Oracle replication & Vmware

[Shoei]

Trying to put together a possible solution for a potential customer to VM their environment and provide failover for Oracle.
Any one done anything like this?
From the info we have, they have 2 computer rooms with Fibre between them.
I know Oracle provide RAC to do data replication, but thats my limit to Oracle know how.
Easiest solution for this is run oracle on VMS and use all the clustering stuff from VMS to handle data protection.

 

[m4cc45]

I'd check the IO on the Oracle first as usually it's a massive database and would be a very poor candidate for virtualisation. The only thing I can say is that we use SAN replication for our VM's rather than software as this tends to be less reliable.

Sorry I can't help further.



M./

 

[iaind]

There's far too many people around here giving advice on VMware when they dont understand the details.

Oracle is by no means a poor candidate for virtualisation, it (like most DB apps) is a very good candidate. VMware work closely with Oracle : http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/oracle/

Obviously the same capacity planning should be applied as to any other system, but you should be able to use it to provide high availability and failover without using Oracle's own product.

There are several ways you could go about this. If you SAN is iSCSI and the IO requirement of the oracle server and the current usage of the fibre are sufficiently low, you could configure the fibre as a VLAN trunk and use a VLAN for SAN access in the second computer room.

You could then use VMware HA to reboot the VM on the second host (in the second computer room) if the first fails. This would only put high usage on the fibre trunk in the event of a host failure.

You could also look at using your SAN's replication to achive a more robust configuration.

VMware Fault Tolerance is also worth considering - same idea as HA but a copy is kept running on the second machine and the memory is kept in sync between them, so in the event of a host failure the other machine would carry on running with zero downtime. This is the most bandwidth heavy solution but is the most robust.

If they were in a position to be able to run a second fibre pair between the rooms it would make it a lot easier

 

[m4cc45]

If you read what I actually wrote I was recommend checking the IO as it MAY be a poor candidate. If it's a massive database with hundreds of users then I would not VM it.

Database's are not recommended for Virtualisation due to there heavy IO usage. It all depends on how many users and the size of the databases. I would also recommend Fibre based SCSI rather than iSCSI if you can afford it with IP Distance Gateways in between but then you are looking at serious money.


M.

 

[iaind]

VMware has little or no overhead in terms of IO, if you're at the point of saturating an HBA then it would be a problem for a physical host every bit as much as a virtual host. Nothing stopping you using multiple HBAs in that circumstance. If you read the case studies on the website you'll see a lot of examples of it being done with huge databases, often with increased performance.

From the sounds of it, the SAN is already in place which has presumably been specced to cope with the IO requirements of the database