Vmware cluster

Hello, in our organisation we are going to make a redudancy sulation on OS-level with vmware cluster. I am new to this and dont understand mutch. Ive tried to google for several hours but i havent found anything regarding this; vmware cluster, redudancy etc
How does the vmware cluster works?.
I dont want to look like a fool with no knowledge about this. So i would be glad if someone explained to me how this works, or give me good documents.
Thanks, Johan

And i have another question, as to my knowledge if host 1 goes down, vmware cluster will start up another machine (or maybe its already up as standby, or maybe already balancing the power), but say if i have Oracle database, can vmware be noticed when Oracle instance go down and then start up another machine to take the lead from there?

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Mix guest os in a vmware cluster

Hi All,
I am trying to figure out if there is performance hit due to mix type of guest os in a vmware cluster e.g. Linux and windows VM's deployed together.
Is there any best practice document on it ?
Thanks

Yes that's correct, situation is related to large cluster of VDI environment. As Tom mentioned that different OS types may not be able to take benefit of Transparent Page Sharing. Additionally, Linux and windows have different way of using timer interrupts to keep os time up-to-date. Refer page 14 and 15 of below document - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Timekeeping-In-VirtualMachines.pdf Not sure it would present a significant drain on resources --

CPU over-commit in VMware cluster environment

I have read the note 1056052. The #5 guideline points out that SAP system should not use memory over-commit setting for virtual machines built on Windows with SQL server platform. My question is if this recommendation applys to CPU as well. Is it common to set CPU over commit for virtual machines that run dialog instance?
My environment is VMware vSphere 4.1, four ESX servers, ESX1 and ESX2 for production and ESX3 for DEV and ESX4 for QAS respectively. The initial placement is PRD CI+DB residents on ESX1 with all resources allocated, three PRD DIs each with 4 vCPU configured residents on ESX2 (total CPU capacity: 8, so CPU is over-committed here). Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is enabled in the VMware cluster. I suppose DRS will initiate vMotion for one or two DIs from ESX2 to ESX3 or ESX4 with spare resources when PRD is loaded heavily.
Do you think the above system landscape and configuration is a practical one or reasonable? Thanks in adanvce for your help.

Matthias, thank you for your reply. You are right on the conclusion of CPU contention in case of high workload where CPU is over-committed. That's exactly where DRS can benefit SAP. I am now testing to see if CPU over-commitment will slow down the system in normal workload or the performance down is in an acceptable range. What's your insight of this?
At the same time, let's consider a different configuration. I remove the CPU over-commitment, for example 4 VMs each with 2 vCPU running on a 8-core ESX server. When the system is constantly stressed, DRS triggers vMotion of 1 VM off the specific ESX server. Comparing the response time before and after vMotion of that DI, I didn't see any improvement at all. Does this make sense? Can I conclude that DRS doesn't help in improving SAP performance whe CPU is not over-cmmitted on DI server?
Edited by: Fred Zhou on Nov 3, 2010 9:21 AM

Oracle licensing in a Vmware Cluster

My question is related with Oracle licensing in a Vmware Cluster.
We have two VMware cluster in our datacenter: the first one (8 hosts – 16 sockets) is for not Oracle VM and the second (2 host – 3 sockets) only for Oracle VM. Both are connected to the same IBM V7000 with zoning and LUN masking that guarantees isolation.
In the Oracle cluster, DRS and HA are deactivated and VMotion logs are monitored for license compliance.
In this isolated environment, Oracle pretend to license every socket to any host connected to the V7000, regardless of the cluster that are connected the host.
Do you know how similar implementations with Oracle have been resolved (in terms of licensing)?
Thanks in advance!

Definitely a useful article. Also useful is this one:
http://houseofbrick.com/managing-oracle-licensing-in-a-shared-storage-environment/
And the various Oracle licensing-related articles written by Michael Webster:
http://longwhiteclouds.com/tag/oracle/
http://longwhiteclouds.com/tag/licensing/
To me personally it boils down to the very simple contractual key element:
By contract, you have to license every physical processor of every physical server where Oracle was/is running (whether that was as a VM or physical is irrelevant).
Conversely this means that by contract, you don't have to pay a penny for any physical server that never ever had Oracle software running on itself, period.
It's amazing how Oracle reps can keep ****ing with their customers like this.

