Zend Server is a complete, Oracle-enabled, enterprise-ready Web appication Server for running and managing PHP applications that require a high level of reliability, performance and security. Connectivity to Oracle databases is delivered out of the box. We have a long history of working with Zend and the PHP community to ensure that the latest and greatest Oracle features are available in the PHP database connectivity libraries.

This is a first step to making it easy for our customers and users to quickly deploy the Zend software stack without having to go to various websites, download various packages and install them. Oracle's Linux OS Support customers make use of the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) to download updates and packages for their Oracle Enterprise Linux installs and can simply run an OS command to do so. (up2date ). When the OS is installed correctly and configured to connect to our update server, it automatically resolves dependencies on other components that are needed and the admin no longer has to log onto websites to download software or find out which other packages are needed and so on.

We now host an rpm package on the ULN servers called zend-server-repo which updates the Linux OS install to also look at the software repositories hosted by Zend. When a user wants to install Zend Server, just a simple command will install the zend-server product directly. There is more information here.

For those people that downloaded Oracle Enterprise Linux (free download for everyone including non-customers here) and use the public yum repository (freely available without registration here) , we have uploaded the rpm there as well.

So now we made it a lot easier for anyone using OEL to get going with Zend Server from Zend. We are looking forward to doing more integration work with Zend.

I just wanted to point out a few cools things as it's related to the upgrade of ocfs2 from 1.2 to 1.4 as part of the Oracle VM 2.2 release.

In 1.4 we support sparse files, this is very convenient for Virtual Machine images because in many cases the template might have a large virtual disk but the disk itself is virtually empty (lots of virtual stuff here :) ). By supporting sparse files on ocfs2, we can now save a lot of diskspace. Here is an example :

# ls -l 32_deploytest/
total 5893120
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16106127360 Oct 12 03:59 System.img
drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 3896 Oct 15 00:53 config-chroot
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 624 Oct 15 00:53 vm.cfg
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 481 Oct 22 2009 vm.cfg.orig

# du 32_deploytest/
0 32_deploytest/config-chroot/etc/ovs-autostart
0 32_deploytest/config-chroot/etc
0 32_deploytest/config-chroot
5893120 32_deploytest

as you can see in the above example, the VM disk (System.img) is 16GB in size but actual size on disk is just shy of 6GB. In previous versions we would actually have allocated and used 16GB but now it's 6GB and as the holes get filled up because data gets written, the file size will grow up to the 16GB.

When people download Oracle VM templates, they tend contain very large disk images but the files are quite sparse and in 2.2, when unpacking these images, on ocfs2, the actual space used will be a lot less.

In the future this also will happen when deploying a VM from one server pool to another or cloning a VM or creating a virtual disk.

The other thing I wanted to show off is the reflink business. I have an Oracle VM 2.2 setup here with ocfs2 version 1.6 and a just newer kernel than what is part of 2.2.

# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 3050092 941232 1951424 33% /
/dev/sda1 101086 51467 44400 54% /boot
tmpfs 288340 0 288340 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3 484078592 33098752 450979840 7% /var/ovs/mount/572F5E5036E9404D8219F4E337B0561B

# ls -l 32_deploytest/
total 5893120
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16106127360 Oct 12 03:59 System.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 624 Oct 15 00:53 vm.cfg

# ls -l clone/
total 0

# reflink -r 32_deploytest/System.img clone/System.img
# cp 32_deploytest/vm.cfg clone/

# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 3050092 941232 1951424 33% /
/dev/sda1 101086 51467 44400 54% /boot
tmpfs 288340 0 288340 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3 484078592 33098752 450979840 7% /var/ovs/mount/572F5E5036E9404D8219F4E337B0561B

# ls -l clone
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16106127360 Oct 15 03:25 System.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 624 Oct 15 03:25 vm.cfg

as you can see from above :
diskspace on /dev/sda3 was 33GB used
the system.img file is 16GB in 32_deploytest
there are no files in clone/
reflink -r and you can see the system.img file at the same size in the directory clone/
diskspace on /dev/sda3 is still 33GB not 49GB.

This is a totally independent file, I can just start the VM and it will work and as I make changes to this VM the diskusage will change as the clone will have more local pages.

I can just delete the other file, it will not affect the cloned version. rm -f of 32_deploytest/System.img would not affect clone/System.img.

How long does this take ? let me try again :
# time reflink -r 32_deploytest/System.img clone/System.img

real 0m0.001s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

instant !

Today we made 3 announcements around Oracle VM, let me summarize them for everyone and provide the links.

