There is some discord and significant misinformation in the Oracle community as to what the contractual obligations are associated with licensing only a subset of a vSphere cluster’s hosts for Oracle. Furthermore, there is all manner of opinion out there regarding the risks of asserting one’s contractual rights. This definitive opinion piece waters down relevant Oracle License and Services Agreement language to a summary that you can get your hands around.  It includes observations on what we are seeing and, more importantly, what we are not seeing in terms of legal actions with regard to the OLSA.

I just offered a fairly comprehensive Oracle-on-vSphere licensing opinion piece to my colleague Jeff Browning who is EMC’s chief spokesman for all things Oracle storage-related. My post appears in Jeff’s Oracle sub-cluster licensing thread at April 2nd.

Jeff then took the initiative to replicate my post to his own blog here and the EMC Community Network here.

Storage Performance Metrics

This blog entry is the continuation of the blog entry dated August 5, 2011

Average Read Time

• 20ms
• Sustained peaks of >20ms for no more than about five minutes

Attributes:

• Un-cached random reads
• Assuming 90% read, 10% write, with writes colliding

The Average Read Time performance attribute is important because there are schema/application designs that can pierce the cache, regardless of how big that cache is.

Average read time can be pulled from Oracle Statspack and AWR reports at the tablespace and datafile level.

Read time can also be pulled from the vSphere Client:

Select a host or a VM in the navigation pane > Performance Tab > [Advanced] > select Data Store > select Real Time > click the Read Latency box.

Spindle Busy Average

< 50%

To run R/esxtop to display device, kernel, guest and queue latency start an r/esxtop session:

$ esxtop > v > [Enter]

Look at the %USD column.

LUN percent busy

$ nmon > d

SCSI Queue Depth

<= teens (after having reconfigured all storage path devices to 128, up from default of 32)

The default SCSI queue depth for ESX is 32.

$ esxtop > d > f > [Enter].  Verify that QSTATS is selected with an asterisk to the left as pictured below.

Storage Latency

For day-to-day monitoring of disk throughput, latency is the ideal metric. It is more accurate in determining if your database is suffering from I/O throughput issues. The performance redlines for disk latency should be 20ms or lower. With latency it is acceptable to have burst periods of higher than 20ms latency, but not consistently.

R/esxtop monitors disk latency at three distinct layers, the device or HBA, the kernel or ESX hypervisor and the guest or virtual machine. Use the free IOmeter storage benchmarking tool in a Windows guest (only the Windows version can do asynchronous writes, not the Linux version).  Configure the tool for the Oracle database default block size and a 32GB streaming write (large enough to pierce the write cache of many SANs).

To run R/esxtop to display device, kernel, guest and queue latency start an r/esxtop session:

$ esxtop v > f > h > i > j > enter

• The GAVG or guest latency is actually a combination of the device latency + hypervisor + any additional guest OS overhead.
• The KAVG is the kernel latency or hypervisor latency. High latency reported at the kernel can be due high SCSI queues or device drivers.
• DAVG is the device latency or HBA latency. We use the term HBA generically, including an actual fiber channel HBA or iSCSI NIC. Device latency usually indicates a bottleneck at the storage or SAN layer.

By monitoring the four distinct layers we can clearly see the HBA is an issue with the SAN configuration. If just GAVG was high then we would have had looked at the Linux guest. This customer had very serve device latency (DAVG). This related back to a SAN issue that was later fixed by the storage vendor with a firmware upgrade.

Storage Throughput

Given a 4Gb Fibre Channel fabric, you should be looking at >100MB/sec/storage path sustained. If you are getting less than that, consider splitting out storage paths.

CPU Ready Time

The VMware definition of CPU Ready is, "the time a guest waits for CPU from the host while in a ready-to-run state" (VMware ESX Server 3: Ready Time Observations - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_ready_time.pdf)  We also refer to CPU Ready Time as the ”guest heartbeat.”

We generally monitor CPU Ready Time through VI client.  ESXTOP can also be used.   However, we prefer the VI client because it measures CPU Ready in milliseconds.

