RAC on OVM - why or why not?
DanBrintDec 13 2010 — edited Dec 23 2010HI All,
I attended Saar's presentation given last week and while I enjoyed it very much I have a query that I'd appreciate any/all feedback on.
As a brief history we've dabbled in RAC before and even had some internal 10g clusters running for a couple of years on internal test systems. We were pleased with the features that we were able to take advantage of and feel comfortable with the skills necessary to manage RAC clusters.
Up until say 2 years ago our business and application needs did not seem to mandate RAC (no real 24x7 uptime and no real performance need beyond a single server) and so we opted to go down the OVM path for the purposes of consolidation, improved availability, ...
At this point we have a number of single node databases and application servers all running quite happily in our OVM environment and life is relatively good :)
Our business and app needs have changed and we are now about to go down the (now mainstream) RAC path full bore and anticipate moving the vast majority of our databases into RAC clusters.
The question I have is why should I consider putting these RAC databases into an OVM environment? From my experience it looks like OVM would in this case be introducing another layer of complexity and more potential points of failure.
As some background you should know that for us licensing is not a concern as we have site-wide licenses for OVM, OEL and RAC. Also our workload is dynamic but not overly unpredictable. We have relatively stable resource consumption cycles owing to the business we are in.
I would really appreciate any and all feedback and look forward from benefiting from the communities experience.