First of all, Validated Configurations on Oracle VM.

We launched the Validated Configurations program a few years ago, around Unbreakable Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). We wanted to make sure that the operating system (OS) was actually well tested as part of a whole stack rather than just basic OS testing that tends to happen. The Validated Configurations site has been very popular with many customers and provides great information and guidelines on configurations across the stack. In most cases that meant "Database on OEL on Server x using Storage y". This has helped increase customer's confidence in deploying full enterprise software stacks on Linux and it helped reduce time to deploy a setup and so on.

So with Oracle VM we wanted to extend this to include Oracle VM underneath Oracle Enterprise Linux and above the server hardware and we now basically have "Database on OEL on Oracle VM on Server with Storage". The same extensive testing is done inside the Linux guests on top of Oracle VM and top to bottom validation. This should do the same as what we did before but now including the virtualization layer. Additionally. it should provide an extra level of comfort to customers given the amount of testing we do on top of our products. In particular making use of the Oracle product suites.

Secondly, we announced a new component to Oracle VM's product stack called Oracle VM Template Builder.

A while back we had created a Just Enough OS (JeOS) bundle around Oracle Enterprise Linux which was a set of packages you can install on top of an OS and that came with a set of tools to easily create Virtual Machines OS templates to be used with Oracle VM. Anyone can use this to create small VMs and then add any of the packages they need on top and configure the VM with one or more virtual disks, memory size and number of CPUs etc. All the Oracle product templates are built using the JeOS image as a starting point. Just to point out that this is not a New Distribution. JeOS is just a package set of the standard Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution. Instead of doing a normal CD install, in this case through the tools it will generate a virtual disk image and install the OEL RPMs directly rather than do a boot from CD/install.

Because OEL is freely available and freely redistributable, the JeOS components are as well and as such this allows people to create templates for their own products, whether this is for ISV virtual machines or for internal deployments at customer sites. This is not trial software and it doesn't require a contract.These are standard enterprise distributions, so just like what we do with Oracle product templates, they are production-quality software.

To extend these capabilities we created Oracle VM Template builder. This is a browser based template creation tool. Oracle VM template builder can be installed using a template on Oracle VM itself (a virtual machine that has everything installed for you) or you can get the RPMs off of our yum update server or from the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and install the application on top of a standard OEL installation.

Oracle VM Template Builder is a web application which lets you configure the packages you want installed, what the VM should look like and it then creates a fully configured package that you can download or import directly into Oracle VM. It is not a hosted tool it's something you can run locally on your laptop/desktop/server. You can create users in the builder and store templates and modify templates and keep track of what you have built and create libraries, etc.

Oracle VM Template Builder relies on the JeOS components as described above.

Thirdly, we announced a new Oracle VM template for Oracle Siebel CRM 8.1. It is a completely configured environment that, in a single download and start-up, provides the entire Siebel CRM environment. The application server, application modules, Oracle database back-end and Oracle Enterprise Linux.

This makes it easy for anyone and everyone to start with Oracle Siebel CRM 8.1 in just a few steps. It reduces deployment time to at most a few hours, or less, to install everything from scratch, top to bottom and get going.

Oracle software templates show the strength of our stack, by being able to provide all the components directly and offer application, database, operating system and virtualization layer in one.

Likely by the end of next week, we are also going to publish these rpms on our freely accessible public yum server.

Package Names :
ovmcli-1.0-1.el5.noarch.rpm
python-ZSI-2.1-a1.el5.noarch.rpm

ULN channels :
el5_i386_oracle_addons | el5_x86_64_oracle_addons
el5_i386_addons | el5_x86_64_addons

have fun !

You can find the documentation on OTN :

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11081_01/doc/doc.21/e15298/toc.htm

The drivers are freely available for download just like Oracle VM. You need Oracle VM 2.1.5 (or higher). have fun

A few days ago we released Oracle VM 2.1.5 which is available for download at http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux.

This release contains the following :

- bugfixes on both Oracle VM Manager and Oracle VM Server side
- the new webservices interface which I wrote a blog entry about, a few weeks ago
- external data-collector cronjob/thread moved into the Oracle VM Manager instance
- minor cosmetic improvements on the Oracle VM Manager side

This is a full CD release. So it is possible to do an install from scratch starting with 2.1.5, both the management and server side.

Prior releases 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 were only available updates through our online network (ULN).

The command line interface, which I mentioned that other entry, will be available shortly on ULN's Oracle VM channel, this cli will require Oracle VM 2.1.5+ and is just a python program/shell that will be able to run on a standard OEL environment.