Business Objects in vmware cluster very slow

Post Author: aboorkuma
CA Forum: Administration
Hi
I recently move the BO From standalone server to Cluster in vmwrae users are facing problem when accessing the
reports , some times page cannot displayed or timeout coming now it is very very slow what are all the parameters i need to tune
to bring the system faster
rds

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They will give you a brief overview.
Please also visit [our BI community|https://boc.sdn.sap.com/] to see more solutions, samples and docus.
Best regards
Falk

Business Objects and Data Services on VMWare

My company has a requirement to deploy Business Objects 4.0 as well as Data Services.
We are going to be deploying them on Windows Server 2008 R2, hosted on a VMWare cluster. I have reviewed the PAM, but my question is:
Will these run using SQL Server 2008 R2 as a database? I see "SQL Server 2008" and I am just curious whether R2 is also supported?
Thanks.

Hi,
SQL Server 2008 R2 is listed in the PAM for DS as Repo DB. For BI4 it is also working and supported. I installed it already on it.
Regards
-Seb.

Don't know where to start with replicating ZFS in a two node cluster

I've got two systems in a lab I'm trying to use to make a ZFS based SAN for a VMWare cluster. I have experience with Linux and Gluster which was easy to have Active/Active High availability, however the benefits of ZFS I'm ok with Active/Passive. The issue I can't get around is finding out the solution in Solaris 11.2 that will mirror the data from the primary node to the secondary node and allow the secondary node to serve and receive data when the primary is down. This is a lab, so I'm not prepared or able to purchase a solution like EMC until I already have some proof of concept. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated

Hi user8777368,
for me this sounds like to failover the zfs filesystem from primary to secondary when the primary goes down. In such a case you can simply use the SUNW.HAStoragePlus resource with property "Zpools" to failover the zpool from one node to the other. The disks where the zfs is located should be in SAN and accessible from all nodes in the Solaris Cluster. There is no need to replicate data in such a scenario. An example is available in:
Solaris Cluster How to use ZFS and Zpools with HAStoragePlus and to Get it Mounted Correctly (Doc ID 1019912.1)
Does this help?
Juergen

DirectAccess 2012 (VMWare) NLB Setup Help

Hi All,
A bit of background on our current setup.
2 X Physical servers (server 2012 r2) hosting DA 2012 in NLB Cluster (Unicast)
All working fine.
I wish to virtualise the DA solution using VMWare. I've built two virtual machines with a view of evicting one of the physical nodes from the existing cluster and introducing the virtual machine.
However I’ve come across on this forum various posts in relation to unicast/multicast setup and has let me somewhat confused.
The current servers are plugged into a layer 2 switch going directly out to the inet. Saying that I’ve read something about layer 3 arp entries? i suppose the layer 3 switch would be our ISP? we have no layer 3 switches in between DA and
the inet here at the office (sorry i am not a networking guy, so this might sound stupid... but I’ve been informed it's layer 2 switch only)
On the virtual machines i've added an internal nic and and external nic (the external nic is dedicated on the VMware host and not shared with other port groups) what do i need to do to ensure i will have no problems when it comes to introducing the
virtual machine into the existing cluster please?
I know a couple of you have setup NLB on VMWare for DA, can someone kindly point me in the direction of some documentation specifically for this kind of setup or what be more helpful is if you could kindly explain what i need to do step by step.
I've read VMWare's documentation but wanted to get some feedback from someone who has done a real world install.
Do i need to set anything on the VSwitch for example notify switches, allow mac address changes etc?

