Category: Linux

Fedora 10 and Oracle 11gR1…

I like to meddle with Fedora from time to time, just so I can see what’s coming round the corner in RHEL. I read recently that Fedora 11 will be the base for RHEL6, which means we are about 6 months away from seeing what the future of RHEL is going to be…

Much as I expected, there were no real problems getting Oracle 11gR1 running on Fedora 10. Here is an OS and an Oracle installation guide for Fedora 10.

The Fedora 10 network configuration dialog seemed to have a couple of issues/bugs. For a start, it was impossible to set the subnet mask. It was constantly overwritten by the default gateway. I adjusted it in the config file and it was fine, but it was a bit confusing for a while. 🙂

I’ve complained a number of times in the past that Fedora doesn’t seem to have an obvious direction. Is it server or is it desktop? Of course it’s both, but I think some clear intent helps from a marketing point of view. The fact that the Desktop Edition, a live CD, is at the top of the Get Fedora page will save many people form downloading a DVD full of software they will never need. Once installed, you get access to all the software via the “Add/Remove Software” dialog.

A few interesting things about the installation are:

  • The installation package list is fixed. There’s no customization during the installation.
  • The installer assumes you want DHCP for your network.
  • SELinux and the Firewall are on by default.
  • Services like SSHD are not on by default.

I guess if these issues annoy you, don’t pick the desktop edition. 🙂

I think this is definite step in the right direction as far as encouraging Fedora for desktop use.

Cheers

Tim…

Air New Zealand individual on-demand system uses Linux…

I was part way through watching The Incredible Hulk on the flight to New Zealand when my “Individual On-Demand System” crashed and restarted. I watched with geeky pleasure as Linux booted up. I couldn’t tell the exact version, it went too quick, but I saw “Red Hat” in the text and there was a picture of Tux… 🙂

I’m in New Zealand now, chilling out at a mates house for a few days before starting the New Zealand Oracle User Group conference.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle, Open Source and Virtualization…

Due to other commitments, I only made it to 2 presentations today…

Executive Panel: Oracle and Open Source:

The session was a seeded question and answer session to highlight Oracles commitment to “Free” software downloads, Open Source and Open Standards. If you follow the subject areas, I guess you know the score. The standout points for me were:

  • InnoDB and BerkeleyDB are have continued investment.
  • The linux kernel community is really happy with the work being done by Oracle. Oracle are not considered an evil empire by the inner circle.
  • The new Windows drivers for Oracle VM are currently in use within Oracle. No fixed release date, but they are on their way, so Windows performance under Oracle VM should improve when this is released. The were expected some time ago, but Microsoft have revised a bunch of APIs, so they had to be rewritten.
  • Oracle VM has supported Live Migration of VMs since it was released, but this is a manual process. Something similar to VMwares automated VMotion will be introduced at some point, but it will probably be under the control of Enterprise Manager/Grid Control, not part of the Oracle VM product itself. The impression I got was that this is a feature they want, not one that is in development, so don’t hold your breath.
  • Oracle are continuing to invest in a variety of Open Source products and Open Standards. Obviously they have their own interests at heart, but being open source means it is helping the Open Source community generally. If Linux get’s better, Oracle benefit, but so does everyone else.

Oracle Database in a server virtualization environment

A general run through current support/certification of virtualization by Oracle. Standout points include:

  • In addition to Oracle VM, Oracle support a variety of hardware partitioning and OS partioning methods provided by the big UNIX vendors. There was a URL of a certification matrix on OTN, but I can’t find it now. 🙁
  • Oracle support dynamic resource configuration in single instance databases. So you can alter the number of CPU’s and amount of memory allocated to a VM and Oracle will notice and work with it. Some of this was possible since 9i, but there were issues. It’s now solid for 10.2.0.4 (+ patches) and 11.1.0.7.
  • Oracle support RAC on Oracle VM, but the configuration is quite limited at the moment. The RAC must be 10.2.0.4 on OEL 5.1 or above and be running on OVM 2.1.2. In addiiton it must be paravirtualized and is only supported in static mode, so there are no dynamic changes to CPU or memory and no live migrations. I assume over time some of these restrictions will be lifted and 11g support will be added.

As far as best practices go, I guess most of it was pretty standard:

  • Don’t overcommit resources. You can’t expect good performance if you have 1 core running 5 VMs.
  • Standard CPU, memory, I/O and network sizing/thoughout considerations still apply.
  • RAC should use dedicated NICs, not shared ones.
  • NIC bonding best done at hypervisor level (Dom0), not at the VM level.
  • All VMs, especially RAC, need time synchronization (NTP).
  • Use native physical devices and multipath or NFS. This will perform much better than virtual disks.
  • Oracle still recommend consolidation of databases, rather than many small databases/instances. Only split things into multiple VMs, database or instances when it is necessary, otherwise you are wasting resources.
  • Expected performance will depend on platform, application type, workload type and resource allocation.

The licensing issue will no doubt catch many people out. Oracle doesn’t recognize software virtualizations ability to limit processing to specifc processors or cores, so by default you must license the Oracle software for all cores on the system when using software virtualization. Those platforms which support hard partitioning (big UNIX vendors) can use per-core licensing. If you plan on using a server just for VMs running the database, this is fine, but if you want to run half database and half app server you will be buying double the CPU licenses that you are using. Bummer. 🙁

Update: A talk this morning says pinning the VMs to specifc cores is within the spirit of the licensing agreement. Nice to see a consistent message… Not! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Sun’s xVM is here…

Sun have announced their revolutionary new product xVM. It’s an open source Xen derivative that installs on bare-metal.

