Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Oracle's announced Oracle VM 2.2 , their latest Xen-based general purpose virtualization technology platform for their Red Hat-based Enterprise Linux version (OEL). Coupled with a new ocfs2 version and a few enhancements, you get ThinProvisioning for VMs and snapshots on cluster-aware files systems. That means they can span across data centers or locations. Update: wording changed as suggested by comment Update2: Oracle VM 2.2 CLI available too

Oracle Linux Tests are designed to verify Linux kernel functionality and stability essential for the Oracle Database. The Oracle Linux Test (OLT) kit , which is distributed as a set of rpms, provides an automated mechanism to define, execute and analyze tests. The kit contains tools such as DBT2 and DBT3 workloads against Oracle single instance or clustered databases, as well as specialized workload simulators. OLT can be used for running tests on Oracle Enterprise Linux, RHEL and SLES distributions and a variety of topologies (storage attached network, network attached storage).

If you care about clustering and currently use VMware, you should read Wim Coekaerts' blog about vCenter Server Heartbeat and Oracle VM Manager with Oracle Clusterware ... I was gonna look into Oracle VM (and Xen) later this year anyway, but may move it up because of this.

With Red Hat and Oracle Linux supporting multipathed installation from 5 update 2 on, I thought they should have changed the Kickstart Options as well, so that anaconda can be given the right parameters. And I was right. ignoredisks has been added to let the installer ignore SAN disks as well as for cluster setups. multipath has been added to handle dual HBAs cases where the same disk will be seen over two different paths. Update: except ignoredisks , there is really not much you need to do but boot the Linux kernel with the option ' mpath '. The multipath option lets you set/configure the multipath.conf configuration, I believe. Not used yet. In my case, I use this line to boot Linux and start a kickstart installation: linux mpath text nousbstorage ksdevice=eth0 ks=http://server/mpathks.cfg That's it. The first activates multipath-aware option in anaconda. The second uses text mode. The third parameter skips any USB devices in my PowerEdge 2950 (virtual floppy, d...

Another note on using PowerPath in Linux... When using 2 Linux servers and PowerPath with a bunch of shared LUNs in order to build a cluster, e.g. Oracle RAC, you have to ensure that on both servers the LUNs are designated as the same /dev/emcpower* devices. Linux is a bit flaky in device enumeration and often, the order of devices gets mixed up. PowerPath can easily fix this . Use powermt save file=devmap.pp on one host of the cluster and use powermt unmanage dev=emcpower{a,b} and powermt load file=devmap.pp on the other, to make sure they both have the same mapping. Then do a ' powermt save ' to make the configuration persistent. Also, when using LVM in conjunction with PowerPath, you don't want regular SCSI devices (local disks or perhaps iSCSI) to intervene. You can tell LVM to ignore certain devices completely when it comes to LVM. In my case I've included the filters below to make sure Linux VMs and BMs (bare metals) get the proper config. Put this in /etc/lvm...

There is a quick FAQ on Oracle VM , explaining the basics about Oracle new virtualization technology. For instance, basic OracleVM is free as anyone can download the binaries . Support is available on a per-socket basis, not per-core. There are also ready-made templates with Oracle Linux (OEL) 4 update 5 for both 32 bit and 64 bit VMs. You will manage VMs with Oracle VM Manager. Oracle supports their own database 10g and 11g inside OracleVM, as well as OEM, Siebel, Peoplesoft and E-business Suite. Support for Oracle RAC clusters will be available somewhere in 2008. Testing is in progress, but timing issues in RAC are very strict, so it must be thoroughly tested. The requirements for OracleVM as similar to Xen's requirements: a new/recent CPU with VTX virtualization extensions is required for running VMs with Windows. If you only run Linux, you can use older hardware as well (and a kernel supporting paravirtualization).

