by Jim Hannan

What is VBCA?

What is Virtualizing Business Critical Applications (VBCA)? A Business Critical Application is exactly what it sounds like, an application that is critical to business success and day-to-day operations. Without it, businesses would struggle to function. Common VBCA applications are: Oracle RDBMS, SQL Server, Exchange, and SAP to name a few.

I believe vSphere 5, as much as anything else, is a VBCA release. What I mean by that is, when you compare it to previous releases the new features are primarily enhancements for providing a platform for VBCAs. VBCA workloads typically have large resource requirements like CPU or memory and, in the case of databases, I/O throughput. Creatively, this type of workload has been dubbed by VMware as a 'Monster VM'.

With vSphere 5, VMware has created a platform more than capable of running Monster VMs. This blog, and the next 5-6 following it, will highlight some of the key features that, in my opinion, give vSphere 5 the accolade of a “VBCA release”.

Part I - Scalable Virtual Machines and Enhanced co-scheduler

At this point it is very well known that the maximum vCPUs a single VM can run is 32 vCPUs. For me, this number is staggeringly high. At HoB, we have been virtualizing VBCA workloads as far back as ESX versions 3 and 4, with a maximum of 4 and 8 vCPUs respectively. In our estimation, 90% of the workloads can fit into a configuration of 8 vCPUs (or fewer). At Indiana University we experienced this first hand when assisting them with virtualizing their OnCourse system. The OnCourse Oracle database was previously on an AIX Power5 LPAR with 12 CPUs allocated. During peak workloads the Oracle database was consuming 9.5 processors. After virtualizing the workload and load testing, we determined not only that the workload would fit without the 8 vCPU max, but it was only using between 35% - 50% of the CPU. This left lots of scalability for the database. Fast forward to today. With a maximum of 32 vCPUs, the door has opened for virtualizing 95% of the workloads in existence.

How did VMware make the jump from 8 vCPU maximum to 32 vCPU maximum?

This is an intriguing question. The best public information available on this achievement is discussed the VMware Whitepaper - The CPU Scheduler in VMware ESX 4. The “relaxed” co-scheduler was first introduced in ESX version 3.0 with a maximum single VM vCPU configuration of 4. In this version, the VMware engineers adapted a cell model. The cells were assigned to pCPU (physical CPU). A common processor configuration during the ESX 3 release was a physical processor with 4 cores. As pCPU core counts increased with AMD and Intel chips, VMware determined that the cell model was no longer adequate.

In ESX 4 the VMware engineers moved from the 4 vCPU limit to 8 vCPU by eliminating the cell architecture to finer-grained locks. This allowed a single VM to span multiple pCPU and allows for scheduling of one vCPU for certain task. This gives the guest OS the ability to schedule one vCPU for single process or thread and greatly reduces the overhead or cost of CPU scheduling from the previous ESX version.

ESXi 5 further enhanced  SMP scheduling, increasing SMT application performance. This increase in some cases can reach up to 10% - 30% (see What’s New in Performance in VMware vSphere 5.0). And, of course, the new 32 vCPU maximum per a single VM increased from the previous maximum of 8 vCPUs.

Here’s the evolution timeline of the co-scheduler:

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.

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.