Introduction

Oracle e-Business ERP Application Suite is an Enterprise Resource Planning tool used at VMware for its core function of processing orders-into-cash: a mission critical process and the lifeblood of the company.

VMware has been running Oracle applications and databases on virtual machines for some time in numerous test, development and other internal systems. In 2008, a project to implement a replacement ERP system used virtual machines for the application part of the Oracle system - why virtualize this central component? Initially to speed up the delivery against strict deadlines, but there were many more project and operational benefits derived. The back end RAC databases were left on physical... for now!

The key finding of the VMware and Oracle consultants working on project found that they didn't have to do anything special to run Oracle on VMware: there is no secret sauce, no special tricks and the project went incredibly well for them and enabled them to meet their deadlines because of the ease and speed of deploying and testing applications on VMware; their other projects now run Oracle on VMware as the best place because it makes their life easier and customers happier!

Despite there being no need for special expertise it is still worth walking through the process of the project team so you can see how they successfully virtualized Oracle e-Business Suit and see for yourself what a normal, no risk process it was.

This document is one of a series that showcases "VMware on VMware" where VMware explains how it has virtualized its own mission critical applications and gained the same business and operational benefits as its thousands of customers world-wide.

Intended Audience

VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and Oracle Professionals. This is a proven practice from the team that built the VMware Infrastructure and deployed the applications, and who continue to manage the system.

Outline

The project team explain their approach in the following steps:

1. What is this Oracle ERP system?

2. Why was it virtualized?

3. Who virtualized it?

4. How was it virtualized?

5. What is happening today?

Oracle's e-Business suite is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software tool that VMware uses for mission critical order-to-cash business processing.

This business function has high SLA requirements, thousands of users (over 6,000 staff have access to iProcurement) and a high rate of operational change in a fast moving business environment.

When the VMware team was implementing the Oracle applications they chose to deploy onto VMware Infrastructure because of the ease of administration, and also because they had incredibly short timelines that could only be met by deploying on VMware - it would just have taken too long on physical.

The system is also complex: VMware's core business processes run through the workflow of Oracle, so any problems will be immediate up to the CEO level. To date there have been no issues with the platform and it has been reliable; in fact the application team do not know, nor care, that their tools run on VMware because (a) it works, and (b) they still use their same methods of getting their job done.

The database layer which is Oracle RAC is still running on physical servers and is being addressed by a new initiative: RAC is already running on VMware for other projects, and is scheduled to move soon for this project.

If you are interested in virtualizing Oracle RAC, check out these VIOPS proven practices:

• Oracle 10g Release 2 RAC On RHEL4 Linux Using VMware ESX Server and NFS

• Oracle 11g Release 1 RAC On RHEL5 Linux Using VMware ESX Server and NFS

There were two main drivers.

Firstly, VMware insists on "eating its own dogfood" with an internal program called "VMware on VMware". Our CIO is driving this initative (and has a great presentation on it too!), and executive sponsorship like this is the key to virtualizing mission critical applications. Our CIO didn't just virtualize because of blind faith in the VMware product set, though, which leads me to the second driver.

• Watch How VMware Virtualizes its Own IT Environment from the Desktop to the Datacenter

With a tough project deadline, provisioning and testing was a huge benefit on VMware Infrastructure compared to physical. Not only is it minutes to deploy and test new servers using templates and cloning, but it is easy to increase and decrease resources available to the application - this is a huge benefit of virtualization because it avoids the error prone and bad but necessary physical world process of over specification for capacity. Instead of buying a collection of oversized servers that are running at low utilization and are difficult to change once installed, virtual machines can be added, removed, expanded and shrunk - a great efficiency and tuning aid for the application folks.

It helped the virtualization project that the team was experienced: Rob is an experienced Oracle expert, and both Jeremy and Dan are VMware experts. VMware has also been running Oracle applications and databases on VMware Infrastructure for years, but in this case the project just focused on the application suite.