During the (scripted) updates of ESX using Altiris, we discovered a ton of timeouts on the ESX hosts. The problem was the NFS server was getting very slow and Altiris scripts were failing due to connection losses and timeouts. Although we updated /etc/init.d/nfs and increased the number of threads/servers from 8 to 16 (default is 8 per core, the VM has 2 cores), this didn't change the behavior we observed on the ESX hosts. Still timeouts... So I dug a little deeper and found NFS for clusters , an excellent tuning/testing document for NFS servers. I tested the server settings using the suggested nfsstat -s and observed next to nothing. All was fine. However, the /proc/net/rpc/nfsd file (using watch -d cat /proc/net/rpc/nfsd ) still showed at least 6 out of 8 processes (aka threads/servers) with 20+ seconds of 100% busy. Clearly something was wrong, but it wasn't the NFS server. More testing showed that manual actions (of what was going on in the scripts) pushed upto 100MB/s t...

Found a nice article on a benchmark study of the new, modern file systems that are coming up. ZFS, XFS, and EXT4 file systems compared shows how ZFS, XFS and ext4 measure up against each other. Of course, there is no reference measurement of zero-line to compare against. But perhaps other benchmark studies can provide this...

" Oracle Validated Configurations are pre-tested, validated architectures with software, hardware, storage, and networking components with included documented best practices for deployment. Oracle and its strategic partners offer and recommend these configurations to enable end-users to deploy fully tested solutions to achieve standardization with high performance, scalability, and reliability while lowering infrastructure costs."

Slashdot | Oracle Contributes Linux Code, Expands Hardware Support : "Oracle expanded the list of hardware compatible with its Linux distribution and added support for Novell's YAST administration tool. They have now certified six hardware configurations able to run Oracle Enterprise Linux. Certified products include those made by Compellent Technologies, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Pillar Data Systems and Unisys. Oracle also said it is releasing an open-source version of the YAST Linux installation and configuration tool for Oracle Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux under the General Public License."

Today, Oracle announced a new TPC-C benchmark result on an HP ProLiant ML350 with the best ever price/performance. This result sets a world record in the price/performance category, which measures the cost per transaction of the configuration benchmarked. It demonstrates that Oracle Database not only provides customers with a highly performant and scalable data management solution, but can also deliver unparalleled cost savings with record-breaking performance on HP ProLiant systems, ideally suited to small and medium sized businesses (SMB). Achieving 100,926 transactions per minute with a price/performance of $.78/tpmC, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One delivered 45 percent more performance at 14 percent less cost than its nearest competitor. To set this new TPC-C price performance record, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One was run on an HP ProLiant ML350 server with one Intel Quad-Core Xeon 2.6 GHz processor and HP StorageWorks arrays. The operating s...

Last year, the Enterprise OpenSource Magazine website posted results of a performance study of several open source clustering file systems. The study was done in an academic environment and aimed to measure the same workloads on several different technologies. However, for the purposes of this blog, the difference between Red Hat's GFS and Oracle's OCFS2 are most interesting... Source: Kevin Closson

Kevin Closson points to a test Dell did using their hardware and an Oracle et-up usign RAC and one without RAC. The results are interesting! The tests are run using Dell's DVD Store Test Application using a PowerEdge 2950 cluster and one PowerEdge 6850 .

Oracle will support the Oracle software on Linux clusters comprised of RAC compatible technologies and supported software combinations. NOTE: The information in the given matrix applies to all Linux platforms (RHEL, SUSE, SLES, OEL) unless otherwise stated in the platform specific section. Source: Kevin Closson's Oracle Blog

Sadly but expectedly, Oracle does not provide or support the Red Hat Application Stack . The stack enables easy development of web applications because its components are fixed. The stack includes JBoss, Hibernate, Red Hat GFS, Red Hat Cluster Suite, and Red Hat Directory Server. However, Oracle already bundles its own "stack" with Apache and Tomcat in the form of the Oracle Application Server . Oracle has made, what appears to be, its own fork of these open source software packages, and it support them independently of the public versions of Apache and Tomcat. For clustering applications, Oracle also delivers its own file system OCFS2.