Oracle's Virtualization Blog

As my boss, Wim Coekaerts pointed out on his blog yesterday, there are a number of good, educational videos covering Oracle VM on YouTube, including coverage of some topics for Oracle VM 2.2 (the latest release). Very easy to find, just go to YouTube and search on Oracle VM (or Oracle VM 2.2 to see those specifically). Of course, you'll also find some videos on reference customers, partners, and even a video interview with me from the Cloud Computing Expo that I mentioned in my earlier blog entry.

Thanks to the Oracle Partner Network team for producing these fine videos!

We are pleased to announce that Oracle VM Manager Command Line Interface (CLI) 2.2 has been released to Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and Oracle's Public Yum Repository.

The Oracle VM Manager CLI 2.2 is the updated version to work with newly released Oracle VM Manager 2.2, and it can also work with Oracle VM Manager 2.1.5. The CLI is written in Python and uses the Oracle VM Manager Web Services API to communicate with Oracle VM Manager. You can use the CLI to perform the same functions as Oracle VM Manager, such as managing all your server pools and guests. The CLI commands can be scripted, thus bring more flexibility to help customers deploy and manage Oracle VM environment.

1. Download required RPMs from ULN or Oracle's Public Yum Repository.

2. Install the RPMs onto a server running Enterprise Linux 5:
# rpm -Uvh ovmcli-2.2-9.el5.noarch.rpm python-ZSI-2.1-a1.el5.noarch.rpm

3. Configure CLI by running "ovm config". The user will be asked for the following information:
- Oracle VM Manager hostname
- Oracle VM Manager port number
- Deploy path (use default)
- Location of vncviewer (required for vncviewer command)
- Enable or disable HTTPS support (depends on Oracle VM Manager setup)

4. Oracle VM Manager CLI is now ready for use. Just type the command "ovm". For example,
# ovm help
# ovm help all
# ovm -u admin -p password svrp ls
# ovm -u admin -p password shell

See additional resources:

• Oracle VM 2.2 Documentation
  
• The Underground Oracle VM Manual by Roddy Rodstein : The Oracle VM Manager Command Line Interface: Introduction, Installation, Configuration and Command Examples

My, my...I just looked back and it has been almost exactly 6 months since my last post to this blog. The time has gone fast as we've been working hard on a number of things here ranging from the Virtual Iron acquisition integration (going nicely, thanks...) to a number of other projects that I'll talk about over the next few posts. I plan to get back into blogging much more regularly as I did all during the Spring.

I want to talk about implementing virtualization for 'Cloud' architectures vs. implementing it for "traditional" virtualization. Last week, several of us from Oracle presented at the Cloud Computing Expo as to our perspectives on what's important for Clouds and, in particular, private clouds with just a little bit on how Oracle products do- or will fit into that including our ability to provide a lot of capabilities at basically every layer of the stack, whether we're talking software as a service, platform-as-a-service, or infrastructure-as-a-service.

My session was about thoughts on the infrastructure layer and specifically, what should you consider when planning to implement virtualization to support Cloud capabilities vs. what you may have already done to support more "traditional" virtualization goals.

There's a link to my presentation farther below (PDF download), but before I send you there, I want to mention an interesting Technical Report from UC Berkeley's Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Lab or "RAD Lab". I quoted the report a couple of times in my preso and I found it to be a thoughtful and accessible discussion of the technical, operational, and economic aspects of cloud computing and, in particular, public clouds. You can find that report here (but if you click this link, don't forget to come back!...)

Funny story: so about 30mins before I presented, I ran into a colleague and asked him how the show was going because I had not yet attended any sessions and he said "Pretty good but the irritating thing is that everyone starts out with 'What is the Cloud?". Hmm. Well. Uh...Glad I didn't do that!..heh... I said nervously while quickly trying to decide if I could sneak away to quickly change my intro. Well, it was too late to change so I just plowed ahead to a standing-room only crowd. Take a look and let me know what you think:

You may notice today that Oracle VM template for Oracle PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.50.02 is ready for download from Oracle's E-Delivery web site. You can review the Installation Guide before downloading the template; or you can refer to My Oracle Support note 950875.1.

This virtual deployment package delivers a "quick start" of PeopleSoft HCM with Oracle Database on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle VM template for Oracle PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.50.02 includes the following components.

• The template consists of three virtual machines: Oracle Database with PeopleSoft HCM instance, Tuxedo stack, Weblogic stack
• The database VM includes Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.2 (64-bit) and Oracle Database 11.1.0.6 with PeopleSoft demo data
• The PeopleSoft Apps VM includes Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.2 (64-bit), Oracle Tuxedo 10gR3
  
• The PeopleSoft Web VM includes Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.2 (64-bit), Oracle Weblogic 11g
  

One of the new features in Oracle VM 2.2 is the ability to set virtual CPU scheduling priority and cap per VM from Oracle VM Manager, which enables you to control access to CPU between multiple virtual machines to align with your IT/business priorities. With this enhancement, users can now control the Quality of Service (QoS) for CPU, network, and disk I/O through the intuitive Oracle VM Manager browser interface.