Wim

It is now very easy to manage your Oracle VM server pools and virtual machines from a shell prompt. I was playing with this yesterday and figured I would take this opportunity to post an example.

In this example below, I had installed Oracle VM Manager (but not yet logged into it) and installed the cli scripts on one system and then I had installed Oracle VM server on another machine. On the Oracle VM server I had actually locally downloaded (manually) an Oracle VM template and created my own virtual machine without using the manager at all. So I actually create a new serverpool in Oracle VM Manager using the cli shell. I register my existing virtual machine and at the end show the list of commands we expose through the cli and through the webservices API. I think this is going to be very useful for many Oracle VM users.

configure the location of the Manager instance

wcoekaer@aldebaran-pc ~]$ ovm config
This is a wizard to help you start running the Oracle VM Command Line Manager.
Ctrl-C to exit.
Enter the host to connect:aldebaran-pc
Enter the port to connect:8888
Enter the deploy path (blank to default):
Enter the path of the vncviewer (blank to skip):
Would you like to enable WS-Security support? (Y/n)n
Configuration finish.
Please run the Oracle VM Command Line Manager again.

Starting up the cli in shell mode

[wcoekaer@aldebaran-pc ~]$ ovm -u admin shell
Enter Login Password:
Welcome to the Oracle VM Manager Shell. Type "help" for a list of commands.

I want to create a server pool but forgot the syntax

ovm> help serverpool_create
usage: ovm serverpool_create [options]
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-H HOSTNAME, --hostname=HOSTNAME
(Required) Server Host/IP
-s SERVERPOOL_NAME, --serverpool_name=SERVERPOOL_NAME
(Required) Server Pool Name
-a, --ha_enabled Enable High Availability
-A AGENT_PASSWORD, --agent_password=AGENT_PASSWORD
Agent Password
-U UTILITY_USERNAME, --utility_username=UTILITY_USERNAME
(Required) Utility Server Username
-P UTILITY_PASSWORD, --utility_password=UTILITY_PASSWORD
Utility Server Password
-L SERVER_LOCATION, --server_location=SERVER_LOCATION
Server Location
-D DESCRIPTION, --description=DESCRIPTION
Description

create my server pool, the Oracle VM server name is wcoekaer-srv4

ovm>serverpool_create -s mypool -A ****** -H wcoekaer-srv4 -U root -P ****** -L myoffice -D something
ServerPool "mypool" has been created

you can see it shows as the only pool (mypool)

ovm> serverpool_list
Server Pool Name Status HA
mypool Active Disabled

there are no images imported yet so lets import the virtual machine I had already created

ovm> image_list
Name Size(MB) ServerPoolName Status CreationTime

ovm> image_register -s mypool -n dom1 -u root -p ******* -c ****** -o "Oracle Enterprise Linux 5" -d mydom1
Registering, please check the status.

as you can see, it now shows up

ovm> image_list
Name Size(MB) ServerPoolName Status CreationTime
dom1 6229.0 mypool Pending 2009-05-05

but ! need to approve it of course

ovm> image_approve -s mypool -n dom1
VM Image "dom1" has been successfully approved.

and here it is, it shows that it's stil up and running because I did not shut down the virtual machine, no need to

ovm> vm_list
Name ImageSize Mem VCPUs Status ServerPoolName
dom1 6229.0 256 1 Running mypool