Hi All,
I've managed to virtualize DA fully with Teredo/6to4/IP-Https all working.
*** Operating in Multicast mode ****
I have 6 hosts part of a VMWare cluster, i allocated 1 port per host which is connected to the internet directly (no fw in between, expect a switch)
I then created a vSphere distributed switch/port group with the following settings
Promiscuous mode: Reject
Mac Address Changes: Accept
Forged Transmits: Accept
Notify Switches: Yes
Once this had been all setup, next step was to talk to our ISP to add the NLB Cluster MAC address to their ARP table as a static entry pointing back to the external VIP’s
because I already had DA in place on two physical servers, I changed the NLB settings from unicast to multicast, and yes when I did this on the internal network I lost the IPV6 address from the NLB settings (so make sure you make a note of it to put it back)
Changing to multicast might cause the servers to become unresponsive (did in my case) I waited a while and one came back, whilst the other needed a reset.
Next step was to introduce a 3rd node and evict one of the physical servers, so I built a virtual machine
Basic spec (4GB 1Vcpu 4cores) 2012 R2
Two network cards
Internal (on the same vlan as the physical servers)
External (connected to the new port group I created above)
I also (probably didn’t need to) set a static mac address on the VM for both network cards.
Allocated an external IP address to the external nic on the VM made sure I can ping google etc
Copied the settings from the physical servers i.e removed GW from internal nic on VM added static route etc etc
Installed the SSL certificate on the 3rd node
Introduced the 3rd node into the existing DA cluster and made sure to move the VM into the DA servers OU so it gets the DA server policy
In NLB manager 3rd host showing as “misconfigured”
Logged onto 3rd node (VM) launched NLB manager, noticed was set to unicast – changed to multicast, brought node online.
Once everything was showing green and I could see connections to the 3rd host, I removed one of the physical servers from the cluster using the DA console.
So back down to two nodes.
Waited 24 hours
Introduced 2nd VM or 3rd node again in this case following same steps as above.
Removed remaining physical host from DA cluster.

Sercurity risk of VMware between internal and DMZ network

What are the sercurity concerns of having VMware Cluster with your DMZ and internal network on it? What are the pros and cons? Would someone be able to break into the kernal of the machine from the DMZ and than get into your internal network?

I've never heard of anyone doing it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. The vSwitches are pretty transparent and there two common design fixes for it; install the Cisco Nexus 1000v which replaces the VM vSwitch and gives you some insight and/or create a dedicated DMZ host for the DMZ VM's. Neither of them cheap

Exchange 2013 DAG with VMWare Clustering

Hi team,
I'm looking at a scenario where there are 3 Hosts with a SAN for storage and is
Clustered for failover with so many other server/applications. The requirement is to have a High Available environment with Exchange 2013. Now I want to know the possibility of having 2xCAS (WNLB) and 2xMailbox Servers with DAG.
1) Want to know if this is a supported scenario, where DAG is implemented in a VMWare cluster.
2) The DAG on cluster is to ensure that even if no host failure occurs i have VM level failover. and if Host Level failover occurs I have cluster based failover.
Any guidance is much appreciated.
Thank you.
Cheers!

Hello,
It is not supported configuration that combining VMware HA solution with the Exchange application-aware high availability solution.
Here are some articles for your reference.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2012/08/28/best-practices-for-virtualizing-microsoft-exchange-2010-msexchange-itpro-hyperv-vmware.aspx#.Uxfd2P7xuM8
http://exchangeserverpro.com/microsoft-vs-vmware-on-exchange-virtualization-and-ha-best-practices/ (
Note: Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. The sites are not controlled by Microsoft. Microsoft cannot make any representations regarding the quality, safety, or suitability of any software or information found there. Please make
sure that you completely understand the risk before retrieving any suggestions from the above link.)
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TechNet Community Support

Desktop Cloning on Vmware

Hi All!
I'm trying to clone desktops from vdi3.1 with a vmware virtualcenter 2.5
I can import desktops, but there's no way i can clone desktops.
After clicking on the cloon button the webpage logs off and i can logon..
someone furmiliar with this problem

( Sorry for spelling )
The setup is as following:
Software VDI 3.1
1 VDi Core ( primary )
2 Secondary hosts for Database ( Mysql Cluster)
Vmware cluster with Vcenter server

Vmware clusters and L2 Spanning

Server virtualization and coud computing are the driving forces behind the need to span a network's L2 domain. This is where TRILL comes into play. You get horizontal scale-out in a flattened network, with multiple L2 forwarding paths powered by TRILL.
The question I have is just how far across the data center does the L2 domain really need to span? Lets say this is a vmware environment. The latest version of vSphere allows up to 32 hosts per cluster. Furthermore, it is only within that 32-host cluster that a vmotion or DRS or FT action can take place. Theoretically, you can configure the vmware cluster to span the entire server farm, end-to-end. But in reality, how are vmware clusters configured? I would think that the hosts in a cluster are largely configured in adjacent cabinets, not across the entire data center. So, do you REALLY need to span the L2 domain across the entire data center server farm?