You log into Oracle VM Manager, then proceed to configure the VMs.

Scheduling Priority -- You can select High (100), Intermediate (50), or Low (1) priority for the virtual CPUs. You can also enter a custom priority by selecting Customize and entering a value out of 100 in the text area. If more than one virtual machine is running on the same managed node, use the Priority setting to give highest priority to one virtual machine, and less (or equal) priority to others. Priority levels determine which virtual machine is allowed to run first, in the event two or more are contending for the same physical processors. 

Scheduling Cap -- The cap optionally fixes the maximum amount (percentage) of CPU that can be consumed by the virtual machines, even if the host has idle CPU cycles. Use the cap to keep low priority virtual machines from consuming too many cycles on a node. You can select a High (100%), Intermediate (50%), or Low (10%) percentage of scheduled time for the virtual CPUs. You can also enter a custom percentage by selecting Customize and entering a percentage in the text area.

If you are using Oracle VM 2.1.2 or 2.1.5, you've had the I/O resource management features - setting bandwidth cap for each virtual network interface and prioritizing the virtual disks.

With network I/O traffic management, you can set bandwidth cap for each virtual network interface. All the virtual network interfaces (VIFs) share the physical network interface card (NIC) to communicate with the outside. If you have several VIFs, and you want to control how much bandwidth is granted to each VIF, you can configure the rate limit from Oracle VM Manager. The network traffic through the virtual network interface will not exceed the limit. The change will take effect without restart.

With storage I/O prioritization, you can also prioritize the virtual disk and enable disk priority, and select an appropriate priority class. The priority class ranges from 0 to 7. The priority class 0 has the highest priority, and 7 the lowest. Rather than being confined to a particular virtual machine, the priority of a virtual disk is global on the entire Oracle VM Server. Virtual disks of the same priority class take the same priority on the Oracle VM Server, even if they belong to different virtual machines.

CPU scheduling priority and cap along with I/O resource management features help assure that the CPU and I/O bandwidth usage are being used according to the priorities you want them to be. For more information about Oracle VM, please refer to the following resources:

• Software download: Oracle E-Delivery
• Oracle VM 2.2 Documentation
  
• Deploying Oracle VM 2.2 and Upgrading Oracle VM from 2.1.5 to 2.2

Oracle VM 2.2 was announced last week, bringing customers more benefits by providing better performance, scalability and security. In the next series of blogs, I'd like to cover some new features of Oracle VM 2.2. But first, how can I get started with Oracle VM 2.2 or upgrade the existing Oracle VM 2.1.5 environment to 2.2?

If you read my previous blog - Basics of Oracle VM, you use Oracle VM Manager to manage many Oracle VM servers. Multiple Oracle VM Servers are grouped into Server Pools in which every server in a given pool has access to shared storage, which can be NFS, SAN (Fibre Channel) or iSCSI storage. This allows VMs associated with the pool to start and run on any physical server within the pool that is available and has the most resources free. Given the uniform access to shared storage, VMs may also be securely Live Migrated or automatically (re-)started across any servers in the pool. Each Oracle VM server or Manager installation just takes a few minutes. You can refer to the Oracle VM 2.2 documentation for details.

In Oracle VM 2.2, it's much easier to configure the shared storage repositories. We provide an improved shared storage configuration and cluster configuration script (/opt/ovs-agent-2.3/utils/repos.py). This new script replaces the previous scripts, ovs-makerepo and ovs-offlinerepo in the /usr/lib/ovs/ directory, and the /etc/init.d/ovsrepositories script. The goal is to reduce storage repositories set up complexity. In addition, the /OVS directory is the cluster root and is a symbolic link mounted to the /var/ovs/mount/uuid directory. You can refer to the "Creating Shared Storage and Cluster" and "Managing Storage Repositories" chapter of the Oracle VM 2.2 Server User Guide.

If you upgrade your Oracle VM 2.1.5 server pool to Oracle VM 2.2, you should plan properly and ensure a smooth upgrade. There are some important factors to consider. You can not mixed Oracle VM 2.1 and 2.2 servers in the same server pool, so there would be planned down time during the upgrade; however, the stored VMs in the repositories remain intact. It only took several minutes minutes to upgrade the Manager, and each server node upgrade would just take a few minutes. So the entire upgrade process should not be long depending on the size of your server pool.