a list of all the options

ovm> help
Usage: ovm [options] subcommand [suboptions]
Oracle VM Command Line Manager.
ovm full list of subcommands:
agent_version --- Get an agent version
config --- Start a configuration wizard
group_create --- Create a User Group.
group_list --- List of all the groups.
help --- Show help
image_approve --- Approve a VM Image
image_del --- Delete a VM image
image_discover --- List all of the Discoverable VM images
image_import --- Import an Image from an External Source
image_list --- Get a list of VM images
image_register --- Register a Discoverable VM image
image_status --- Show the Image status
iso_approve --- Approve an ISO image
iso_del --- Delete an ISO image
iso_discover --- List all of the Discoverable ISOs
iso_import --- Import an ISO from External Source
iso_list --- Get a list of ISO images
iso_register --- Register a Discoverable ISO image
iso_status --- Show the ISO status
os_list --- List all the available Operating Systems
server_add --- Add a Server to the ServerPool
server_config --- Config a Virtual Server
server_del --- Delete a Server from the ServerPool
server_info --- Get a VM Server info
server_list --- Get a list of VM Servers
server_poweroff --- Poweroff a VM Server
server_restart --- Reboot a VM Server
server_status --- Show the server status
serverpool_config --- Config a ServerPool
serverpool_create --- Create a ServerPool
serverpool_del --- Delete a ServerPool
serverpool_info --- Get a ServerPool info
serverpool_list --- Get a list of ServerPools
serverpool_refresh --- Refresh all of the ServerPools
serverpool_restore --- Restore a ServerPool
serverpool_status --- Get a ServerPool status
shareddisk_create --- Create and Register a Shared Virtual Disk
shareddisk_del --- Delete a Shared Virtual Disk
shareddisk_list --- Get a list of Shared Virtual Disks
shell --- Launch an interactive shell
template_approve --- Approve a Template
template_del --- Delete a Template
template_discover --- List all of the Discoverable Templates
template_import --- Import a Template from an External Source
template_list --- Get a list of Templates
template_register --- Register a Discoverable Template
template_status --- Show the template status
use --- Sepcify a ServerPool to use
user_assign_group --- Assign a user to the Group.
user_assign_serverpool --- Assign a user to the ServerPool.
user_create --- Create a User Account.
user_list --- List of all the users.
vm_add_disk --- Create and Add a disk to the VM
vm_add_nic --- Create and Add a nic to the VM
vm_as_template --- Save a VirtualMachine as template
vm_attach_cdrom --- Attach a CDROM to the VM
vm_attach_shareddisk --- Attach a Shared Virtual Disk to the VM
vm_clone --- Clone a VirtualMachine
vm_config --- Config a VirtualMachine
vm_create --- Create a VM
vm_del --- Delete a VirtualMachine
vm_del_disk --- Remove a disk from the VM
vm_del_nic --- Remove a nic from the VM
vm_deploy --- Deploy a VirtualMachine
vm_detach_cdrom --- Detach CDROMs from the VM
vm_detach_shareddisk --- Detach a Shared Virtual Disk from the VM
vm_info --- Get a VM info
vm_list --- Get a list of VMs
vm_list_cdrom --- List CDROMs of the VM
vm_list_disk --- List Disks of the VM
vm_list_nic --- List Virtual Network Interfaces of the VM
vm_migrate --- Live Migration
vm_migrate_all --- Migrate all the VMs on the server
vm_pause --- Pause a VirtualMachine
vm_poweroff --- Poweroff a VirtualMachine
vm_poweron --- PowerOn a VirtualMachine
vm_reboot --- Restart a VirtualMachine
vm_reset_status --- Reset status of a VirtualMachine
vm_resume --- Resume a VirtualMachine
vm_set_bootdevice --- Set the first BootDevice
vm_set_keyboardlayout --- Set the Keyboard Layout
vm_set_vnc_pwd --- Set the VNC Console Password
vm_status --- Get a VM status
vm_suspend --- Suspend a VirtualMachine
vm_unpause --- Unpause a VirtualMachine
vncviewer --- Start a VNC console.

OCFS2 is a really nice filesystem that is used by many people out there, if we track the ocfs2-users and ocfs2-devel mail lists it is clear that many people out there make use of it for their own applications.

We provide OCFS2 RPMs for Oracle Enterprise Linux(OEL) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL) on oracle.com and we make the RPMs available integrated on ULN for the Oracle Unbreakable Linux support customers. Even though the code is in the 2.6.18 kernel that is used in RHEL5, they decided to not compile the modules so we compile them out of the kernel. (we do not modify the kernel config and build them in because that would be considered a change)

For people that want to use OCFS2 or play with it, it’s included in OEL as an extra (not modifications of existing RHEL code). You can get the RPMS for RHEL from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). It is all free for use and download. If you need support you can purchase an Unbreakable Linux support subscription and that includes support for the filesystem.

You can find tons of information on our oss.oracle.com website http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/. Some of the new features that are in the mainline Linux release of the filesystem are listed below. The most notable one is REFLINK which I will cover in more detail. All OCFS2 development is public and every change is immediately published on oss in our git repositories.

- extended attributes. in fact the value of each extended attribute can be as large as a regular file. Which is larger than even ext3 can do.

- Posix ACL support

- support for userspace cluster stacks. If needed it is possible to use OCFS2 with cman and pacemaker

- jbd2 support. This gives us 64-bit blocknumbers and we can theoretically support 4PB filesystems. with jbd1 the limit is/was 16TB per filesystem

- quota support

- metadata checksums and ecc. all metadatablocks in OCFS2 now have a checksum field. If the checksum fails, there is an ECC field that can recover a single bit error. If it is unrecoverable then OCFS2 will make this single inode unreadable but it does not or will not affect the rest of the filesystem. In most filesystems this would take the entire filesystem into read-only mode.