Select the virtual machine > Performance tab > click Advanced > click Chart Options... > CPU > Real Time > and select Ready

It is normal for a guest to average between 0 - 50ms of CPU ready time.  Anything over 300ms and you will experience performance problems. We’re comfortable with up to 300ms CPU Ready Time on average, with a high water mark of 500ms.

ESX Memory Oversubscription

Do not oversubscribe memory shared by Tier-1 Oracle workloads.  VCS should report no ballooning.

Oracle is very aggressive at using all of the resources available to it. When an Oracle instance starts up, it allocates memory for the Oracle SGA. This allows Oracle to use a contiguous space of memory for caching of data and SQL statements. As long as the instance is running, it will not give the memory back even if blocks are unused. Oracle memory is less dynamic then CPU. It tends to level out after the Oracle SGA has been allocated. You may see brief periods of spikes when the PGA is being used for a RMAN backup, but other than slight anomalies it tends to stay static. As with CPU, measure memory during peak workloads.

We recommend memory sizing by using the following 3 tools:

• Oracle SGA Advisor.
• Oracle PGA Advisor.
• OS metric collection (for example, nmon)

Start with the Oracle advisors first to determine if the SGA and PGA are accurately sized. We consider the SGA critical to virtual machine sizing. If, for example, the Oracle SGA is undersized this will affect your buffer cache hit and shared pool, negatively impacting performance. It will also skew your OS metric collection. After the SGA and PGA are sized accurately then use the OS collected metrics to determine the appropriate memory size of the virtual machine.

Allocate enough ESX physical memory to at least cover the Oracle SGA, and preferably as large as the sum of the SGA, the PGA high water mark, and memory used by the shadow processes.  If you use reservations, make sure that there is enough extra physical memory in the cluster that the failed over VM will not refuse to start.

In vSphere Client, select the VM > Performance tab > Advance tab > Chart Options… > Memory > Real Time > Active

Network Performance

We confess that we rarely run into network configuration issues that impede VMware Infrastructure performance.  Just the same, we’ll offer a standard.  There is always the possibility that a workload changes its virtual machine memory blocks at a high rate.  A workload so hot that it generates dirty memory blocks faster than the proprietary vMotion interconnect can move in thirty seconds is justification for beefing up the interconnect hardware capacity through faster NICs (or converged technology), teaming NICs, or both.

iperf Network Load Test

Conceptually the network load test should be used to force the max throughput of the network fabric and interfaces. Similar to the memory it flushes out any potential drive issues, hardware issues or network topology issues. This test is to validate performance and push the max throughput of the interfaces to determine if there are driver issues or stability problems.

Iperf is a network testing tool. It is able to create a TCP or UPD data stream between two nodes (or virtual machines). Iperf is open source software available for both Linux and Windows at http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/. Below is a simple test that runs for 500 seconds testing the maximum throughput of the network interfaces.

Server Node

$ iperf -s -i 5

Client Node

$ iperf -c -t 500 -i 5 –m

Dropped Packets

For network packets on a LAN, you ideally should not see dropped packets. Dropped packets typically indicate congestion in the network or failing hardware. One percent dropped packets in either direction can throttle throughput by as much as 15 percent.

In vSphere, dropped packets can be monitored by selecting the ESX host > Performance tab > Advanced > Network > Real Time > select None in Counters > then check Receive packets dropped and Transmit packets dropped

As we move forward, there are more layers in the system stack. Virtualization is being introduced for a whole bunch of reasons, each of which is justification alone in my mind for doing so.

From my viewpoint, virtualization blends the lines somewhat between the various IT administrators’ functions. I see that as a good thing for the admins, for IT, and for the business overall. This could be a huge paradigm shift in particular for some shops we’ve worked in where the various IT teams barely communicate between themselves.

My first-steps formula for moving in this direction:

1. Select up to ten performance attributes from these hardware resource groups that I list in what is usually descending order of importance: IO, memory, CPU, and network.

2. Adopt metrics for each attribute.

3. Adopt a handful of performance tools freely available or bundled with native Linux or Windows.

4. Author and promote elevator-pitch summary conceptual overviews of the performance attributes, the needs they fulfill, and your associated SLAs.

