Exalytics - Patch Set 5 ( Exalytics PS5)

Oracle released the PatchSet 5 for Exalytics last week.

Here are some highlights:

Base Image upgrade

Majority of the patch is confined to the Base Image.

New base image - 1.0.0.7 to include kernel upgrade to 2.6.39-400. additional drivers and firmware upgrade for X4-4 machines.

It comes with an Upgrade utility which will allow for patching a PS4 machine to PS5.

Virtual Deployments Upgrade

 VM server upgrade to 3.2.8, and guest kernel to 2.6.39-400

Additional software certification

Oracle Database In-Memory: 

Oracle database 12c EE (rel 12.1.0.2) with in-memory edition is now certified with Exalytics when run in Data Warehouse mode. (No OLTP support)

Does this mark the end of TT on Exalytics?

I will update this as we upgrade a client's machine to PS5!

Sachin
Architect - Oracle Engineered Systems
Exalytics/Exalogic/Exadata
BuzzClan LLC

BuzzClan is a business consulting company collaborating to provide Oracle software advisory services & implementation services. BuzzClan LLC is committed to providing substantive business value on each and every client engagement. We do this through a combination of industry-specific business expertise, technical skills, proven project management methods and our “onsite - off site - offshore” delivery model. We strive to work in partnership with our customers to build high-performance teams and create business solutions that will last.

Engineered Systems VS. NIST Definition of Cloud Computing

According to the NIST,

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.(http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf)

In this blog, I will examine how each of the five essential characteristics defined by NIST (in bold/italics) applies to the engineered systems - Exalogic, Exadata, and Exalytics.

On-Demand Self-Service:  

A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

This refers to the ability of cloud services consumers to configure and maintain the landscape presented to them. This allows for distributed administration capabilities. While the centralized team concentrates on managing the infrastructure tasks like initial setup, capacity planning and resource quota allocation, backup, disaster recovery, patching, libraries of Virtual Machine (VM) templates, middleware code, etc., the application-level administration is delegated to the consumers. They can create VMs from the template library and extend them according to their needs.

To enable the consumers to do this, several administration consoles are provided by the Cloud Infrastructure to allow for GUI, Command Line Interface (CLI) or scripted interaction with the system.

Oracle’s engineered systems provide the following self-service capabilities:
 •  Cloud admin account access
• Enterprise Manager Operations Center (EMOC) access 
• Virtual Data Center (vDC) Management tab with access to pre-built Virtual Machine templates for frequently used functions
• Base VM templates to build upon
• Command Line Interfaces (CLI and dCLI) access to most of these tasks for automation and one-touch unilateral provisioning

Broad Network Access:  

Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).

Oracle’s engineered systems are generally used for private cloud offerings within secured corporate or public sector settings. Therefore, access to these is not required on a mobile device. The systems provide the access over SSL/SSH using the following: 

• Browser-based interfaces (EMOC/VM Manager/ZFSManager)
• CLI interface over SSH

Resource Pooling:  

The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage,  processing, memory, and network bandwidth.

This, I believe, is the most important characteristic of a cloud offering. With commodity servers running independently, we have seen that there is often a heterogeneous usage of resources. Most of the servers are underutilized while some can never have enough resources to service the load, creating a bottleneck referred to as 'underutilized server sprawl'. With an IaaS scenario, this can be fixed by dynamically rearranging the load on a particular resource. The engineered systems allow for resource quota for the users/accounts (Account Resource Limit).

• Oracle Virtual Machine Server - Virtualizer
• Virtual CPU/CPU oversubscription
• Common memory pool
• Common storage
• Shared network access  

Rapid Elasticity: 

Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.

We currently follow these steps in order to change the memory, vCPU, and/or the Network resource allocation for an existing guest vServer (Reference - Exalogic: Changing the Memory, vCPU and Network Resources for an existing guest vServer (Doc ID 1586296.1)):

1. Stop the vServer
2. Create a template
3. Create a vServer type with the required memory and vCPU resources
4. Delete the old server
5. Create a new vServer by using the template in step #2 and the vServer type created in step #3

I am hopeful that upcoming releases will make this process more streamlined and easier to manage.
Ideally, to ensure elasticity, the virtual servers should have memory, vCPU, network bandwidth, and storage quotas within a range. The servers should also have a priority definition which will help mitigate resource contention issue in case multiple vServers are trying. The vServer should be able to negotiate the resources based on its priority among other servers, the current load on the vServer, and the Virtual Server as a whole.
The disk space is shared among all the compute nodes and virtual machines.  Shares and projects can be created by the cloud admins to be mounted on the VMs. These shares can also be shared among multiple VMs.
Resource quotas are established at a cloud-account level. Any VM created within the account has access to the resources allocated to the account.
What’s missing?