- improved inode allocation. This will help with filesystems which a huge huge number of files.

- indexed directories. This will improve performance of lookups of a single name.

- reflink which creates a target inode that shares the data extents of the source inode in a copy-on-write fashion.

Now, about reflink. The reason we implemented reflink is for Oracle VM. As you know, a virtual machine/guest owns one or more virtual disks. These virtual disks are represented as files on a filesystem hosted by the hypervisor. In the case of Oracle VM, if you have SAN or iSCSI storage, we put an OCFS2 filesystem on top of this, managed by the management domain (dom0). The virtual disks live on top of this OCFS2 volume.

These virtual disks can become very large, they usually are many GB’s in size. So when a user wants to create a clone of a virtual machine or create a virtual machine based on an existing template, we copy the content of the original virtual disks to a new set of virtual disks. By default this duplicates the amount of storage used.

ie. you have VM1 with a 40gb virtual disk (vm1/system.img) and you want to copy that to create VM2 based on the same virtual disk image (vm2/system.img).

The reflink feature in OCFS2 which was published to fs-devel and ocfs2-devel a while back, supports this operation through effectively creating hard links but with copy-on-write (or basically a point-in-time data hard link).

Today, we copy the file vm1/system.img to vm2/system.img. Tomorrow, we do reflink vm1/system.img vm2/system.img. At initial create time no additional space is used, no actual copying is done, it just creates a totally new inode/file and shares the data extents. As soon as a write is done to one or the other side, 1mb chunks are copied over where the writes occur.

This allows us to create instant copies of files (or in the case of Oracle VM, virtual disk images).

Some of the advantages of reflink are :

- Each “hard link” or point-in-time copy, is a regular file for the OS, for an application etc, so there are no changes needed to applications or backup software. This is totally transparent, there is no container around these files etc. Unlike vmdk and vhd where the snapshots live inside the containers.

- It is fully cluster safe so this works in an OCFS2 filesystem cluster so the link and the COW works on any node even if the file is used and opened on another node. This allows us in the Oracle VM case to create snapshots and run these new VMs on a different node than the original VM is running.

- This is a generic feature just like symlink. It is available to any user or application.

- It is open source (part of OCFS2 code) free to use for anyone.

Below is an example of reflink. It shows the diskspace usage, it shows the time it takes to complete the commands and also a simple modification done with dd to one file and show how that affects both files.

ls -l total 1771896 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:58 el4.5-system.img ===============================================================

df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1 50G 3.9G 47G 8% /ocfs2
===============================================================

reflink el4.5-system.img el4.5-system1.img

real 0m0.030s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
===============================================================
ls -l
total 1771896
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:59 el4.5-system1.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:58 el4.5-system.img
===============================================================
df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1 50G 3.9G 47G 8% /ocfs2
===============================================================
md5sum el4.5-system.img el4.5-system1.img
c41b670c59e8a4446ad07e9fb0f98b6d el4.5-system.img

real 0m31.094s
user 0m7.420s
sys 0m10.530s
c41b670c59e8a4446ad07e9fb0f98b6d el4.5-system1.img

real 0m34.553s
user 0m7.500s
sys 0m10.140s

===============================================================
dd if=/dev/zero of=el4.5-system1.img bs=1M count=1000 seek=500 conv=notrunc
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 104.889 seconds, 10.0 MB/s
===============================================================
ls -l
total 3543792
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 13:02 el4.5-system1.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1814420898 May 1 12:58 el4.5-system.img
===============================================================
df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sde1 50G 4.9G 46G 10% /ocfs2
===============================================================
md5sum el4.5-system.img el4.5-system1.img
c41b670c59e8a4446ad07e9fb0f98b6d el4.5-system.img

real 0m32.430s
user 0m7.920s
sys 0m11.340s
b67b39c3c86a4110cb795f516bc7f86b el4.5-system1.img

real 0m32.069s
user 0m7.920s
sys 0m10.350s

enjoy.

Oracle Unbreakable Linux launched two years ago as a support program for existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) implementations or for new Oracle Enterprise Linux implementations. Oracle Unbreakable Linux program is about enterprise-class support that customers can't get (or is not available) from Red Hat. It has never been about creating a knock-off or forked Linux distribution. There is no migration, or switch, needed for existing RHEL users to move to Oracle Unbreakable Linux support.

