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You cannot afford for business critical applications in your datacenter to go down just to upgrade them. With that in mind, let’s look at which events might provide a good opportunity to virtualize applications in your datacenter. Below are some questions to ask when considering virtualization. If you answer “yes” to any of the questions, it might be time to virtualize that app.
Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]
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The following best practices for virtualizing Oracle can provide useful guidance for virtual CPU, virtual memory, networking and storage setup.
Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]
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This post is part of the 7-part series Seven Top Benefits of Virtualizing Business Critical Applications.
Ensuring availability of your applications is difficult. Each application component must be made highly available, and operations teams often struggle with a proliferation of different clustering and availability options. The Web tier is fairly simple to protect using network load balancing, and the application tier can be clustered, but databases are typically the most difficult tier to protect. Databases can be protected using Microsoft Clustering, database mirroring, or high-end options such as Oracle RAC.
VMware provides a range of capabilities that can extend availability to 100 percent of applications including databases, without the complexity or cost of clustering. These capabilities are:
The siloed example of availability methods shown in Figure 11 requires expensive licenses, dedicated standby infrastructure, and highly skilled staff to configure and manage. The alternative to this expensive approach is a standardized approach using vSphere technology, though some companies choose to implement both appspecific and VMware solutions running in tandem.
To prepare for availability issues affecting an entire datacenter, VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager (SRM) enables datacenter teams to build, manage, and execute reliable disaster recovery plans for all applications, including business-critical apps. By taking full advantage of the encapsulation and isolation of virtual machines, SRM enables simplified automation of disaster recovery. SRM helps meet recovery time objectives, reduces costs traditionally associated with business continuance plans, and achieves low-risk and predictable results for recovery of a virtual environment.
Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]
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The figure below lists some of the top business and technical reasons to virtualize business-critical applications.
Note: Consolidation rates are averages based on “VMware Customer Readiness Reviews.” Licensing savings are cited in the Licensing section of the below whitepaper.
Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]
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vSphere delivers the performance required to run business-critical applications in large-scale environments. vSphere 5 provides 16 times (source Figure 14 in BCA Whitepaper) the performance of VMware Infrastructure 3 while keeping virtualization overhead at a limited 2 to 5 percent. The fact is that the virtualization overhead or “tax” is often greatly exaggerated and many application owners are managing applications that have already been virtualized by the server and virtualization teams, and the applications owners don’t even know it.
Performance is a major factor in business-critical applications. Virtual machines perform the same as their physical equivalents, as witnessed in production by the app owners. The following set of graphs illustrates this performance across several applications.
Virtualized Oracle databases perform the same as native databases from the application owner’s perspective (source: Virtualizing Performance-Critical Database Applications in VMware vSphere).
In the figure below, Confio, a third-party company unaffiliated with VMware, compared virtual and physical servers in a side-by-side test, finding the performance would be the same to the DBA (Source: A Comparison of Oracle Performance on Physical and VMware Servers, 2012. Written by Confio, www.confio.com.)
In the figure below, Virtualized SQL databases perform the same as native databases from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL on vSphere.).
In the figure below, Virtualized SAP performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Virtualized SAP Performance with VMware vSphere 4.).
In the figure below, Virtualized Java performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Performance of Enterprise Java Applications on VMware vSphere 4.1 and SpringSource tc Server.).
In the figure below, Virtualized Hadoop performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Source: “A Benchmarking Case Study of Virtualized Hadoop Performance on VMware vSphere® 5”, 2012.)
Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]
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Thousands of VMware customers have virtualized their Exchange, Oracle Databases, Oracle eBusiness Suite, SQL, SAP, and Java applications. These applications are often considered the six business-critical applications (BCAs). There are also business-critical apps that are industry specific (such as for retail, telecom, and healthcare industries) as well as newly emerging business-critical apps (such as Hadoop). According to a recent VMware survey (Source: VMware customer survey, June 2011), 75 percent of VMware customers report they virtualize at least one business-critical application in their production environment.
The figure below identifies many large companies that are currently virtualizing their business-critical applications with VMware. You will find additional virtualization success stories at www.vmware.com/customers.
Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]
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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
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Learn why 75-percent of VMware customers report they virtualize at least one business-critical app in their production environment.
Link: http://vmware.com/go/apps-heart-vmware
Audience: This whitepaper provides solution and technical product information is intended for Architects, Engineers, Administrators, DBAs, App-owners and Business staff
Purpose of this whitepaper: This whitepaper documents the challenges with virtualizing business critical apps and provides evidence for overcoming these challenges and to virtualize these apps.
Executive Summary: Starting with vSphere 4, and more recently using vSphere 5, customers are virtualizing business-critical applications at an accelerated pace. 75-percent of VMware customers report they virtualize at least one business-critical application in their production environment. Application infrastructure administrators and CIOs see that the value of virtualization extends far beyond basic consolidation. Applications run better virtualized, with faster time to market and improved Quality of Service (QoS).
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by Neal Mueller
COLLABORATE is a big event for Oracle Database and Oracle Application users. You can find just what you need with help from one of our three participating users groups, those being:
VMware customers are virtualizing all of Oracle's products, so we were a popular booth at Collaborate. VMware also had eight sessions at Collaborate:
Here is booth picture of VMware's Oracle expert Kannan Mani working with the Harvard University DBA Team. The DBA explained his architecture to Kannan on the piece of paper on the table and then took note of what Kannan said, putting it into his iPhone.
VMware had a booth and signage at the show.
Next year, Collaborate 13 will be held in Denver. Denver is home to VMware's Oracle-Master Don Sullivan and VMware's Oracle-Double-Ace George Trujillo.
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.
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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
