BP 2000 Oracle On Nutanix
BP 2000 Oracle On Nutanix
SOLUTIONS DOCUMENT
Contents
1. Executive Summary................................................................................. 5
3. Oracle on Nutanix.................................................................................... 9
5. Nutanix Configuration........................................................................... 13
Controller VM Settings...................................................................................................................... 13
Cluster Resilience ............................................................................................................................ 13
Storage Container Configuration...................................................................................................... 14
9. Conclusion.............................................................................................. 27
About Nutanix.............................................................................................28
Oracle on Nutanix Best Practices
1. Executive Summary
Nutanix provides a complete datacenter infrastructure solution for your production and
development Oracle Database environments, eliminating the complexity of traditional IT
infrastructure. Nutanix delivers predictable performance, linear scalability, and web-scale
cost efficiency for your transactional and analytical Oracle Database environments. With
powerful self-healing, data protection, and disaster recovery capabilities, Nutanix keeps
your applications running and your critical data protected on VMware vSphere or Nutanix
AHV. As a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) program, Nutanix is committed
to your success.
Nutanix reduces operational costs by simplifying daily database management tasks
with Nutanix Database Service (NDB). NDB streamlines and simplifies Oracle Database
administration, helping you drive efficiency, agility, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.
With one-click provisioning, patching, and cloning, NDB provides simplicity, security, and
standardization on-premises and across clouds.
This document provides design, configuration, and optimization guidelines for a single
instance of Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) running on
Nutanix. In this document, we cover the following topics:
• Overview of Nutanix AOS and Nutanix Database Service
• Linux and Windows OS best practices for Oracle on Nutanix
• Nutanix storage configuration
• In-guest configuration
Readers should be familiar with the following concepts:
• Oracle Database administration
• Nutanix cluster administration (hypervisor, networking, storage)
• Linux and Windows OS (guest OS that Oracle Database runs on)
Table: Document Version History
3. Oracle on Nutanix
Digital transformation demands that IT services become more agile, shorten application
deployment time, and increase scalability. Designed to run any application, Nutanix
software converges storage and compute, eliminating the complexity of separate
standalone storage solutions. Nutanix supports VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and
Nutanix AHV, allowing you to choose the right hypervisor for your needs.
Using the advanced storage functionality of Nutanix Volumes, your workloads benefit
from all the foundational Nutanix features, such as backup and recovery, disaster
recovery, snapshots, clones, and high performance.
Running Oracle on Nutanix offers several advantages:
Simplicity
You can deploy your database in minutes with NDB, which means a shorter time to
production. NDB also simplifies management with a single management pane and
one-click life cycle management that includes database patching. With NDB, you
don't have to worry about storage area network (SAN) management tasks such as
multipathing, zoning, or masking.
Fault-tolerant platform
Nutanix uses high availability and data redundancy to withstand software and
hardware failures, which means that your Oracle Database deployment stays
running even if the underlying hardware has issues.
Enterprise-grade performance
Nutanix provides I/O latency of less than a millisecond and predictable
performance while supporting a wide range of transactional and analytical
database workloads, including Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and
Oracle RAC.
Scalability
With the Nutanix solution, you can start small and scale performance and capacity
nondisruptively as your needs grow.
HCI nodes host storage services and guest VMs running Oracle. Storage-only nodes are
nonschedulable, so they only host storage services (no guest VMs), which can be useful
from an Oracle licensing perspective. We designed storage-only nodes to expand the
storage capacity of an existing Nutanix cluster.
Processor
Select a processor with a high clock speed and 12 or more cores per socket on dual-
socket servers. We recommend that you select at least a 2.9 GHz CPU (with SPEC 55
or greater per core on the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark) for production Oracle Database
instances.
Memory
Use a balanced memory configuration. A balanced memory configuration delivers the
highest bandwidth between the processor and memory and the best performance for
CPU-intensive applications. The number of DIMMs required for balanced memory varies
by model.
Storage
Use all-flash storage for Oracle Database instances. You can reduce long-term storage
costs for backups and archived data by using Nutanix Objects or Nutanix Files on a
separate hybrid storage cluster for cost efficiency.