Hi Ayodeji,
Is this type of deployment support.
Also off the topic question, can I have a top level domain(example.com) and sub-domain(staging.example.com) form a peer relationship in im & presence servers.
As per Cisco 2 sub-domains apart of the same top-level domain can form a peer relationship.
Thanks.

RAC performance on Vmware

Hello to all
Last month I have been assigned an assignment to work on RAC. Our application is a data ware housing and we striving for performance. Our high management orders me to implement Rac for performance. I have started work on RAC. And submit my finding. I found that RAC is slower on VMware software
We have installed the oracle RAC software on the followings:
Two VM machines (with 4 GB ram each, 1 Processor each with hard drive space 50Gb each)
     Two Physical machines with following specs:
•     Intel Core 2 Duo (2.0 GHZ)
•     2 GB ram each
•     80 GB SATA Hard Drive each
•     One Shared Drive on network (SATA 80 GB)
•     Two LAN card on each system (1 Giga bits each). One for private and other for public.
o     VM Performance Issues
     We are facing following issues on VM machines:
•     Slow I/O (Very slow loading and execution performance)
•     CPU was on 100 % without any activity
•     The VM machines were on a single server thus they were sharing the same physical hard drive and LAN cards
But today my Boss sends me an article in which claim that RAC is faster on VMWARE software instead of Physical machine. Now I have to answer to higher management. I could not understand what I said. Becoz during my experiment it perform very poor. Plz help me or suggest me what is your opinion. I’m waiting for your reply
Link of article
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/05/08/oracle_vmware/ ?
Regards
Edited by: Oracle Studnet on May 11, 2009 3:01 AM

Hi Oracle Student,
I see a few problems here. First off, I think the author of the article, Chris Mellor, may have misunderstood the comments made by Chuck Hollis of EMC and/or The Oracle Storage Guy (both linked to in Mellor's article), and I think that you and your management definitely have misunderstood something.
It sounds to like you're running RAC nodes on virtual hosts? That's just crazy, and makes no sense!
First off, RAC is NOT a performance solution. It's a high availability solution! The only time it makes sense as a performance solution is when your application's requirements are so large, you can't buy a single node that's large enough to support your app! So, for example, your application is well-designed and optimized, and it still needs more performance than you can get from a Sun E25K or HP Superdome, etc. Machines in this class have on the order of 256 CPUs and hundreds of GBs (possibly into the TBs) of RAM. This level of hardware is on the order of 10s of millions of dollars. There are VERY, VERY FEW applications that really need this kind of capacity. If you are one, then it makes sense to look at RAC for PERFORMANCE. Otherwise, RAC is NOT a performance solution!
It is, however, a high availability solution! So, if you need to provide an Oracle database in a high availability environment, then RAC is (part of) the solution. It will provide high availabiliy at OS/node level. If a server crashes, this is where RAC is beneficial. It won't do anything for disk/SAN failure, though. (That's where DataGuard would come in.)
Finally, if you read the two blogs cited in the article you provided the link to:
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2009/05/why-oracle-doesnt-like-vmware.html
http://oraclestorageguy.typepad.com/oraclestorageguy/2009/05/response-to-comments-from-alessandro-perilli-blog.html
If you read those, it becomes obvious that they're comparing RAC on physical hardware to single-instance on VMWare. It makes NO SENSE to run RAC on two virtuall machines, particularly if the two VMs are on the same physical machine.
What they are describing is the following:
Suppose you have two nodes, let's say they are HP DL-585s, each w/ 4 dual-core CPUs and 64 GB of RAM. (Just two hypothetical, typical pieces of hardware.) Now, your requirement is to best utilize these two nodes to provide high availability for two databases. How do you do it?
Well, there are two solutions (possibly more, but these are the two relevant ones) to consider:
RAC or VMWare.
RAC:
You set up your two nodes in a cluster, load Oracle Clusterware, possibly ASM, the Oracle database software. You create two databases, call them db1 and db2. Each node will run an instance of each db. So, node1 will have instances db1-1 and db2-1. Node 2 will have db1-2 and db2-2. So, (assuming that a single node has enough capacity to support all your users), you have server-level high availability. If a node crashes, (assuming properly configured failover, TAF, FAN, etc) the users would fail over to the remaining node.
VMWare:
Same two physical nodes as before. This time, you install VMWare, and set them up in VM cluster, and you define that each of your nodes will host one VM, and it can failover to the other node. Now, install single instance Oracle on each VM. VM1 will host db1, and VM2 will host db2. Now, in the event of a failure, VM1 (with db1 running inside of it) could failover to node 2, or VM2 could failover to node 1.
So, there are similarities here. In each case, high availability is provided for node failure, either via RAC or VMWare. So, why run one or the other? Well, the article author seems to imply that VMWare is cheaper, and it very well may be true. So, there's a cost advantage to running RAC.
What about RAC advantages? Well, RAC is more tightly integrated w/ the database, and with some effort (TAF and FAN configuration) it can be even more tightly integrated, which allows for much smoother failovers. In the event of a VMWare failover, there will certainly be a longer hang/pause when failover occurs.
Some other thoughts to consider are:
- RAC is generally going to be managed by the DBA
- VMWare, most likely, managed by a sysadmin. How does that fit into the picture at your company? It may or may not work for you, depending on your company, etc.
Bottom line, and the take-away idea here, is to compare RAC on physical hardware vs. single instance Oracle on VMWare cluster! Comparing RAC on bare metal to RAC on VMWare doesn't make any sense.
Hope that helps,
-Mark