• Networking quota
• Prioritization (if a resource is oversubscribed, which account/VM/process gets access to the resource if the physical limit is reached)
• Time slot-based allocation   

Measured service:

Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

Enterprise Manager 12c provides the capability to meter the usage and calculate chargeback of different resources (targets).  A universal charge plan contains rates for CPU, Memory and storage. Extended charge plans can be used across various target types. Details can be found in the OEM - Chargeback Administration.

What’s missing? 

• This functionality is not available for Exalytics servers yet. However, in an OBIEE implementation, certain Usage Tracking reports can be configured to provide this functionality.

Tech Term of the Day 

NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology


Sachin
Architect - Oracle Engineered Systems
Exalytics/Exalogic/Exadata
BuzzClan LLC

BuzzClan is a business consulting company collaborating to provide Oracle software advisory services & implementation services. BuzzClan LLC is committed to providing substantive business value on each and every client engagement. We do this through a combination of industry-specific business expertise, technical skills, proven project management methods and our “onsite - off site - offshore” delivery model. We strive to work in partnership with our customers to build high-performance teams and create business solutions that will last.

Elastic Cloud vs. Not-So-Elastic Cloud: CPU Over-subscription

This is Part III in my series of articles about implementing Exalytics as a private cloud. The first two that laid the groundwork for this concept are:

Part I – Exalytics: The Promise of BI on Private Cloud

Part II - Classify the Exalytics Application Requirements and Cloud Offerings

The idea is to create a system which can host various OBIEE/EPM implementations and can adjust according to the current load and the VM’s priority/quota. Each VM is assigned a range of resources from the available pool. Instead of saying that a VM can have 2 cores/CPU, we can virtualize the resources by creating a virtual unit?the vCPU?and allocate available threads.  This vCPU is the key ingredient in an elastic cloud.

vCPU Configuration - EMOC vDC Management

 We allocate to each VM the resources it needs to run optimally. However, instead of assigning an absolute number of resources, it is done virtually in terms of CPU threads rather than cores. This allows two important things: 
• dynamic reallocation of the resources at runtime without the need to recycle the server
• VMs compete for the CPU cycles/threads on the basis of priority allocated to them at design time.

 If we have a VM hosting the EPM Suite, another VM hosting BI for the North America, and another VM hosting BI for the Asian operations, we can schedule the priority of the North America VM and the Asian server to be high priority based on time of operations. The EPM server can have overall priority so that users on the EPM server will get a better throughput whenever they are on.

Account Resource Limit

 One caveat is that the vCPU memory and storage quotas (Account Resource Limit) are set at the account level rather than at the VM level. This enables a cloud user to create multiple VMs within the quota allocated to them.

 The vCPU priority and cap are defined when creating VM profiles.

VM Proile - CPU Priority/Cap

 This profile will be used to define a VM hosting a service which can run in the background and yield to a higher priority task when needed. A deployment plan is created with this profile and applied while creating a virtual machine.

When creating a new VM Server, the following can be applied to benefit from a real elastic cloud implementation:

1. Change the CPU/vCPU ratio
2. Configure an Account Resource Limit for individual accounts
3. Create VM profiles with vCPU priority

Further explanation of this concept can be found in Donald Forbes’s article on  Exalogic and CPU Oversubscription.

Sachin
Architect - Oracle Engineered Systems
Exalytics/Exalogic/Exadata
BuzzClan LLC

BuzzClan is a business consulting company collaborating to provide Oracle software advisory services & implementation services. BuzzClan LLC is committed to providing substantive business value on each and every client engagement. We do this through a combination of industry-specific business expertise, technical skills, proven project management methods and our “onsite - off site - offshore” delivery model. We strive to work in partnership with our customers to build high-performance teams and create business solutions that will last.

Classify the Exalytics Application Requirements and Cloud Offerings

This is Part II in a series of articles discussing private cloud options on Exalytics:

Part I - Exalytics - The Promise of BI on Private Cloud

Part III - Elastic Cloud vs. Not-So-Elastic Cloud

 If you are involved in the architecture team of a big organization taking care of BI arena, you know that BI implementations are very fragmented. Everyone needs to be able to make sense of the data that they are collecting and the different ways they can get around to doing that.

 Implementation varies by the business group: accounting, planning, or finance. Some rely on Excel while others gravitate towards a combination of Excel and Access. Some even have custom applications that are painstakingly built using .NET/ASP.NET, JSP, Oracle XE and others, depending on the level of IT resources available to the business and their core skills.

