Driving Down Database TCO with VMware Data Director and SAP-Sybase ASE

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A recent IDC study concluded SAP-Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) has the lowest total cost of ownership compared to other relational database management systems (RDBMS). The study found ASE required 27% less processing power and servers than other RDBMS.VMware found ASE’s threaded architected to be equally efficient when running on VMware vSphere. Our validation testing showed ASE performance, when virtualized, is often equal that of identical physical systems.

VMware vFabric Data Director can further reduce hardware TCO by quickly virtualizing ASE on vSphere using built-in workflows to virtualize and migrate physical databases to run on vSphere. I speak to many SAP-Sybase customers who are still on older UNIX boxes who want to virtualize on modern x86 servers. vFabric Data Director can be used to jump start the physical to virtual conversion process and also keep security, data protection polices, resource consumption, and database configuration best practices in place.

The IDC study also showed SAP-Sybase requires 27% less IT Staff to manage ASE compared to other RDBMS, further TCO management costs can again be realized with vFabric Data Director.  Provisioning can be one of the most time consuming tasks requiring multiple IT teams working together to properly configure a database server.  It is not uncommon for departments to wait weeks or even months before their requests have been satisfied.  With VMware vFabric Data Director, provisioning can be a self-service operation.  The DBAs set up database templates and associates role-base permissions for use with these templates, as well as setting resource allocation to specific organizations.  Then users simply go through a self-service wizard to create a database which meets their requirements.

It won’t be long before our customers can take advantage of these capabilities. VMware and SAP-Sybase are working together on an ASE plug-in for vFabric Data Director which will be out by the end of the year.  To learn more about the capabilities of Data Director visit the product landing page or watch the product demo video below.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/unoDXJW2jT4

For more information contact Bob Goldsand (bgoldsand@vmware.com) and Jonathan Jiang (jonathanj@vmware.com)

Adding “Database-Awareness” to VMware vSphere with vFabric Data Director

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Customers are saving lots of money by virtualizing theirdatabases on VMware vSphere.  A study conducted by Forrester Research in January 2011 found that customers who migrated 1000+ Oracle databases from physical to VMware vSphere enjoyed an ROI of 888%, with a payback period of 4 months, and a discounted benefit value of $2M+.  However, databases require special handling when deployed on VMs.  For example, vSphere offers snapshot capability that allows the user to restore the VM to the current state at a later time. In order for that feature to function properly for the database, there are a few necessary steps to ensure consistency: e.g., restore the database in crash recovery mode.  The reason for the manual steps is that vSphere is not treating the database differently from any workload.

Enter VMware vFabric Data Director (vFDD) – the software layer that adds database-awareness to vSphere.  vFDD  extends the capabilities of vSphere to address the specific needs of the Database workload.  In the case of snapshot, it understands the commands that need to be run within the database before and after the VM operation is performed.  Another common scenario is HA.  vFDD extends vSphere HA such that it will trigger a failover not only when there is a hardware failure but when the database software stops responding.  It is also smart enough to do the right things that correspond to the database type.  Oracle, Sybase ASE, and MySQL handle snapshots and HA monitoring differently, and vFDD takes care of the complexity and exposes the abstracted capabilities. The smarts of how to perform each of the tasks is in the Data Engine Plugin.

SAP and VMware are now collaborating on the development of the Sybase ASE plugin for vFDD (stay tuned for more details and delivery dates). The plugin will give unprecedented operational efficiency and agility to the Sybase DBA teams.  We have shown that Sybase ASE delivers great performance on vSphere.  The vFDD plugin will make it even more attractive for customers to operate their Sybase ASE systems in that environment.  For more information, please visit the Data Director product page.

SAP HANA on VMware vSphere

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SAP announced today that VMware vSphere is now supported and is the preferred way to virtualize SAP’s high performance HANA database.  This is great news for customers of both VMware and SAP and opens new options for deployment and management of HANA.  This new announcement follows the 2011 announcement by SAP and VMware  that virtualization is a best practice for running SAP and that VMware is the preferred virtualization partner to deploy SAP applications for x86.  It demonstrates the strong partnership between the companies and their desire to offer customers compelling solutions by supporting the combination of their leading edge software.

HANA running on vSphere can be treated and managed along with the rest of your SAP landscape using the same tools already in use.  Extensive testing has been done with HANA on vSphere and it has been confirmed that HANA functions exactly the same as it does as a hardware appliance, but with the added benefits of VMware virtualization.

One of the biggest benefits of virtualizing HANA with VMware is the ability to have several smaller HANA instances all sharing a single physical server.  This means that an entire HANA appliance does not have to be dedicated to a single instance, but can instead run multiple virtual HANA instances at the same time thus allowing for more flexibility.  This can lead to much better utilization of existing resources and better overall efficiency.