Wait a minute… That sounds remarkably like what Oracle did with Oracle VM, which was released about a year ago…

So now we have four big players wanting a share of the market:

  • VMware ESX (ESXi) Server – A proprietory, bare-metal hypervisor. ESX isn’t free, but the ESXi version is.
  • Oracle VM – A free open source bare-metal hypervisor.
  • Sun xVM – A free open source bare-metal hypervisor.
  • Microsoft Hyper-V – A not-so-free proprietory hypervisor that’s not exactly bare-metal.

You have to take the word “free” with a pinch of salt. With most of these tools, the real power comes with the enterprise tools and they cost money. Even so, as far as basic hypervisors go, it’s looking a lot more crowded in free-town.

I guess the one that stands out on this list is Hyper-V because it isn’t really a bare-metal installation. You run Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 box and it effectively demotes the server to a partition, or virtual machine. As a result, if you want to run a bunch of Linux VMs, you still have to have the Windows Server 2008 parition managing the lot. Not what I would call bare-metal. I suppose this is less of a hardship for a Windows shop, but it just doesn’t sound like an enterprise product to me. Just an opinion. 🙂

It looks like the next couple of years are going to be kinda interesting. VMware is still the name on everyones lips, but the profit margins are going to take a bit of a beating as the competition fires up…

Cheers

Tim…

VMware ESX and Oracle RAC…

It looks like those possible VMware ESX articles I mentioned yesterday are now on the VIOPS site.

If you’re interested in the enterprise VMware kit it’s worth taking a look at the site. New stuff is being added all the time. I think it’s official launch is at vmworld2008 in about 3 weeks.

I’ve also added an overview article for the ESX Server installation to my website.

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 9 and Oracle 11g…

I wrote a couple of articles against a beta version of Fedora 9 before I went on holiday. I did a run through against the final release of Fedora 9 today and they seem fine, so here they are:

The installation process doesn’t give you the option to turn off SELinux or the firewall. You can do it after the installation, so it’s just a small annoyance, but I don’t like it.

If you want to know my opinions on the distribution itself, read my post on Fedora 8. It’s six months later and there is still no visible sign of a direction for this distribution. I don’t think my opinion has changed.

Cheers

Tim…

rlwrap…

During his unconference session at OpenWorld 2007, Lutz Hartmann used rlwrap to give SQL*Plus and RMAN command line history and basic editing functionality. Like the Windows Process Explorer post I wrote recently, this is another example of a gizmo I’ve used in the past then completely forgotten about, so I’m grateful to Lutz for reminding me. To see how I install and configure it click here.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Someone and just told me my rlwrap post is now ranked higher than Howard’s on Google. This is really a “duck and cover” event. 🙁

Fedora 8 and Oracle 11g…

My Fedora 8 escapades were delayed by my OpenWorld experience, but better late than never.

The first article is a run through of a fairly basic Fedora 8 install, showing what it looks like. The second is the Oracle install guide in my normal format. There’s one little nasty in there, but for the most part it was pretty smooth sailing, especially since a guy called “Robert W. Benton” emailed me to tell me what the problem was before I had even finished downloading the OS. Thanks for that Robert. 🙂

I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ll no doubt mention it again, but I’m really struggling to see what the Fedora distribution is aiming for. It seems to send out contradicting messages at times. For instance, it has features that make me think it is a desktop OS:

  • Looks very soft and cuddly like a desktop OS.
  • It pops up an annoying warning message if I log on as root.
  • Users get sub-directories like Documents, Downloads, Music, Videos created by default.

But for me the big contradictions are:

  • The distribution is really big. I would expect a desktop OS to come on one CD, with the extra features available for download.
  • The installation process seems rather clumsy compared to Ubuntu. It’s not a big difference, but that slight bit of extra complexity makes it feel like a server installation to me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not hard, but I’ve been doing this since Red Hat 5.2, so I’m not exactly a Linux newbie. I feel it could be simplified further.

Looking from the other angle, it could be considered a server OS, after all it is a playground for Red Hat (a bit of flame-bait there 🙂 ), but some of the previously mentioned points detract from that message. I remember all those people telling me that Windows wasn’t a real server OS because it forced you to have gizmos like Media Player etc. Fedora has this same feel to me now. Plus the DVD is missing a number of packages that I would expect an enterprise distribution to have. I know they are available for download, but as a server OS I would prefer to forgo the fluffy guff in favor of the enterprise stuff.

I can image some of the responses to this post. No doubt some Fedora fan[boys|girls] will post telling me that Fedora is a great desktop and/or server OS… blah, blah, blah… I’m not doubting that. I just think that we have to recognize that the server and the desktop are two totally different experiences and I don’t think Fedora sells itself well enough on either front.

Ubuntu is a classic example of how to do it right. I don’t believe it is significantly better than Fedora, but it had a clear message from day one. We all knew it was a desktop OS and it acted like that. They’ve subsequently gone the server route also, but they’ve kept it as a separate entity. This is no different to the way Microsoft tackled the same issue.

I really feel like Fedora must decide what its purpose is, or it’s just going to end up another one of those faceless distributions you try, think of as OK, then ditch in favor of something else that suits your purpose better…

Cheers

Tim…