5. Regularly publish your performance metrics to the organization including the C-level and business users.

I believe there is significant benefit to IT proactively educating superiors and business peers on these performance attributes, unilaterally suggesting associated SLAs/red lines, and freely making the information available. Rather than self-inducing pressure, such information liberates. It naturally removes organizational barriers. It goes a long way to removing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. When appropriate, it brings more focus and leverage to IT CAPEX discussions including budget exceptions when necessary. Last but not least, it can demonstrate that VMware Infrastructure is for all intents and purposes transparent.

I’ll publish some key performance attributes, straw-man metrics, and suggest a handful of tools in a follow-up blog post.

A few weeks ago an industry colleague asked me that question. My answer was immediate: enhancements around VMDK.

This blog entry is not about any new specific features of the code name MN release.

And no, I’m not talking about enhancements to the VMFS file system. It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that about the only evidence of VMFS's aging is how many calendar pages have flipped since its last revision under ESX 3.5. No doubt VMFS yet has room for improvement, just as the ESX kernel scheduler had room for improvement when it was completely re-written more granularly for vSphere 4. As the GA VMFS release stands, it’s already capable of a scant 100 microseconds of latency per IO in the hypervisor, and that with linear scalability.

What I’m talking about is the absolute certainty that the list of features that require VMDK storage will continue to expand. That’s going to put all the more pressure on organizations that are worried about keeping a rapid V2P rip cord handy next to their virtual tier-1 production Oracle databases.

Direct-mounted storage and RDM both hold out the possibility of a very rapid replatform to native. Or better yet use either storage paradigm to leave production on vSphere where it belongs and hot-fork a branch to native.

As of 4.1, here’s my list of key features that are only enabled by VMDK, listed in what I would say is their descending order of importance:

• Lab Manager/vCloud Director

• Storage vMotion

• Storage IO Control

• Fault Tolerance

The odds of getting into a Sev-1 yelling match with Oracle Support over vSphere’s presence in a production stack are largely mitigated by proper system stack architecture. Our CEO Nathan Biggs wonders if it is a coincidence that in all the years we’ve been doing this, no House of Brick customer has ever needed to V2P their production Oracle system for support purposes.

VMware is hardware to Oracle. Our team's day-to-day experience has me thinking that  a major purpose of the replatforming language in Oracle’s VMware support statement may be to serve as a legal hedge in the unlikely event that anybody were to ever encounter a VMware hypervisor problem that actually induced an Oracle bug. It doesn’t surprise me that we’ve been seeing a significant up-tick in the number of enterprises determined to virtualize the entire stack.

From my view, there is no significant body of street experience to justify pre-emptively avoiding VMDK out of fear for Oracle Support. To that subset of shops that say “We’re not virtualizing production without a rapid V2P insurance policy,” I’d still say being virtual with restricted storage tooling beats the heck out of being stuck on native. Better yet, if you stick with VMDK, you’re in an expanding crowd of good company.

Side notes on the VMDK-enabled features mentioned above:

Fault Tolerance: I yawn in the Tier-1 space today anytime FT is mentioned. Precious few of our customers’ Tier-1 workloads' can accommodate their high water marks with a single vCPU. But in some future moment when someone crosses my palm with a SMP FT announcement, in that same moment FT will hold out the prospect of high availability fail-over SLAs of just seconds. As such, SMP FT will demand to be re-evaluated against much more expensive, complex, incumbent RDBMS clustering technologies.

Lab Manager: yes, the vCloud Director source code branch allows multiple data stores under a single configuration of VMs. But I’ll keep promoting Lab Manager until its vCloud Director cousin is enhanced with linked clone capability which I consider critical for the pre-production product development lifecycle. And I’ll continue to advocate that shops pull together single highly-performant data stores underneath Lab Manager until then.

As for Storage vMotion, Storage IO Control or even SAN vendor FC/Solid State dynamic reallocation algorithms, I see great value in each of them. I’m also certain they are not a wise substitute for poor or missing storage architecture. Rather, they should be viewed as nice insurance policies on top of properly-architected storage.

It's official.  Yesterday Oracle announced support for RAC 11.2.0.2 or newer on VMware.  No exclusions or conditions.