With more than 30+ years of experience supporting the largest business- critical data centers around the world, Oracle brings the highest support quality, more value, and proven business practices to Linux support, including the following items Red Hat can't:
· 7500+ professionals providing 24x7, global support in over 145 countries
· Lifetime support policy
. 7+ years of general product support with the ability to extend to unlimited number of years
· Premier backporting
. Request backport of specific features eliminating pressure to upgrade with every update release

Customers Are Benefiting

Oracle is the trusted advisor to many CIOs looking for more value for their entire application stack; including support for Linux.

· 79% of databases that run on Linux, run Oracle
· Over 30% of Oracle Applications are deployed on the Linux platform
· Over 50% of recent Oracle Fusion Middleware deployments are on the Linux platform

Oracle's Linux business includes thousands of customers using Oracle on Linux and Oracle Unbreakable Linux support for their Linux deployments.

Due to dissatisfaction with Red Hat's quality of support as well as a desire to get more value, many users have switched from Red Hat Support to Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support.

Read why Interactive One switched from Red Hat to Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support.

Oracle's Linux Commitment

Oracle offers a complete and comprehensive software stack and single point of support for Linux and also offers the risk mitigation and value that users demand, especially in today's tough economic times. Oracle has a solid Linux business and a long-term commitment to continue to enhance Linux as a choice for business-critical deployments.

You can find the article here:
http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1347468,00.html

Previously one had to take a set of servers, install Microsoft Windows, install Microsoft Cluster Services (so you need at least an Enterprise edition Windows server version), then install the VMware management components and a database on top. Then you had to set up all those components from the various vendors to get it to offer server, application or OS failure protection. Then configure MSCS and register the various components. With this new announcement, it seems that it will now be possible to do this without the need for Microsoft Cluster Services.

All this comes, again according to the article, at an extra cost: "Pricing was listed at $9,995 per existing vCenter instance – including the database -- or $12,995 when bundled with a vCenter license." So one has to purchase a license for VMware vCenter, Microsoft Windows Server, vCenter Server Heartbeat, times 2, and support for these products. I believe this will really add up.

Now let's looks at Oracle VM.
Oracle VM, has Oracle VM Manager which is our own management server to manage pools of Oracle VM Servers with their virtual machines. Oracle VM Manager runs on Linux (Enterprise Linux) and uses an Oracle database (by default we even use/can use the free version Oracle XE) for its backend database server and OC4J for the J2EE application container.

Oracle VM Manager can easily be set up in an HA environment where it is possible to protect it against hardware failures or (unlikely) crashes of the application, including the database or the operating system, through the use of Oracle Clusterware. The white paper at the link below describes how to use Oracle Clusterware to protect Oracle VM Manager in a 2 server setup on Enterprise Linux:
http://www.oracle.com/technologies/virtualization/docs/ovm-clusterware-whitepaper.pdf

Basically Oracle offers all the software components required to set up – an HA Management server environment, with no need for third party products and multiple vendor licenses. Additionally, if you have a Linux OS support subscription from Oracle (which starts at $499 for a one year Basic Limited support subscription, per server), the Oracle Clusterware usage is included at no extra cost. This means that for two servers, Oracle VM Manager, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle Clusterware, the whole thing comes at just about $1,000 with 24/7 support for a year. For detailed pricing, visit: http://store.oracle.com/linux. And on top of that Oracle Clusterware has been around for many years and is the software used by Oracle Real Application Clusters.

Everything is provided and supported by Oracle. That's a pretty good deal. And we're not yet talking about the server side (Oracle VM server or VMWare ESX server).

And best of all, this is not an alpha version of some future possible release with no supported products on top, this is the exact same code you can use on test, development, pay, no pay, supported, non supported production systems.

Why does this matter ?

Well, certain Linux Distribution / Support vendors don't let you freely download their product unless it's pre-alpha stage, have been known to claim that customers can't freely use this product without paying support (despite the GPL), and have even insisted through their sales team that a customer must power off servers when the server's support subscription expired. Now that doesn't make much sense and I wonder how this all works with a product that is released under the GPL. But this sort of FUD is not good. Especially not when it comes from a self proclaimed open source leader.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=open+source+leader

I am very excited to announce the new 2.1.2 release of Oracle VM. This is now available from the usual location : http://edelivery.oracle.com/oraclevm

A bunch of new features are included in this release :

* Guest VM HA : auto-restart a failed VM or, if a server fails, auto-restart all failed VMs that were running on that server (and that had the HA option enabled). A quick and easy way to increase application up-time without having to change anything inside your guest VM. Earlier this week(Monday), this was demoed during a keynote at Oracle World by Chuck Rozwat.