Before you start the upgrade, you want to make sure that your existing server pool has been configured properly:

• The hostname in /etc/hosts must be associated with the public IP address instead of 127.0.0.1
• You have all the server entries in your DNS server; If DNS is not used, make sure the correct setting in /etc/hosts for all the servers in the pool. If you plan to use DNS for all servers, but DNS was not specified during the server installation, please update /etc/resolv.conf file and add your domain name in it.
• All the servers in the same pool must have the consistent name resolution, either by DNS or by file (/etc/hosts). You should not have mixed name services for the servers in the same server pool. For example, some have DNS, while others use /etc/hosts to resolve host names.

You can follow the simple steps to upgrade your entire server pool:

1) Upgrade the Oracle VM Manager first.
You run the runInstaller.sh script and select the Upgrade option. You can read the Oracle VM Manager 2.2 Installation Guide for details. Note you should back up the Oracle VM Manager database before upgrade.

2) Upgrade non-master Servers, make sure that VMs have been shutdown before the upgrade; After the upgrade, no need to reboot the server at this time if you want to enable sparse file support for OCFS2 cluster in the next step.

Option 1: boot from Oracle VM 2.2 ISO (local or from the network), select the upgrade option, then follow the instructions; refer to the Oracle VM Server Installation Guide.

Option 2: if connected with ULN, you can read the instructions to upgrade the server via ULN.

3) The server pool master should be the last one to perform upgrade. Reboot the server after you complete the upgrade.
If you want to turn on the new OCFS2 1.4 feature support, such as sparse files and unwritten extents, you can enable the feature now: (the device must be unmounted from all nodes before performing the tunefs.ocfs2 command)
# umount <device>
# tunefs.ocfs2 --fs-features=sparse,unwritten <device>

Also, if the user encounters the following error, it means that the volume is still mounted on one or more nodes.
# tunefs.ocfs2 --fs-features=sparse,unwritten <device>
tunefs.ocfs2: Trylock failed while opening device "<device>"

4) Reboot the rest of the servers in the pool, the server pool master agent will communicate with the other nodes in the pool, populate the changes of the cluster and storage repository configurations.

5) If the server pool is HA-enabled and you want the server pool master fail-over feature, be sure to add the virtual IP address for the server pool from the Oracle VM Manager.

Now you've successfully upgraded your environment from Oracle VM 2.1.5 to Oracle VM 2.2. Have fun!

Update (10/23/2009): Roddy Rodstein provided a step-by-step upgrade manual, please refer to The Underground Oracle VM Manual:

•  Oracle VM 2.1.5 to 2.2 Upgrade

At Oracle OpenWorld we had two major announcements for Oracle VM. One is the Oracle VM Storage Connect Program; and other one is Oracle VM 2.2 . Here I'd like to give a brief overview of the Oracle VM Storage Connect Program, also talk about What's New in Oracle VM 2.2. If you attend Oracle OpenWorld this year, please visit the Oracle's Demo booth W-142 at Moscone West (Oct 12-14).

Oracle has been developing a storage discovery and provisioning API in consultation with various storage partners for over a year. The Oracle VM Storage Connect framework will enable Oracle VM Manager to directly leverage the resources and functionality of existing storage systems in the Oracle VM environment, supporting native storage services such as Logical Unit Number (LUN) creation, deletion, expansion, and snapshot. When a storage vendor enables the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in, their customers will be able to provision that vendor's storage through the Oracle VM Manager.

The integrated solutions will enable end users to reduce cost and simplify storage maintenance and set-up by allowing virtualization and storage management through a common user interface. This will enable simpler management of virtual infrastructure, as well as faster provisioning of solutions in a cloud environment.

Through the program, partners have access to Oracle's development resources, as well as benefit from joint marketing initiatives.The Oracle VM Storage Connect framework does not require storage vendors to change any of their hardware, array software or client software, thus allowing partners to improve time to market.

Please visit Oracle VM Storage Connect Partner Program web site for further details about the program, partners and schedule.

In addition, we are excited to announce Oracle VM 2.2 release which features the latest Xen-based, industry-standard hypervisor, Xen 3.4, and provides substantial performance enhancement for customers running the latest Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron based processors. For virtualization and management product developers, Oracle VM 2.2 with Xen 3.4 hypervisor and updated dom0 kernel provides a rich platform for "upstream" development of future solutions based on a broad array of new technology including CPU power management, memory management, and direct I/O capabilities.