I laud Oracle Corp. for their decision.  They are going to sell more RAC as a result of removing the RAC-on-VMware support restriction.

House of Brick has been relentless in the promotion of RAC-on-VMware.  If RAC is appropriate for a workload, then every aspect of the stack's product lifecycle can be optimized when virtualized on what I consider to be the world's premier platform.

House of Brick did our first production-grade RAC-on-VMware implementation in May 2007 and I spoke on it at VMworld later that year.  I dedicated an entire session in April at IOUG 2010 to RAC-on-VMware and the results of our Break/Fix lab.  This is probably as good a time as any for me to come clean and admit Break/Fix Lab was a misnomer because there is inherently nothing broken about RAC-on-vSphere.

With this, I'm going to find the time to get my six minute video summary posted of our RAC-on-VMware Break/Fix Lab.  I promised the attendees of our EA8700 session at VMworld 2010 that I'd get it out there, but it kept getting back-burnered.

So, if Oracle Corp. now acknowledges the advisability of removing the VMware support restriction for the world's premier High Availability RDBMS and their most complex database offering, what does that tell you about the viability of single instance Oracle on VMware?

I’m happy to report that House of Brick’s most recent event was back in Omaha—our Solid Foundations seminar December 4th.  My presentation was “Oracle DB 11g R2 New Features”.  My slides are available here.  This presentation is not a comprehensive list of 11g R2 DB new features.  Rather, it is an overview of those features that have caught my eye from our perspective of involvement with our customer base.  There is at least one feature in here that isn’t in the New Features Guide: the new Result Cache, that Oracle placed in the Shared Pool, of all places.  I intentionally held off in reviewing Tom Kyte’s must-see Oracle Open World ’09 presentation “11 things about Oracle Database 11g Release 2” until I was done with my own new features compilation.

Our Omaha customer/prospect base may have noticed we’ve been a little quiet lately.  Lately we’ve been guilty of distraction, and that’s a welcome problem.  On the one hand our local customer base continues to expand.  On the other hand, our local customer base is getting to be a smaller piece of our total business.  Moving forward, we anticipate we will supplement our Omaha-based Solid Foundations live events with webinars to connect with our expanding customer base and prospects out of our local region.

Years ago we faced another welcome problem: House of Brick live events were drawing large crowds while the Nebraska Oracle User Group had as few as 15 at some events.  The NOUG board proposed a merger of the events.  We were humbled by NOUG’s overture and we agreed.  Since then, our Oracle business has grown but at the same time become a smaller piece of our overall activities.  Because of this, we suggested that the NOUG re-evaluate if it makes sense to continue to fold into our Omaha live events as Oracle is getting proportionately less of our presentation bandwidth and indeed is no longer even our primary topic.  NOUG leadership agreed and have announced that they will combine with the Heartland Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG)’s Omaha events.

When I asked Friday’s Solid Foundations crowd how many shops were running Oracle RAC, easily a third of the hands went up.

It’s been hopping since Oracle Open World.  I’ve been doing a lot of events and Fortune 500 customer site visits—all of them on the topic of tier-1 workloads on VMware.

I think it inevitable that the enterprise trend to evaluate options to VMware, will collide with enterprises’ need to leverage virtualization’s benefits into tier-1 workloads, let alone horizontal scaling.  I look forward to the word-on-the-street revelations that will come from that.  Forget vendor posturing.  The passage of time makes it more difficult for people that over-represent themselves to maintain control of the message.  I find it interesting that the majority of the scaled shops we are talking to already have VMware Enterprise License Agreements in place but haven’t yet moved into tier-1 virtualization.  I also find it interesting that configuration defects in many shops go unnoticed but become sudden roadblocks when the shops attempt to virtualize a tier-1 workload.

I continue to slam into a consistent, significant uptick in RAC interest wherever I go.  On that topic, shops interested in RAC will want to make sure they look at Barb Lundhild’s OOW ’09 presentation “Understanding Oracle Real Application Clusters Internals”. There are significant RAC enhancements and component realignments as of DB 11g R2.

During Sunday’s Partner Event keynote, Larry Ellison said,”I think it’s enormously exciting that we can take this great company Sun and combine it with another great company Oracle and then merge those technologies and maybe do things neither company would be able to do by themselves.  That’s our goal, to tackle problems even bigger, to integrate hardware and software, and deliver revolutionary systems.”

