Blog Posts

Tim Hall of oracle-base.com fame wrote a guide on installing Oracle RAC on VMware Server... to think that people are scared of running RAC on ESX, and here's Tim doing the job on our free, hosted product! Great work, Tim!

Of course, we couldn't leave it like that, so I logged on to Tim's website, registered myself, and asked him if he'd be interested in doing the same on ESX Server....

....once we got him some Not For Resale licenses to help him along with full access to our products, Tim arranged his own hardware and - this is the amazing bit - whilst consulting around the country he STILL managed to find time to install our products, create RHEL virtual machines, install RAC and get it all written up!

After working with myself and Tushar on getting things up and running and onto VIOPS, I think the whole thing took about a week in elapsed time and a couple of days in actual effort.

The end results are fantastic, and you can see them here:

• 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

Check out Tim's website for more goodies.

More applications proven practices are planned - why not contribute your own, or help us prioritize the ones that you want to see first? Post a question in the discussion forum, or just get going and submit your own proven practice - it's really easy!

I am responsible for VMware's standards strategy and activities. I have been involved in standards for many years and have been president of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) over ten years. I am passionate about management standards and how they improve interoperability of operation management tools in the support of IT. VMware is a supporter of open standards and participates in a number of standard setting organization. To see a current list you can go to www.vmware.com/standards. I will be blogging here on various standards that are important to VIOPS. These include server, desktop, data center, and virtualization management standards that are being implemented in products today and will have a major impact on the products of tomorrow.

One of the latest standards that is being developed is Open Virtualization Format (OVF). A current version of the specification that as of this post is still a working progress can be seen here. This specification describes a new packaging format for virtual appliance which will improve the ease of deploying and installing virtual machines. To see a demo of how this can reduce the time to deploy an application or service you can see this demo of an OVF package used to deploy WebSphere V7 beta in a VMware environment.

The OVF file is a TAR file which contains the actual virtual machine disk files, which can be either a VMDK, VHD, ISO image or any openly described virtual machine disk format. It also contains meta data regarding the virtual machine. This may include information regarding the resources required to run the virtual machine as well as licenses requirements for the virtual machine and associated applications and services.

I look forward to posting more information in the future regarding OVF and other important system management standards. Let me know what you think via the Comments section of the document, or ask me a question in the Discussions section

Metrics are essential for developing the best virtualization solution for your organization: we’ve all heard the mantra, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”.

But metrics aren’t easy, especially if you are starting with a blank piece of paper and trying to work out what to measure and how to measure it. If you read up on the subject of metrics, you will find some heavy tomes on how to design metrics with a lot of detail that, quite frankly, you don’t have time to work through – and after all, surely someone has done this before?

At VMware we have a unique view across business verticals and sizes of organizations when working with our customers, and every week we hear questions on metrics: What should I measure? How should I measure it? Are my metrics good compared to my competitors?

The proposal document “VMware Super Measures” is the start of a collaboration attempt on the VIOPS Pilot Project to develop some simple, effective and industry-common metrics that help you:

1) Measure your success, or failure, with virtualization. An example might be surpassing, or missing, virtualization targets.

2) Prioritize focus on your efforts. The metrics focus on the business and the customer, not on technical aspects, and this focus is a critical success factor for virtualization

3) Implement metrics as soon as possible. The earlier you start collecting metrics, the more management information at your disposal to make better decisions.

You can collect metrics without acting upon them, even though that would be defeating the point. But if you do anything after reading the Proposal, I would appreciate a comment, a suggestion, your point of view, and if I may dare, some contribution from you to improve the proposal so we can develop it into a practice for the benefit of the whole community.

Thanks

Steve