While allowing for smaller HANA instances, vSphere 5.1 also allows for virtual machines to be scaled up to 64 virtual CPUs and 1 TB of memory.  This enables virtual HANA to address a wide range of needs of customers.  vSphere also allows for new HANA instances to be quickly deployed from templates.  HANA deployment times can be reduced from weeks to minutes when deploying HANA as a virtual machine.  It is also possible to quickly resize a HANA virtual machine with a simple setting change to adjust resource levels between different virtual machines.  This allows for the resources used by HANA to be easily adjusted over time as needs change in the datacenter.

It is important to note that HANA runs on standard VMware vSphere that has not been modified or customized in any way to support HANA.  This means that it is the same vSphere that VMware customers and partners are already using and will be supported and run the same way.

In order to obtain HANA on vSphere, existing HANA partners will begin offering a version of their HANA appliance that will have vSphere 5.x and a HANA virtual appliance pre-installed.  Once received, additional HANA virtual machines are easy to create and deploy.  This will make it extremely easy to get many initial instances of HANA up and running and speed the use and development of applications using HANA.  HANA on vSphere opens many new possibilities by enabling a more flexible and still high performing leading edge database environment.  Existing customers will find it compelling to leverage the same tools to manage and use HANA while taking advantage of the additional capabilities of VMware vSphere to enable rapid deployment and more efficient use of resources.

We are excited about SAP’s announcement today as this is the next phase in an ongoing evolution of virtualizing SAP environments for our joint customers!

For more information, see the press announcement , visit www.vmware.com/SAP, and visit SAP’s Events Newsroom for all of details on SAP’s announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage leading up to and during SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd.  Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @SAPInMemory.

Think You Can’t Run Oracle on vSphere?; Listen to What Our Customers are Saying

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I still hear about too many IT managers delaying the virtualization of their tier 1 Business critical databases because of the misperception  surrounding running Oracle on vSphere. My advice to these managers is stop listening to the noise  and start listing to VMware’s customers success stories because that’s all that really matters.

Check out the white paper I co-authored with NetApp’s Steve Schuettinger entitled; “Running Business Critical Application on Oracle RAC, VMware, and NetApp.” We discuss, in detail, Green Mountain Power’s  virtualization of their Oracle Enterprise Infrastructure.  Although we focus on the database tier in this paper, Green Mountain Power also virtualized the Oracle Utility Suite, Fusion Middleware, WebLogic, and the Oracle Business Intelligence.

Still not convinced? Check out a session at VMworld San Francisco entitled “A Customer Success Story: Running Business Critical Oracle Enterprise Applications and Oracle Real Application Clusters on vSphere.” on Thursday August 30th at 10:30am (Session ID is PAR3379).  Come hear from Green Mountain Power’s Mark Dincecco, Director of Information Technology; Paula Fortin, Senior Enterprise Systems Administrator; and Nayab Saiyed Enterprise Database Architect as they  discuss how they went from nearly 0% virtualized to about 70% virtualization in less than a year. Also hear how Green Mountain Power kept their virtual infrastructure 100% available during Hurricane Irene and suffered no data loss.

Lastly, many of our customers are just tired of the inaccurate information  and are looking for the facts & proof. . If you are among them,  I encourage you to read my blog; SAP-Sybase Makes Running Business Critical Databases on vSphere Hassle Free. SAP-Sybase has never asked its customers to reproduce on physical, performance matches that of native, and offer unquestioned support for databases running on vSphere.

Bob Goldsand,

VMware Alliances Partner Architect

Oracle VM – 4x More Marketing, 4x Fewer Substantiated Facts

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by Avinash Nayak

The good folks in Oracle’s marketing department deserve a raise for their efforts around promoting the latest release of the company’s virtualization solution, Oracle VM (OVM) 3. They certainly are aiming high, claiming OVM 3 is four times more scalable than VMware, four times cheaper to deploy than VMware, and is architected for efficiency while VMware is prone to inefficiencies. Not bad for a product that did not even exist until 2009 and is only on its second release (why the second release is called OVM 3, I don’t know). Unfortunately for Oracle Marketing, there’s a problem, namely – the FACTS. The facts show that VMware vSphere 5 delivers much higher scalability, greater value and unmatched performance compared to OVM.

Let’s take a closer look at Oracle’s claims and compare them with the facts:

Is OVM 3 four times more scalable than VMware? Switch the order of the products and it's perfect.

Oracle bases this claim on the fact that OVM 3 supports 128 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) per VM, where vSphere 5 VMs support 32 vCPUs.

Wait. Did someone change the definition of scalability when we weren’t looking? Since when is the scalability of a virtualization platform defined only by the number of VM vCPUs supported?

Surely, a better measure of the scalability of a platform is the number of VMs doing useful work that the platform can support (and manage) on a host or a cluster. It’s not the only measure, but one that’s far more insightful for showing scalability than just comparing vCPUs. Oracle’s documentation shows that OVM 3 is only able to run up to 128 VMs per host, compared to 512 for vSphere 5 (four times more than OVM 3, what a coincidence). So, it looks like Oracle got the “four times” part right. They just got the products mixed up. Simple mistake.

In addition, VMware’s testing has shown that a 32 vCPU guests can deliver 92-97% of native performance. Oracle has yet to provide any evidence that a 128 vCPU guest can scale linearly on OVM3.0.