Monday Oracle President Safra Catz said: “That it turns out that us and all the other software vendors, were all sending you little pieces of technology all these years, and it was at your site that you had to make it all work together.  And what we thought was that this really didn’t make sense.  That long-term, companies like us had to take more and more of the responsibility of bringing you systems that work together.”  She continued, “But many of you know there’s a reason we call this Oracle Open World, because we are just slavishly devoted to open standards.  And if you want some of the pieces and some from others, that’s ok.  We’re going to make that possible.  But our hope is that little by little, you take many of the pieces from us.”

Yet it appears to me that Oracle has already started stepping away from openness, in the very moment when its hardware partners, OS partners, and customers rather need to be reassured as to Oracle’s commitment to a somewhat level playing field moving forward.  I submit as evidence the “Database Smart Flash Cache” feature new in 11g R2.

11.2 New Features E10881-03 October 2009, p. 1-27: “New in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2), the Database Smart Flash Cache feature is a transparent extension of the database buffer cache using solid state device (SSD) technology. The SSD acts as a Level 2 cache to the (Level 1) SGA. Database Smart Flash Cache can greatly improve the performance of Oracle databases by reducing the amount of disk I/O at a much lower cost than adding an equivalent amount of RAM."

Sounds pretty good.  But get this restriction in the 11.2 Concepts Guide part # E10713-04 October 2009 p. 14-9) “Note: Database Smart Flash Cache is available only in Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux.”  The 11.2 Admin Guide (part # E10595-06 October 2009 p. 6-21) says Database Smart Flash Cache is only supported on the Solaris or Oracle Enterprise Linux operating systems.  This is confirmed by 11.2 Release Notes for Linux (part # E10838-03 October 2009 p. 2) and 11.2 Database Release Notes -03 p. 9.  11.2 Database Licensing Information (p. 1-4) says Database Smart Flash Cache is Enterprise Edition only and Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux only.  The 11.2 Reference (E10820-03 October 2009 p. 1-49, 1-50) says nothing about OS restrictions on either of the new db_flash_cache_file and db_flash_cache_size parameters.

What technical justification could Oracle have to not make this feature available or not support it in the HP-UX, AIX, or Windows ports for example, let alone the Red Hat and SuSe Linux distributions?  I’m feeling the need to reevaluate my enthusiasm for Oracle Enterprise Linux, for the first time since its announcement in 2006.

Mr. Ellison said, “There are some advantages of the single organization having control of the engineering of the hardware also engineering the software and engineering all the pieces to fit together well.”

It would appear that Oracle is already taking initiatives with respect to the Sun/Oracle announcement that give me pause.  If we’re already seeing what may be a competition-motivated lock-out of a key feature like database smart flash cache today, what kinds of additional lock-outs may be coming once the hardware and DB software are subjected to co-engineering?  I am not in favor of Oracle’s Sun acquisition.
 

Mr. Ellison continued in his Sunday keynote, “We are not selling the hardware business, no part of the hardware business are we selling.  And we think Sparc is a fantastic technology, and with a little more investment it could be even better.  You know the CMT line is fantastically innovate, and we think again by adding to the already spectacularly good engineering team we have around Sparc, we can increase our rate of innovation.  Make the chip even more reliable while consuming less power.  Make the chip even faster while consuming less power.  So we intend to invest in Sparc.”

I’ve been dazzled by how elegantly Oracle has integrated opened new business lines beginning with the Oracle Application Server curve back at the turn of the decade.  I had my doubts Oracle was going to make it with an app server, but they proved it to me, technically as well as with actual market share.  Oracle has consistently impressed me with their integration of acquired companies both organizationally and technically.  I’ve wondered since the Oracle/Sun announcement if Oracle was finally in over their head by attempting to get into hardware.  This week I’m swayed over to believe that Oracle can probably pull off the integration and management of Sun’s hardware lines.  Larry Ellison’s in charge and he’s a remarkably impressive visionary, strategist and tactician.

