At Oracle, we always knew that Oracle VM Templates can save significantly on deployment time.
To validate this, we commissioned the Evaluator Group to conduct a test in their independent labs using only publicly available Oracle documentations.
In this lab validation, the Evaluator Group deployed a 2 node Oracle Real Cluster using Oracle VM templates.
The group also deployed the 2 node cluster Oracle RAC on VMware vSphere.
The resulting time savings was 10x with Oracle VM taking about 3 and a quarter hours vs. with VMware vSphere taking over 39 hours.
In the second validation, the Evaluator Group deployed Oracle E-Business Suites using Oracle VM template. And doing the same thing with VMware vSPhere.
Using Oracle VM templates, it took about 2 and ¼ of an hour. With VMware vSphere it took over 15 hours. Nearly a 7x difference in time savings with Oracle VM
OVCA systems come with a ZFS Storage Appliance to manage their internal data, boot images, etc., but what about the large amounts of data that you need to access to run applications on your virtual machines?
Oracle’s ZFS Storage Appliance is ideal for that too. It is co-engineered with OVCA to maximize performance and efficiency while at the same time reducing deployment risk and TCO. As an Application Engineered Storage expansion to OVA, ZFS offers these capabilities:
- Extremely high throughput for any type of applications and workloads you are running on your VMs. It is optimized for IOPS-intensive workloads like OLTP databases, and for bandwidth-driven workloads like data warehousing, BI Analytics, and video processing. And it’s powerful enough to run a diverse set of workloads concurrently.
- You will also have to work hard to run out of capacity with the ZFS Storage Appliance. It comes in multiple sizes with raw capacities for application and database data that expand from 20TB to over 2.6PB
The ZFS Storage Appliance also comes with the world’s best storage analytics, which allow you to visualize and drill down into specific workloads to understand where bottlenecks occur and why. It can even allow you to examine and manage the storage aspects of OVCA environments all the way down to the VM level.
And finally, the ZFS Storage Appliance has the core Application Engineered Storage features since it is co-developed together with other Oracle hardware and software to deliver specific capabilities that are not available in third-party storage systems.
- For instance, it reduces risk by automating storage management from Oracle Database, so you have fewer storage systems to integrate and manage. ZFS Storage Appliance also lowers risk by providing leadership fault-monitoring and self-healing capabilities, and by simplifying setup and management with DTrace Storage Analytics.
- It reduces complexity because its large memory and cache- based architecture is more efficient in serving the I/O from large virtualized environments, and unique features like Hybrid Columnar Compression reduce the amount of storage needed for data warehouses built using Oracle Database. And, it enables you to lower TCO because you need fewer systems that cost less and are easier to manage.
When you add all of this up, the ZFS Storage Appliance with its intelligent caching gives you the IO performance of Flash but with the cost and scalability of Disk-based storage solutions.
The Oracle Virtual Networking product family consists of several major elements.
One is the hardware that you see on the top left of the picture here, which are the Oracle Fabric Interconnect boxes. You can select between the 4U-high system and the 2U-high system; and I will contrast those two in a second.
There is a management software element, which is called Oracle Fabric Manager, shown on top right of the slide. It's a graphical user interface based solution. You log in and you can basically manage the entire infrastructure from a single pane of glass.
Going clockwise, bottom right of the slide shows the performance monitoring product called Oracle Fabric Monitor, which allows you to see granularly into every virtual NIC, virtual HBA, every port, and every chassis that you have in your infrastructure.
Finally, the Oracle SDN software allows you to take servers and bind them to each other using private L2 networks and getting extremely fast speed.
The entire solution is fast. We are leveraging technology called InfiniBand, which gives you up to 80 Gigabits of bandwidth per server.
Now, when you use Oracle SDN technology, you can put all your server traffic that goes from server to server.
For example, when you are doing V-motion or live migration, you can put that on the SDN Fabric.
And you can get up to 19 times faster VM migration than with traditional Ethernet.
You can put all your backup traffic on Oracle SDN, thereby giving you up to 30 times improvements on backup.
We give you granular Quality of Service (QoS), so you can get predictable performance for mission critical applications.
For example, you are running an Oracle database and you want to guarantee certain amount of network and storage throughput, you can do that with this architecture.
And finally, the InfiniBand fabric has the lowest latency (in hundreds of nanoseconds) of any fabric out there. It's about a third of the latency of standard Ethernet (in microseconds).