Another enabler is the continued support of Oracle for e-Business ERP on VMware. See here for more information about Oracle on VMware:

• A list of vendors that support their products on VMware - email any questions on ISV Support.

• A list of customers who have virtualized Oracle products on VMware

• Virtualizing Oracle Blog by Chris Rimer

• How VMware Virtualizes its Own IT Environment from the Desktop to the Datacenter by VMware's CIO - this is a live recording of our CIOs VMworld presentation, highly recommended.

There were some inhibitors to the project, some factors that wanted to stop the virtualization effort: the main one was the reluctance of the application experts who had no experience of Oracle on VMware... here's where the CIO executive sponsorship helped to move past this barrier and now the application experts RECOMMEND Oracle on VMware after their positive experience! They found the speed up of their tasks and the project was a significant business benefit to them, allowing them to hit their deadlines and deliver a rock solid solution.

A truly team effort, starting from the CIO down through his management team to the workers on the ground.

The key individuals are noted as the Authors in this document - Rob (VMware Oracle expert), Jeremy and Dan (VMware experts), but other people were involved and benefited from this solution:

• Project Managers got their project on time

• Oracle Application experts got earlier access to their systems and can use the same tools as normal

• Virtualization experts didn't have to do anything special for Oracle - just another cluster!

• The Network and Storage teams only needed to be "hassled" once for ports, IPs and storage - once assigned / pre-allocated to the VMware Infrastructure, the VCPs could handle the individual assignments to virtual machines which took a lot of mundance workload off the shoulders of the over-worked Network and Storage teams - huge win! Once the VI is cabled up, that's that! No repeat trips to the datacenter which is slow and expensive.

• User testing - because the project was fast and reliable, users had more time for testing.

The team that did all of the work was inhouse and didn't need to learn any black magic or apply any secret techniques. Existing experience and resources were adequate and didn't need any expert consulting other than for complex Oracle features like Cache deployment - which has nothing to do with VMware Infrastructure.

A standard infrastructure project was followed with no special changes: it was pretty straight-forward!

There were four environments as depicted in Figure 1 - ERP Environments

Figure 1 - ERP Environments

In the production environment, the mix of application, virtual machines and physical hosts is shown in Figure 2 - Server Assignments.

Figure 2 - Server Assignments

Oracle ERP Application (and OS) layer

The most important characteristic about virtualizing the Oracle application was that it needed no special treatment or customization to run in virtual machines:

• No changes to application in any way.

• Some changes to Linux OS in virtual machine, specifically to fix kernel clock issues link.

• The application suite uses Oracle clustering with no issues.

• Standard monitoring tools are used.

Network layer

The network complexity was hidden from the application because a virtual machine abstracts all of the redundancy and different NIC configurations away.

Oracle application benefited from redundant NICs without knowing about it, because the redundancy is at the ESX vSwitch layer - so no special configuration for the application or Linux OS because ESX is handling it for them.

The high-level network organization is shown in Figure 3 - Network Topology.

Figure 3 - Network Topology

Storage layer

The Storage was a Clariion array with redundant fibre-channel fabric: not that the Oracle application would know about it, because the complexity is hidden / abstracted by VMware ESX.

Storage was presented as VMFS virtual disks and not raw disk maps (RDMs).

Security

• No special configurations, standard application, OS hardening and ESX firewall configuration.

VMware Infrastructure

Again, nothing special is required for Oracle to run in VI - all the normal best practices for VI were applied.

Life is normal for the application team: the Oracle experts use the same tools as always and do not care or know about virtual machines or VMware Infrastructure because it doesn't cause them any problems.

Oracle provide support, so there are no support issues.

The infrastructure operations team benefit hugely, of course, because of the efficiencies of virtualizing - whether it's backup/recovery, or increasing/decreasing resources allocated for tuning - all of these, and more, are far easier on virtualization than physical which in turn increases the quality of service to the applications team and means the mission critical business processes for VMware are running smoothly.