Cisco B200 M4 and VMware Haswell EVC Mode

Greetings,
I have a new VMware cluster consisting of four B200 M4 UCS blades all with Intel Haswell CPUs (2.3GHZ, 12 core). I am trying to enable EVC mode on the cluster (just in case of future expansion). VMware keeps telling me I am missing features, but as far as i can tell everything is enabled in the BIOS. The one thing i don't have in these blades is the TPM module, but VMware told me that shouldn't matter.
Anyone else run into issues with the B200 M4 and ESXi?
I am running vCenter 6, but ESXi 5.5 U2.
Thank you!

VMware got back to me and confirmed that even if you upgrade vCenter to version 6, Haswell EVC mode is only supported if your ESXi servers are also on version 6.
In my case my servers are still on 5.5 due to compatibility issues with Veeam.

Active Failover Cluster of Identity Managment

Could be possible create an AFC of IM using WebCache WC as Load BalanceR?
Or we need to adquiere an LBR fron third parts tested list?
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/hi_av/Tested_LBR_FW_SSLAccel.html
If the first answer is YES, could someone redirect me to some notes, please.
We are talking about a complete IM (SSO, DAS, OCA, OID).
I guess OID could be a problem... :( due to WC can't do an ldap balancing
tx for your help.
diego

When I started this, we had two different vmware servers set up in two isolated datacenters across the factory from one another. The two nodes of our RAC system (mounted on Netapp) follow the same topology. The tech doing the vmware tested a forced failover using a manual method (we didn't need it active at that point), and I didn't even see any downtime. I have no clue how this really works, but it seems fine. The vmware disks are mounted on a SAN which has striping between the two datacenters.
Since then, they've started creating a vmware cluster which should fail over automatically (apparently), but I haven't seen it tested.
Your (cold failover) solution sounds fine to me. Your only problem is that the SSOs will stop working while you're doing the failover.
I once saw a solution somewhere (either at a client or in metalink) that had two OIDs running at the same time behind a hw load balancer with the MR RAC-mounted. I suspect that only one was "active" at a time. I think the solution is difficult because of the way that OID has cached data. I think that as well, some applications keep a persistent connection to OID (Forms runtime?) and these would break on failover.
Maybe what you could do is have your standby "up" like this and somehow set up an automatic reload of the data on the standby when it becomes primary...

Vmware cluster

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