Networking
In a cloud architecture, Ethernet handles the data previously handled by a SAN. High-
performance networking is the key to good Oracle Database performance on Nutanix.
Networking best practices include the following:
• Use redundant 25 GbE or faster uplinks from each Nutanix node.
• Enable LACP in an active-active configuration.
• Connect all the nodes in a Nutanix cluster to the same pair of switches.
• Use a dedicated VLAN for Oracle RAC Cache Fusion (heartbeat) networks on each
Nutanix node.
For more information on networking, see the following documents:
• Physical Networking
• Nutanix AHV Networking
• VMware vSphere Networking
5. Nutanix Configuration
This section provides recommendations for configuring the Controller VM (CVM), cluster
resilience, and storage containers for Oracle deployments.
Controller VM Settings
Nutanix Foundation provisions CVMs during the Nutanix cluster installation process. The
number of vCPUs allocated to a CVM is based on the number of cores per socket in the
server hardware.
Table: Recommended CVM vCPU and Memory Settings
Parameter Default Heavy Oracle Workload
vCPU 12 16
Memory 32 GB 64 GB
All vCPUs for a CVM must fit in a single socket; if you have more than 12 cores per
socket, you can increase the number of vCPUs assigned to the CVM. For heavy I/O
workloads, increase the CVM memory to 64 GB to provide metadata caching space and
reduce latency.
Cluster Resilience
Nutanix AOS supports two levels of fault tolerance (FT). Clusters with three or four nodes
are FT1, and you can configure clusters with five or more nodes as FT1 or FT2. To
achieve application fault tolerance, ensure that the cluster has enough free memory and
vCPU capacity available for critical workloads to fail over to another node. With AHV, you
achieve application fault tolerance by enabling high-availability reservations. For more
information, see the VM High Availability in Acropolis section of the Prism Element Web
Console Guide. Replication factor 2 or 3 is defined per storage container.
Table: Minimum Number of Nodes Required for FT1 and FT2
• ASMFD is a kernel module that resides in the I/O path of the Oracle ASM disks.
Oracle ASMFD simplifies the configuration and management of disk devices by
eliminating the need to rebind disk devices used with Oracle ASM each time you
restart the system. The ASMFD feature rejects write I/O requests that aren't issued
by Oracle software. This filter ensures that users with administrative privileges can't
inadvertently overwrite Oracle ASM disks, which prevents corruption in those disks
and files in the disk groups.
Nutanix performance testing shows that ASMFD and udev yield similar results, so you
can deploy whichever device you're most comfortable with on your Nutanix cluster.
For more information on how to deploy Oracle ASM, see Introducing Oracle Automatic
Storage Management.
Note: ASMLib wasn't part of this performance study.
The following table shows the recommended settings for all ASM disk groups. For
more information on setting these parameters, see the Automatic Storage Management
Administrator's Guide for your version of Oracle.
Table: Recommended Settings for Oracle ASM Disk Groups
Settings Values
ASM Allocation Unit (AU) size (AU_SIZE) 1 MB
ASM OCR disk group redundancy Normal/High
ASM DATA disk group redundancy External
ASM FRA disk group redundancy External
When you configure the timeout using udev rules, you make it persistent across
restarts.
For more information on setting the misscount parameter, see the Oracle Clusterware
Administration and Deployment Guide.
vDisk Configuration
To achieve the best I/O performance when you run Oracle on Nutanix, follow these
recommendations:
• Use Oracle ASM or an OS volume manager to stripe performance-critical file systems
across four or more vDisks.
• On ESXi, place the vDisks in each stripe across multiple PVSCSI controllers.
• On ESXi, use a VMXNET3 adapter for iSCSI traffic and ensure that the iSCSI
interface is on the same subnet as the CVM.
• When using Volume Groups on AHV, create separate groups for database files and
redo logs, archive logs, backup files, and Oracle Cluster Ready Services (CRS) disks.
Table: Number of vDisks for Each Data Type
Number of vDisks Purpose
3 Boot, grid home, Oracle home
4–8 Database files and redo log files
4 Database archive log files
4 Database RMAN backup files
3 Oracle CRS voting disks, RAC only
Note: iSCSI vDisks are automatically load-balanced across the Nutanix cluster.
