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Category Archives: vSphere HA

Oracle on VMware vSphere & vSAN – Dispelling the Licensing myths

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Introduction to VMware vSphere & vSAN

Some key things to keep in mind when we talk about VMware vSphere Platform , ESXi hypervisor and vSAN:

VMware vSphere is a platform of virtualized hardware that creates a total abstraction layer between the O/S and the Hardware
ESXi, is a non-Para virtualized, Type1 hypervisor and therefore makes no changes to the kernel of the guest operating system
VMware vSAN , the industry-leading software powering Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution, in no way changes the location of where compute runs, and hence does not directly impact the licensing impact of any CPU Core or Socket based licensing

Oracle Licensing Myths

There are myths floating around that

Oracle Licensing requires licensing every vSphere host attached to a given vCenter
Oracle licensing requires licensing every Site connected to the Primary site where the Oracle workloads primarily resides

These myths are perpetuated by overzealous licensing and sales teams which is in contrast of the reality of the actual Contractually Impactful documents.

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Harnessing the Power of Storage Virtualization and Site Recovery Manager to Provide HA and DR Capabilities to Business Critical Databases – VAPP4634

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Harnessing the Power of Storage Virtualization and Site Recovery Manager to Provide HA and DR Capabilities to Business Critical Databases

How do you simplify and improve availability of your Extended distance Oracle Real Application Cluster using vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) ?

Storage Virtualization, both host based and appliance based, can pave the way for increased ease of configuration and improved availability of your cluster based applications. vMSC featues including vMotion, HA, DRS and FT as well as extended distance Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) are greatly simplified, and in some cases, made possible through the use of storage virtualization technologies such as EMC VPLEX, Netapp Metro Cluster, IBM SVC, HP 3PAR Peer Persistence or Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) disk groups. Continue reading →

Updated availability guide for vCenter 5.5 with Microsoft Clustering support now available

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The original vCenter Server 5.5 Availability Guide was published in December 2014.

With the End of Availability of vCenter Server Heartbeat guidance was provided on how to monitor and protect vCenter. Due to the need for additional protection, we have internally validated using Windows Server Failover Clustering for protection of vCenter services. Improved SLAs can be attained with this clustering solution. The update provides step-by-step guidance to deploy this solution to protect vCenter 5.5

You can download the updated paper here: https://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10444

Say Hello to vMotion-compatible Shared-Disks Windows Clustering on vSphere

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As you dive into the inner-workings of the new version of VMware vSphere (aka ESXi), one of the gems you will discover to your delight is the enhanced virtual machine portability feature that allows you to vMotion a running pair of clustered Windows workloads that have been configured with shared disks.

I pause here now to let you complete the obligatory jiggy dance. No? You have no idea what I just talked about up there, do you? Let me break it down for you:

In vSphere 6.0, you can configure two or more VMs running Windows Server Failover Clustering (or MSCS for older Windows OSes), using common, shared virtual disks (RDM) among them AND still be able to successfully vMotion any of the clustered nodes without inducing failure in WSFC or the clustered application. What’s the big-deal about that? Well, it is the first time VMware has ever officially supported such configuration without any third-party solution, formal exception, or a number of caveats. Simply put, this is now an official, out-of-the-box feature that does not have any exception or special requirements other than the following:

The VMs must be in “Hardware 11” compatibility mode – which means that you are either creating and running the VMs on ESXi 6.0 hosts, or you have converted your old template to Hardware 11 and deployed it on ESXi 6.0
The disks must be connected to virtual SCSI controllers that have been configured for “Physical” SCSI Bus Sharing mode
And the disk type *MUST* be of the “Raw Device Mapping” type. VMDK disks are *NOT* supported for the configuration described in this document.

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