• Updated Xen 3.4 Hypervisor - More efficient power management capabilities, broader hardware support, and better performance, scalability and security for both hardware virtualized and paravirtualized guests;
• Updated Dom0 Linux Kernel with Newer Drivers - Better hardware support for higher performance, including Intel Xeon 5500 series (known as Nehalem) and AMD Six-Core Opteron "Istanbul"-based processors;
• Updated OCFS2 1.4 Cluster File System - Sparse file support in OCFS2 1.4 enables significantly faster virtual machine provisioning and cloning, also allows users more control over data allocation, improving performance and storage efficiency;
• Importing Block Devices as Shared Virtual Disks - Block devices can be assigned to virtual machines, greatly improving performance of applications such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC);
• Virtual CPU Scheduling Priorities and Caps per VM - Control access to CPU between multiple VMs to align with IT/business priorities;
• Server Pool Master Auto-failover- Maximize the availability of Oracle VM management features including live migration, VM life-cycle management, and HA functions;
• Virtual Machine Tree View - Gets a better view of the Oracle VM environment at-a-glance and to ease operation;
• Changing the Group to which a Virtual Machine belongs - Saves time and space and improves ease of use;
• Improved Shared Storage and Cluster Configuration - Provide new configuration script to streamline the shared storage and cluster setup, reducing setup complexity;
• Placing a Server in Maintenance Mode - Better serviceability, prevents server from actively hosting VMs during maintenance;
• Improved Logging - Enables easier audit support and troubleshooting of Oracle VM Manager operations;
• Importing VHD Disk Images - Ease of migration from Virtual Iron, Citrix or Microsoft to Oracle VM in addition to the existing virtual disk image conversion from VMware;
• Virtual CPU Scheduling Priorities and Caps per VM - Control access to CPU between multiple VMs to align with IT/business priorities;
• dm-nfs Enhancement - "dm-nfs" provides loopback-style emulation for a block device using a regular file as backing storage, which resides on a remote system and is accessed via the NFS protocol. In Oracle VM 2.2, it has been augmented to use asynchronous and direct I/O for better performance;
• Secure VNC Access - Changes in the underlying Xen implementation enable secure and authenticated communication with a guest's VNC console.

The Oracle VM Server 2.2 packages have been updated to ULN. You can refer to the FAQ on how to upgrade Oracle VM Server 2.1.5 to Oracle VM Server 2.2 via ULN. The ISO images including Oracle VM Server and Manager 2.2 will be available at Oracle E-Delivery site later this week. Please refer to the Oracle VM 2.2 Documentation on how to plan, install or upgrade your Oracle VM environment.

Update (10/15/2009): Oracle VM 2.2 ISO images are now available for download from Oracle E-Delivery web site.

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 will be held in Moscone Center, San Francisco on Oct. 11-15, 2009. Don't miss the many exciting Linux and Virtualization activities at Oracle OpenWorld, including expert-led sessions, technology demos, partners, customers, keynotes, and more! Use this daily planner as a checklist to get the most out of your week and visit oracle.com/linux and oracle.com/virtualization for more!

Oracle VM Templates are complete, pre-installed and pre-configured software packaged as Oracle VM virtual machines (VMs) complete with an OS (Oracle Enterprise Linux). Customers enjoy the benefits of faster application deployment with Oracle VM Templates - for Oracle software as well as non-Oracle software.

Zeus Technology recently announced the availability of the Zeus Traffic Manager Template - a pre-installed, pre-configured virtual machine, for Oracle VM. The Zeus Traffic Manager is an enterprise-class, layer-7 load balancing and application traffic management solution. It is now available for download as an Oracle VM Template.

Just download and copy the Oracle VM Template image(s) onto your server that has Oracle VM installed on it, import and deploy the Template VM(s) and, after answering some one-time queries relating to the customer's desired environment (DHCP or static IP, passwords, etc.) within minutes you will have a fully installed and configured application environment that you know is completely correct without having to install products from scratch.

To learn more, please visit Oracle VM Templates web site.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Oracle VM Template Builder, an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux "Just enough OS" (JeOS) - based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM. Now, end-users and ISVs have the option to develop their Oracle VM Templates by using these JeOS-based scripts directly or via the graphical Oracle VM Template Builder.

Oracle VM Template Builder uses "JeOS" to facilitate building an operating system instance with only the absolute minimum packages needed for an Oracle VM Template, helping to reduce the disk footprint by up to 2GB or more per guest virtual machine, and to improve security and reliability. Oracle VM Template Builder is distributed as software packages via the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and Oracle's public yum repository

See related press releases on Oracle VM Templates:

• Oracle Announces Oracle VM Template Builder Enabling Faster Application Deployment for ISVs and End-Users


• Oracle Introduces Oracle VM Template for Oracle's Siebel CRM

Please refer to the Documentation: Oracle VM Template Builder Installation and User's Guide for more information.

Update: (10/6/2009) Oracle VM Template Builder is also distributed as an Oracle VM Template that you can download from Oracle E-Delivery site, see Oracle VM Template Builder page in details.