* P2V : the server CD allows you to boot in p2v mode which copies over the disk images from a physical server to an Oracle VM server in a server pool and creates a virtual machine for you.

* VMWare V2V: we now automatically convert VMware images into Oracle VM format instead of the manual steps that were previously required.

* Secure Live Migration:  Notice I said "secure".  That's because we are now the first major virtualization solution to SSL encrypt migration traffic natively and by default so you are not exposing sensitive information like account numbers and passwords in the clear.

* Other features such as rate limiting of virtual network interfaces, Disk IO priorities for guest virtual disks etc.

* And, RAC has now been certified with Oracle VM, adding to the list of Oracle products we've cerftified with.

And just like with the previous release, its free to download (both Manager and Server), free to use, no license keys, no alpha/be-our-tester version, all features included, no cpu limitations. Just pay for support, if you need it. You don't get that from anyone else.

In the virtualization world most people talk about virtual appliances however we decided to call it virtual machine templates. The reason for this is that we are looking at more complex and more feature rich product components. In many cases people want to make changes to the installations. We have to be able to do upgrades and apply security patchsets and so on. So we decided not to create blackboxes but create virtual machine images which have been pre-configured with recommended patches, recommended OS settings, then the Oracle product on top with the recommended patchset level and also other changes and fixes applied.

The first few templates are now already available for download. There are 2 siebel software templates, one for the middle tier and one for the database and there are the recently released Oracle Enterprise Manager templates, also one middle tier and one database tier.

The downloads might be pretty hefty but once downloaded you can just import these into Oracle VM and start a virtual machine. All you have to do is provide a password or 2 and an ip address and hostname. You then end up with a fully configured Siebel product stack or Enterprise Manager product stack .In the EM one, we even added a virtual disk which contains full yum repositories for Oracle Enterprise Linux so you can do patch management and provisioning out of the box for the OS as well.

The license on these templates contains free download and free trial use with the option to purchase a product license and use in a production environment (for the traditional Oracle products). Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Linux are free download and free use.

We will continue to add more templates on a regular basis and enhance existing ones but this is a very exciting project which will help our partners and our customers get started on using Oracle products out of the box. Hope you like it. And.. more to come

Yesterday morning I was at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. Intel announced this new community effort called lesswatts. (http://lesswatts.org) (I suggested fewerwatts but the folks involved said less sounded better...ok then

Either way - the idea behind the project is to help Linux make better use of the new power features that are in the various new chips and also provide users with the tools and information needed to set up the OS and applications in order to make more efficient use of resources. This will then result into power savings. Lower power bills, better for the planet and so forth.

Renee James, general manager of Intel's software group made the announcement in her keynote and I joined her on stage for a few minutes to explain how Oracle and Intel are working together to get this into the hands of our customers. This project is important to Oracle as a consumer of Linux and because of the Unbreakable Linux support program we provide to our customers.

This really means a few things

Oracle plans to:

- Extend the validated configurations program we have (http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/linux-validated-0606.html) and add hints and tips to set up a system with power savings in mind. This will be based on internal (Oracle) testing.

- Help with making Linux be able to use the hardware features better (kernel and userspace code changes). At the same time, Intel will spend a lot of effort on power management in Linux.

One complaint we sometimes hear, is that even though Linux has a lot of new functionality and rapidly picks up new technologies, the distributions lag. Mainline Linux testing is still not on par and backporting untested features can be difficult. We have a lot of work to do here but there also is a lot of opportunity to work together and make this happen.

Bottom line :using less/fewer watts is good for all.

Yesterday, a few folks sent me this link : http://www.linux-mag.com/id/4120/. I read it with interest as there are a few things, ignoring the tone of the article, which I thought were interesting. 

I don't know how to make this clearer, so I'll reiterate what we've said from the start...Oracle Enterprise Linux is fully source and binary compatible with RHEL, so the same "experience" exists when you install either product. For good or bad. If we made it different, so that Oracle's installation was different, there would have been a complaint that we are not compatible. hmm no win ? But remember, our focus is on enterprise-quality support and that means we strive to provide customers with the best possible user experience. Oracle Enterprise Linux is compatible with RHEL and what we do is provide a great support service on top of either/both. We didn't launch a Linux distribution business, we started a Linux support program. I think we have made that very clear many a times. 

Next is the claim that it takes many hours to get things working... that made me wonder... So I decided to take an old laptop, a 2gz p4 with 1gb ram, install everything from scratch(OS + Oracle database 10gR2) and time it. To the minute (or second) give or take a few seconds, but given the comment of "many hours" those few seconds surely won't matter. 