ESXi Settings
The following table lists our recommended settings for Oracle Database VMs on ESXi.
Table: Recommended Settings for Oracle Database VMs on ESXi
Parameter Configuration
Network adapter VMXNET3
Storage adapter Minimum of 3 PVSCSI (OS + DB + redo), 4 for
larger or high-performance databases
OS and app disks Thin-provisioned, disk mode = dependent
Database (ASM) disks for standalone Thin-provisioned, disk mode = independent
persistent
Database (ASM) disks for RAC Thick-provisioned, eager-zeroed, disk mode
= independent persistent (VMware KB
1034165)
VMware tools Latest installed
VM memory Locked (preferred) or Memory Reservation
enabled
Advanced VM config: Disk.ENABLEUUID In the VMX file, set disk.EnableUUID=True for
the VM (VMware KB 52815)
Advanced VM config: Recommended value: disabled
ethernetX.coalescingScheme
• Keep production VMs on separate physical hosts for the best performance.
• Make sure that two RAC VMs don't end up on the same physical host.
• Control VM placement to ensure performance under regular conditions and during a
high-availability event.
On ESXi, use admission control to ensure that sufficient resources are available to
provide failover protection. For more information, see vSphere HA Admission Control
Settings for Nutanix Environment.
Note: Use a percentage value for high availability admission control. When you use VMware vSphere,
obtain this percentage value by dividing 1 by the number of hosts per cluster.
• Use the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to stripe the database file systems.
• Use an LVM-striped volume with an ext4 or XFS file system.
• Configure the physical extent size to 1,024 KB.
Nutanix Replication
Nutanix offers multiple types of data replication:
• Metro Availability: synchronous replication (not supported for Volume Groups)
• Asynchronous replication: recovery point objective (RPO) of 60 minutes or more
• NearSync: RPO between 1 and 15 minutes
Metro Availability requires a maximum transmission latency of 5 ms. If the latency is
more than 5 ms, we recommend that you use asynchronous or NearSync replication. You
can add a third-site witness VM to automate Metro Availability failover.
For complete details on the available recovery point and recovery time objectives, see
the Nutanix Disaster Recovery Guide.
Oracle Replication
You can use Oracle replication options such as Data Guard and GoldenGate to replicate
Oracle databases on Nutanix.
Backup
The best backup method depends on the size of the database, the data change rate,
and whether you can use an online or an offline backup. With NDB, you can choose
to use NDB's backup software or third-party backup software. Nutanix supports using
RMAN and third-party backup software including HYCU, Veeam, Commvault, and Veritas
to back up Oracle databases.
NDB provides an excellent method for managing application-consistent backups of
multiterabyte Oracle databases. NDB backs up mission-critical databases using a
combination of application-consistent snapshots and archive logs and provides an
excellent workflow for this process. For more information, see the Nutanix Database
Service Administration Guide.
8. Database Maintenance
Oracle recommends that you apply security patches every quarter or whenever a
critical patch is available. NDB automates Oracle Patch Set Updates (PSU), which
uses automated workflows to reduce the time and effort required to patch multiple
Oracle Database servers with minimal downtime. For more information, see the Nutanix
Database Service Administration Guide.
9. Conclusion
Nutanix web-scale engineering streamlines Oracle Database deployments with high-
performance, low-latency storage, linear scalability, high availability, multicloud support,
and simplified management through NDB. Nutanix takes care of the underlying compute
and storage architecture so that you can focus on higher-value tasks, such as application
enhancements accelerating time to production.
Visit the Nutanix Community to engage with Nutanix experts and learn more about the
benefits of the Nutanix Cloud Platform for Oracle Database, Nutanix Database Service
for Oracle, and other business-critical applications. Contact Nutanix at [email protected]
to set up your own customized briefing that includes sizing, TCO analysis, data
protection, and disaster recovery design.
About Nutanix
Nutanix offers a single platform to run all your apps and data across multiple clouds
while simplifying operations and reducing complexity. Trusted by companies worldwide,
Nutanix powers hybrid multicloud environments efficiently and cost effectively. This
enables companies to focus on successful business outcomes and new innovations.
Learn more at Nutanix.com.