Is VMware four times more expensive than OVM 3? NO. Maybe Oracle meant vSphere has four times more functionality than OVM 3.

Oracle makes this claim solely based on virtualization software costs. But virtualization software cost is only one component of the total cost of deploying an application. The other components are the hardware costs (server, storage and networking), guest OS licensing costs, power and datacenter space costs. You need to take into account all of these when calculating the total costs for deploying an application.

Thanks to the advanced features provided by vSphere, customers are able to realize significant savings from reduction in hardware necessary to deploy an application environment relative to OVM.  Through the use of multiple advanced memory management features  (transparent page sharing, ballooning, memory compression, and hypervisor swapping), vSphere is able to achieve much greater VM density per host than OVM, meaning you need fewer hosts to deploy the same number of VMs. Independent tests have shown that vSphere 5 consistently delivers higher VM density compared to competing platforms, such as Xen based OVM.

Let’s take a simple example and compare the TOTAL cost of deploying 100 Linux VMs on vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus (VMware’s highest vSphere edition) vs. OVM3. We assume a conservative 25% density advantage for vSphere over OVM. This means that if we assume we deploy 12 VMs per host for OVM, we can deploy 15 VMs per host for vSphere 5.

 

We see that even the highest edition of vSphere 5 is less than 6% more expensive than OVM when you take into account TOTAL cost. So it appears that Oracle’s cost claims are exaggerated by 400/6 = 66.67 times.

So what do you get for a premium of less than 6%? Here’s a subset of the features found in vSphere 5 that are absent from OVM:

 

Feature 

VMware vSphere 5 

Oracle VM 3

Clustered File System

VMFS 5 Purpose built and tested for virtualization

OVM built on OCFS2, not built for virtualization

Thin, bare-metal hypervisor

Yes, ESXi has a small 144MB footprint for better reliability and security

No, OVM 3’s Xen hypervisor requires a large Linux management partition making it four times larger

Logical resource pools

Yes, divide and assign cluster resources to hierarchical groups

No, users share all resources across entire server pool

Role-based access controls

Extensive customizable user roles and permissions

No, single user account used for all hosts managed by OVM Mgr

Storage live migration

Storage vMotion

No

Storage array support

Supports over 1,200 arrays, vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration supported by 175 arrays

Storage Connect API supported by less than 20 arrays

Auto storage tiering

Profile-Driven Storage

No

Thin disks

Fully supported

No

Broad guest OS support

Over 88 guests

Only 13 guests

Complete resource balancing

DRS and Storage DRS, balances memory, CPU, storage load

DRS feature considers only CPU and network load

“Noisy neighbor” protection

Yes, Network and Storage I/O Controls

No

 HA policy enforcement 

 HA supports: admission controls, VM-VM affinity/anti-affinity controls, restart priority 

 HA feature supports only basic restart ; Only anti-affinity controls

Memory overcommit

Yes, enables greater VM density, lower costs

No

But Oracle should be intimately familiar with how a “free” solution does not necessarily provide better value. After all, isn’t MYSQL a free product (like OVM) and you only pay for support. Does it deliver the same capabilities as Oracle’s Enterprise Database solutions? I wonder what Oracle has to say about that.

Is OVM 3 more efficient than vSphere? We’d like to see the evidence.

The basis for this claim is a four year old Oracle VM Benchmark Performance Report from The Tolly Group done using OVM 2 (the first version of the product). The performance tests compare OVM 2 (note – Not OVM 3) to physical servers, not to vSphere. Oracle has not provided any evidence to support the claim that OVM 3 is more efficient or has a performance advantage over vSphere.

Like other Xen-based hypervisors, Oracle VM requires guest operating systems with extensive Xen paravirtualization modifications to get acceptable performance. Instead, vSphere uses unmodified guest OSs together with optimized device drivers and full support for virtualization hardware assist features in modern processors to deliver unmatched performance. This approach allows customers to use standard operating systems that are fully supported by ISVs. And with a disk footprint of only 144MB, the vSphere hypervisor represents a far smaller attack surface. An OVM 3 server’s disk footprint is swollen to 588MB (four times larger than vSphere) by the Linux management operating system installed in the Dom0 partition.

Also, without advanced features like Network and Storage I/O Controls, OVM is unable to guarantee service levels for business critical applications (for example, large databases.) vSphere is the only platform that delivers capabilities to ensure that your most important applications have access to the resources they need to meet required SLAs.

Grading the claims made by Oracle with regards to OVM 3:

Marketing: PASS; Delivering on the Marketing Claims: FAIL

So it looks like VMware will not be shutting shop just yet. Despite what Oracle says, vSphere 5 is well ahead of OVM 3 in terms of performance, features and value.

This blog is part of a series on Virtualizing Your Business Critical Applications with VMware. To learn more, including how VMware customers have successfully virtualized SAP, Oracle, Exchange, SQL and more, visit vmware.com/go/virtualizeyourapps.