 Once you start designing an enterprise solution and start collecting feedback from these groups, they tend to gravitate towards these 3 bins:

• Enterprise BI applications

• Custom, high-value BI applications requiring independent control

• Smaller datamarts

The classification is easier said than done. The first bin is pretty simple and normally revolves around the enterprise ERP solutions. One builds a data warehouse connected to the ERP and provides a set of analytics on that.

The distinction between the second and the third bins can lead to a fierce battle. Everyone wants their application to be autonomous. 

Ideally, the private cloud should be able to do metering and chargeback, with an internal cross-charge to “cost centers” based on how the system resources were being used. Once this is in place and a cost is associated with the different modes of operating the Analytics Solution, one can negotiate the applications category by adjusting the "cost" associated with each model.

There are several ways to host applications on a central Exalytics system. We can present a  few options  for the agencies to choose from: 

1. Exalytics running bare metal implementation

• Single BI instance

• Multiple BI Instances

2. Virtualized Exalytics (OVM) 

• Single-Instance VMs, one for each application

• Multiple BI Instances on one shared VM

• Single-Instance VMs, shared for multiple applications

I will discuss the pros and cons of these in the next blog.

Sachin

BuzzClan LLC

Architect - Oracle Engineered Systems

Exalytics/Exalogic/Exadata

BuzzClan is a business consulting company collaborating to provide Oracle software advisory services & implementation services. BuzzClan LLC is committed to providing substantive business value on each and every client engagement. We do this through a combination of industry-specific business expertise, technical skills, proven project management methods and our “onsite - off site - offshore” delivery model. We strive to work in partnership with our customers to build high-performance teams and create business solutions that will last.

Exalytics - The Promise of BI on Private Cloud

Oracle came out with a neat infomercial touting the features and benefits of Exalytics - Extreme Analytics with No Limits.

The ability to have more than 50,000 users and cut analysis time from monthly to daily are impressive.  This type of an appliance should be a great tool for exposing Enterprise Analytics in a private cloud setting, enabling users to keep up with the demands of  implementing the OBIEE and EPM suite of products.

Originally, Exalytics didn't support virtualization. Patchset 1 introduced the base image concept that enabled virtualized Exalytics implementation, but it had one deal-breaking limitation: InfiniBand connectivity was not supported if the boxes were virtualized.

“Exalytics virtualization does not support Exadata access via InfiniBand connection. This feature is planned for Exalytics Release 1 Patchset 4 (v1.0.0.4). However, Exadata can be accessed via the 1G or 10G interfaces.”

I have yet to see a customer who bought the Exalytics machines without Exadata as the database server, so taking away the InfiniBand connection meant that nobody had the incentive to virtualize.

 Oracle came out with Patchset 4 in early 2014. Exalytics boxes can now be virtualized while keeping the InfiniBand connectivity into Exadata and/or Exalogic (as traffic cop). There is a lot of excitement about being able to run the BI system as a private cloud offering. 

In a state department where I am currently consulting in, one of their goals is to 

“gain efficiencies through creation of a Private Cloud and encourage adoption of public cloud platforms, when appropriate.”

So when the PSU4 came out, the stakeholders were very excited to present the recent Exalytics acquisition and rewire them as private cloud offering for various agencies looking to use it to serve their BI content.

Oracle's recommendation has been to limit the VMs on an Exalytics box to a maximum of 4 on X2/X3 machines and 12 on X5 (@10 core/VM). The configurations are as follows:

• 1 VM for BI
• 1 VM for Essbase (planning)
• 1 VM for Endeca
• Each VM instance to run a minimum of 10 cores

It is still unclear if this is a licensing limitation or a result of an internal benchmark. If an organization is using an Exalytics box to run OBIEE, BI apps, and the EPM suite, there go the 4 VMs. They would need to allot one for each of these: BI apps (one central implementation), EPM (one central implementation), OVM, and custom OBIEE machines.

In the succeeding weeks, I will share our experience with this state department client and how we meet one of their goals by eliminating duplication and lowering costs. Stay tuned for these upcoming posts:

Part II - Classify the Application Requirements and Cloud Offerings - Exalytics
Part III - Elastic Cloud vs. Not-So-Elastic Cloud - CPU Over Subscription

Tech Term of the Day

Exalytics base image: an image that consists of the operating system, virtualization software, and device drivers pre-configured for the respective appliance.


Sachin
BuzzClan LLC
Architect - Oracle Engineered Systems
Exalytics/Exalogic/Exadata

BuzzClan is a business consulting company collaborating to provide Oracle software advisory services & implementation services. BuzzClan LLC is committed to providing substantive business value on each and every client engagement. We do this through a combination of industry-specific business expertise, technical skills, proven project management methods and our “onsite - off site - offshore” delivery model. We strive to work in partnership with our customers to build high-performance teams and create business solutions that will last.