Mr. Ellison continued, “Solaris is unquestionably the number one enterprise operating system in the world in terms of linear scalability, in terms of reliability, in terms of features and functions.  It is the leading operating system running the Oracle database.  But it’s just the leading enterprise operating system period.”

Mr. Ellison continued, “And we’re very proud to be working with Sun to make sure that all the Oracle software runs better on Solaris, more reliably on Solaris, and faster on Solaris than it’s ever run before, and it runs faster there than it runs any place.”

So what are Oracle’s intentions with respect to Linux?  I think Chris Josephes sheds useful light on the issue, especially as it relates to Oracle’s 2005 declaration of Solaris 10 as the preferred development platform for these 64 bit platforms: UltraSparc, AMD-64, and Intel-64. 

Mr. Ellison continued, “We’re going to spend more, not less on MySQL.  We think it’s a fantastic piece of technology, it’s extremely popular, it’s an open source product, and we’re going to increase our rate of contribution to that product.”

On Wednesday, Scott McNealy said: “The one I hear a lot about is MySQL.  Open Source.  Well, what’s going to happen?  This is the volume, open source, low end database out there in the marketplace.  Is it going to get clobbered?  Well, I don’t think so.  And again Larry has said, “It doesn’t compete with the Oracle database,” which is true, this competes with Microsoft.”  Mr. McNealy put up a slide with this text: “’MySQL and Oracle don’t compete at all,’ said Mr. Ellison adding that he would not sell MySQL.  Financial Times, 22 September 2009”.

So what about the whole engineering effort behind Oracle 10g with one of the prominent objectives being that it would compete with SQL Server’s relative ease of installation and operations?  At the time we were led to understand that the single CD 20 minute 10g Database install and the improved manageability of 10g Database, was in part a response to Oracle’s concern about the hemorrhage of customers jumping ship for SQL Server.  What about Oracle’s open admission in the fall of 2005 that Oracle Express was a direct answer to SQL Server 2005 Express?  If MySQL and Oracle don’t compete at all, then one would have to talk themselves into the new concept that SQL Server and Oracle don’t compete at all.  A MySQL customer today doesn’t have the obvious technical upgrade path to paid Oracle versions compared to an Oracle Express customer.  What then could Oracle’s financial/business interest in continuing to promote MySQL?  I’d like to hear an answer to that question, rather than Oracle continuing to attempt to convince us that they’re going to support and contribute to MySQL simply because they say they will.  The existence of the Oracle employee assigned to MySQL documentation, that I met at Tuesday evening’s bloggers’ meeting, did more to convince me of the prospects of Oracle’s on-going support for MySQL, than all of these executive statements combined.

On Wednesday during his Exadata II comments, Mr. Ellison said, “The important thing here I think is our belief that eventually the virtual machine, the VM, and the operating system have to work exceptionally well together.  That means they have to be engineered together.”

With respect to the last sentence, I’m afraid I’m not similarly disposed.   VMware and the guest operating systems weren’t engineered together, although current versions were most definitely engineered with awareness of each other.  On the other hand, this seems like a huge forward looking statement on Oracle’s part, and one that I believe sets up a straw man to fill market demand that doesn’t today exist.  On Thursday while leaving the conference, I had an epiphany about my full-time experience in VMware’s OOW pavilion: not one person asked me about Oracle Virtual Machine or even mentioned it.

Oracle has somehow managed to stay out of USA Today and the Wall Street Journal so far this week, according to what I have noticed.  Expect that to change today with Larry Ellison’s keynote, assisted on-stage by California Gov Schwarzenegger.

I’m intrigued by Oracle’s Golden Gate acquisition announcement.  Golden Gate specializes in real time decision support data integration.  Look for Golden Gate to play well with Oracle’s strategic business intelligence acquisitions of Siebel and Hyperion business intelligence acquisitions.  These compliment Oracle’s tenured Data Warehouse Builder and OLAP—already tightly integrated with the database.

Major changes in the Oracle Partner program announced on Sunday.  Oracle’s acquisitions have outgrown the existing partner framework.  The partner program now allows and encourages specialization.  Among the changes is the separation (at least for partners) of decoupling certification from Oracle University training.  The Exadata Storage servers and Sun Oracle Database hardware are available for re-sale by Oracle Partners as of December 1.  I thank Ray Wang for his excellent recap of the Sunday announcements.