So I started at 1:50pm, booted up my laptop and with the EL4U5 for x86 DVD. At 2:01pm, I had the entire distribution installed and the system did the reboot. This was the default installation, no customizations.  

The box reboots. I configure a regular user, oracle. It starts up Xwindows, I run rhn_register as the root user and configure my box to connect to ULN. This took me 3 whole minutes ! Time flies... 

then I run : 

[root@localhost ~]# up2date oracle-validated 

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: el4_i386_latest... 

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: el4_i386_oracle...

######################################## 

Fetching rpm headers...

######################################## 

Name                                   Version        Rel

----------------------------------------------------------

oracle-validated                        1.0.0          4.el4             i386 
 

Testing package set / solving RPM inter-dependencies...

########################################

oracle-validated-1.0.0-4.el ########################## Done.

compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-4 ########################## Done.

elfutils-libelf-devel-0.97. ########################## Done.

gcc-3.4.6-8.0.1.i386.rpm:   ########################## Done.

gcc-c++-3.4.6-8.0.1.i386.rp ########################## Done.

glibc-devel-2.3.4-2.36.i386 ########################## Done.

glibc-headers-2.3.4-2.36.i3 ########################## Done.

glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.1 ########################## Done.

libaio-0.3.105-2.i386.rpm:  ########################## Done.

libaio-devel-0.3.105-2.i386 ########################## Done.

libstdc++-devel-3.4.6-8.0.1 ########################## Done.

sysstat-5.0.5-15.0.1.el4.i3 ########################## Done.

Preparing              ########################################### [100%] 

Installing...

   1:libstdc++-devel        ########################################### [100%]

   2:libaio                 ########################################### [100%]

   3:glibc-kernheaders      ########################################### [100%]

   4:glibc-headers          ########################################### [100%]

   5:glibc-devel            ########################################### [100%]

   6:gcc                    ########################################### [100%]

   7:gcc-c++                ########################################### [100%]

   8:libaio-devel           ########################################### [100%]

   9:sysstat                ########################################### [100%]

  10:elfutils-libelf-devel  ########################################### [100%]

  11:compat-libstdc++-33    ########################################### [100%]

  12:oracle-validated       ########################################### [100%]

The following packages were added to your selection to satisfy dependencies: 

Name                                    Version        Release

--------------------------------------------------------------

compat-libstdc++-33                     3.2.3          47.3

elfutils-libelf-devel                   0.97.1         4

gcc                                     3.4.6          8.0.1

gcc-c++                                 3.4.6          8.0.1

glibc-devel                             2.3.4          2.36

glibc-headers                           2.3.4          2.36

glibc-kernheaders                       2.4            9.1.100.EL

libaio                                  0.3.105        2

libaio-devel                            0.3.105        2

libstdc++-devel                         3.4.6          8.0.1

sysstat                                 5.0.5          15.0.1.el4 
 

so now we are at 2:05pm.  

I grab the oracle 10.2.0.1 CD and put it into the laptop and start runInstaller.

This is a standard out of the box install with the starter database created. 

2:15pm. software installed, products relinked and creation of the clone/seed database started. Remember, this is a laptop with one of those 5400rpm disks.  

2:26pm. database created, configuration assistants ran, I type as fast as I can to run the root.sh scripts and about a minute later. done. 

2:27pm, after 37 minutes, on the slowest machine I could find near me, I installed the OS from scratch (EL4U4), I installed Oracle RDBMS 10.2.0.1 with the default started database from scratch. And now have everything up and running and configured. Including a registered system with ULN.  

So for the default Linux install, get the oracle-validated rpm which we have talked about plenty and clearly tell people this is the sort of add-on stuff we can provide to make it easy to install Oracle products without having to modify the distribution. 

Maybe I cheated a few seconds left or right while reading the clock, so say 38 minutes. Still far less than an hour, and certainly not many many hours and certainly no installation problems, at all. No errors, no finding packages from CDs to get something going. Just hit the next button and enter a password here or there. 

Did I miss something ? It didn't feel like rocket science to me, even though, admittedly, it wasn't my very first Linux or Oracle installation. Someone want to try and beat me on installation time ? I can try it on a current desktop, I bet I can bring it down to about 20 minutes. Yes, it really is that easy and on top of that, if I had a problem, I could call support and I am sure they'd have been very helpful :) 

Reference URLs

http://linux.oracle.com

http://oracle.com/linux

http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux

http://www.orablogs.com/sergio/archives/001882.html