too big for vSphere.....

I was fortunate to work with some really great Oracle experts at EMC IT over the past year.  They run one of the largest Oracle RAC instances in the world and they wanted to know how it would perform as a set of VMs. We embarked on a test that used a copy of their production database and Load Runner scripts to simulate their environment.  We used big 32 vCPU Monster VMs for the RAC nodes and compared the performance against their existing physical Oracle RAC cluster.

We found that on average the performance was within 10% - check the whitepaper for details (cool graph included).

The doubts should now be completely gone.  It is possible for your Oracle RAC database (yes, the one that you think is too large / too important) to leave the dark ages too.

Perfmon File Format Fun

One of the things that I really like about esxtop, is that the batch mode output file can be loaded into windows performance monitor aka perfmon.  There are some things about the way that perfmon allows you to quickly select different counter sets and zoom in on specific time segments of data that make it the best tool to use in some cases.

I recently found myself working with some other data that was in a plain text format, but would be nice to have in a CSV format.  I also decided that it would be nice if it would load into perfmon as well, just to make things really nice.

It turns out that perfmon won't accept just any old CSV file, but is expecting a very specific format.  I used some esxtop output files as examples and then was able to construct the key elements needed to create a CSV file that will load into windows perfmon.  I could not find this information anywhere else, so I thought that I would share it here for anybody who is interested.

All values must be separated by commas.

All values must be enclosed by double quotes.

The very first value on the first line is the format definition.  I just copied the one used by esxtop.

The first line of values defines how the counters will be displayed and oraganized for selection in perfmon.  It follows this format \\<hostname>\<GroupCounterName>(<CounterName>)\<DataValueName>

The first line must have the same number of values as the number of columns (in other words - each column of data must have a label).

The first column for each row after the first row is the date / time stamp.  It must be of the format MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS

Here is a sample from a CSV file that I created following these rules that does load successfully into perfmon:

Here is what it looks like when you add this CSV file as a source in perfmon and then go to add data counters:

So now you know the secrets to the file format needed for CSV files to work with windows perfmon.  Have fun.

Todd

Pardon The Interrupt at VMworld

Pardon The Interrupt, but I'm asking for your vote to get a completely new type of session into VMworld this year.

We will have an expert panel of people from Cisco, Dell, StorSimple and VMware all together on stage to cover all VMworld topics.  That's right.  All. Topics.

VMworld 2012 session # 1913 - Pardon The Interrupt: VMworld Expert Panel on Everything

You might ask - "How it is possible to cover all topics in a single session?"

It's the format of the session.  We will use the same format as the ESPN show Pardon The Interruption.  We will have the list of topics.  The panel will get to discuss each topic for a limited amount of time and when the bell goes off we move to the next topic.  Pardon the Interruption does some serious and some not so serious sports topics.  Pardon The Interrupt will do some serious and some not so serious VMworld topics.

Here are a couple of examples of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption. (I will not be wearing a Turkey costume at VMworld)

Now imagine this format with a great expert panel that is willing to have fun but also has the right background to cover the all topics.

Here's the people on the panel:

Marc Farley from StorSimple is a storage industry insider, author of multiple books on network storage, blogger at DataOnTop, and co-founder of InfoSmack and RUN! podcasts.  

Scott Hanson is @CiscoServerGeek and has worked with x86 servers for almost 20 years and presented on topics ranging from supercomputing to systems management.  Scott also is an excellent poker player (at least that's what I heard).

Kong Yang is the resident Virtualization vExpert at Dell.  Kong and I co-presented at VMworld 2007 when Exchange was the Final Frontier and people were still nervous about virtualizing their domain controllers.  

I'm the final member of the panel.  I'm a performance engineer at VMware that tries to pull as many things as possible into my job description.  I've presented at four of the last five VMworlds on a variety of topics.  I blog here and on VROOM!.  I'm also the host / creator of VROOM! Videos and sit next to Kong every week on on So Say SMEs video series.

Go Vote! 

VMworld Session 1913 Pardon The Interrupt: VMworld Expert Panel Session on Everything

 I promise that it won't be a gutter ball performance.

vSphere Transparent Page Sharing and Oracle DB Discussion

In So Say SMEs last week Kong and I discussed the recent Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) enable or disable debate for Oracle databases.  There is some background reading that you can do if you want the full details.  There is a white paper by EMC, a blog by Michael Webster, and a blog by Scott Drummonds.  I think that we covered it all in the video at a high level, but I do recommend the blogs and white paper for the real geeks.

Overall, I think it is great discussion to have and it gives everybody who is interested a bit more insight into some of the specifics of how TPS works.  I agree with Scott - "Sibling bicker. But family is family."

Lone Ranger Perfmon Art

Here is a new Perfmon Art - The Lone Ranger.  

This is CPU utilization from a 30 vCPU virtual machine.  Each of the individual vCPU utilization levels is graphed. One CPU is much more heavily utilized than the others.

Sybase Has The Right Approach for Virtualization

Yesterday at Sapphire, SAP and VMware issued a joint press release that shows how two companies can work to together.  In this case, SAP and VMware announced a deeper and stronger relationship in a few different ways that results in customers being able to more easily run, license, and get support for Sybase databases running on VMware vSphere.

There are three major components of the announcement: Performance, Support, and Licensing.

We did some joint testing to measure performance and verify compatibility.  We had no issues with compatibility and the performance was excellent.  The performance difference between virtual and physical for a Sybase ASE database was within a small percentage on average.

Sybase does not require that problems be reproduced on a non-virtualized setup to get support.  They will support their databases running on vSphere.

There is also the ability to license Sybase based on the number of virtual CPUs being used by the VM instead of having to license for all of the processors in the physical host.  This is referred to as sub-capacity licensing.

Submitting Talks for VMworld

The deadline for submitting a presentation for VMworld this year is one week from today.  I have been fortunate over to get talks accepted in the past and I'm submitting a few this year and hope to be back again.  It is a great experience to get to talk about some of the things that I work on, get to meet lots of other geeks, and learn new things throughout the week.

The last few years there have been thousands of submissions for only a small number of speaking slots.  The committee that picks which are accepted has a more difficult job each year.  Kong and I discussed some of the strategies and things to consider when submitting your abstract for VMworld in this episode of So Say SMEs -

Only thing is certain - If you don't submit an idea, it won't be accepted.  If you do submit an idea, you have a chance.