After hanging with VMware’s Chris Rimer (owns the Oracle relationship world-wide) and even speaking with him around the country, I finally get it on the Oracle-on-VMware “certification” issue.  Oracle doesn’t certify below the OS.  VMware is hardware to the Oracle red stack, because it’s below the OS.  With respect to Oracle’s VMware support clause that Oracle may ask a customer to assist replicating the bug on physical hardware, that makes Oracle’s VMware support policy no different than Oracle’s policy with HP or other hardware vendors.  This is consistent with Wim Coekaert’s response in Sunday’s partner Oracle Virtual Machine meeting to a guy asking a one-off question about VMware support.  Wim is reported to have said that Oracle’s no different than most other ISV’s with respect to that policy.  This is an appropriate time for me to remind that to-date Oracle support has never asked any HoB Oracle VMware customer to replicate any problem on native hardware.

I ran into Tim Gorman at last night’s Bloggers’ meeting.  We flew Tim into Omaha a few years ago to keynote at Solid Foundations.  Tim is on HoB’s very short list of Oracle business intelligence specialists to call.  He’s also an Oak Table member.  I also enjoyed chatting with John, a ten-year Oracle employee who blogs independently of Oracle’s blog site, and who works on Oracle’s MySQL documentation project.
 

I’ve enjoyed the steady stream of HoB customers and associates who have been stopping by the VMware pavilion.  It feels like a high school reunion.  Nebraska Workers’ Compensation Court’s Randy Cecrle observes that the exhibit floor is substantially shifted from previous years.  He’s not finding the third party content/document management, IDE or BPM vendors out there.  Much fewer development tool vendors.  He says he checked the program guide to make sure he wasn’t overlooking them.

I’ll be taking a look at what’s new in OVM 2.2, announced this week.

The best break-out session recommendation that I’ve heard yet from Oppenheimer Fund’s Roger Rose.  Monday Steve Shaw’s session S312645: “Oracle Database Performance on Linux: Tips, Tools, and Tuning for Intel Platforms.”  This included the option to disable the Linux background process that can slow down the clock for power consumption.  It also included changing the NUMA memory setting/interleave from 6K to 2M.

Look for my comprehensive review of the show’s keynotes tomorrow. 

This show’s down to about 35K attendees, compared to 45K two years ago.  Oracle’s cutting back; no third year of the mega LCD screens with Oracle ads on either end of Howard St.

Surprising trend: In day one of my VMware Pavilion volunteer work, I got asked as many questions about the mechanics of running RAC on VMware, as I did any other Oracle-on-VMware topic.

From Sunday’s Oracle/Sun talk: I noticed Larry Ellison’s defense of TPC fining Oracle a whopping $10K for making a comparative IBM performance claim based on numbers that Oracle hadn’t yet published.  In my opinion, Mr. Ellison seems to be saying in so many words that the end justified the means and they made the decision fully anticipating the $10K fine.

I’ll no doubt say more about Oracle’s Sun acquisition later.  Out of all of the Sun issues, I probably the most curious about what Oracle will do with Sun’s MySQL business line.  Six years ago, we used to laugh at this little database that had no stored procedures and didn’t even have commit/rollback.  We stopped laughing at MySQL a few years ago.  Now it’s one of our business lines.  I keep reminding myself that if Oracle were to attempt to scuttle or ignore (same thing) MySQL with intent to reduce competition for the Oracle database, that someone out there would no doubt take the open source remnants and keep it alive.  I just scanned two sheets that I picked up today at the Sun pavilion.  The first sheet describes each of their 23 demo stations.  The second lists the ~50 Sun-related sessions at the show.  Not a word in either about MySQL.  That's a disappointment.

 
News today that caught my eye since we do a lot with E-Business Suite shops: datango claims reduction of Oracle application rollout and support costs by over 40%.

HP targeted Oracle Apps shops today, announcing a series of new provisioning templates for BladeSystem Matrix users.  I'd like to see a vendor step forward with Oracle Apps VMware virtual machine templates.