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Best Practices Guide—Deploying Oracle 12c RAC Database on Dell EMC XC Series All-Flash
Introduction Product overview Solution infrastructure Sizing hypervisor configuration guidelines
Oracle database VM configuration
VM guest OS configuration for Oracle guidelines
Nutanix CVM
Storage layout for databases
Performance monitoring
Appendix A: How to identify and query the disk ids/WWNs Appendix B: Configuration details Appendix C: Technical support and resources

VM guest OS configuration for Oracle guidelines

Home > Integrated Products > XC Family > Guides > Best Practices Guide—Deploying Oracle 12c RAC Database on Dell EMC XC Series All-Flash > VM guest OS configuration for Oracle guidelines

VM guest OS configuration for Oracle guidelines

  • Oracle and VMware support most of the mainstream Linux distributions. Dell recommends Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running Oracle databases due to the wide customer install base and the strong supports of the database products by these companies. However, customers might choose any supported Linux distribution based on their preferences. For this document, the information is based on Oracle Linux.

    VMware recommends using the PVSCSI and VMXNET3 drivers for greater performance capability. Many mainstream Linux distributions might have these drivers included and installed by default. However, in order to ensure the drivers are at the latest version, obtain the latest version of VMware tools and install them in the guest OS. Refer to the VMware KB article 1014294 for more information about general VMware tools installation instructions.

    Installing and configuring the OS for an Oracle database in a virtual machine is similar to doing so on a physical host.

    1. Install the base OS from a virtual CD or ISO.
    2. Update the guest OS, software packages, and bug fixes to the latest version from the vendor’s yum repository.
    3. Install the latest version of VMware tools.
    4. Configure the guest OS to synchronize time from a trusted server. This is particularly important if Oracle RAC will be used. All RAC virtual machines must maintain a synchronized time across the RAC cluster. It is recommended to use NTP on Oracle Linux 6.x/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x or chronyd on Oracle Linux 7.x/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x.
    5. Transfer the Oracle installation media to the virtual machines. If deploying multiple instances, it might be beneficial to set up an NFS mount and share the common media through NFS.
    6. Disable the NetworkManager service.
    7. Disable the  avahi_daemon service if Oracle RAC will be deployed on the virtual machine.
    8. Oracle recommends tuning the swapping priority on database servers. Set vm.swappiness=5 in /etc/sysctl.conf.
    9. Review the 12c Oracle Database Preinstallation Tasks and 12c Oracle Grid Infrastructure Installation Checklist. Other Oracle versions can be found on https://docs.oracle.com.
    10. Create Oracle OS users and groups (user oracle with primary group of oinstall and user grid with primary group of oinstall).
    11. Present virtual disks to the guest OS in vSphere.
    12. Identify virtual disks using the procedures outlined in Appendix A: How to identify and query the disk ids/WWNs.
    13. VMware recommends setting the disk timeout value to 180 seconds. This is typically handled by the VMware tools where a udev rule is created to set this timeout. It has been discovered that this udev rule is missing in the VMware tools for Oracle Linux 7.x/RHEL 7.x systems. To work around this issue, the file can be created manually in /etc/udev/rules.d/99-vmware-scsi-timeout.rules with the following contents:

    ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi", ATTRS{vendor}=="VMware  ", ATTRS{model}=="Virtual disk", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 180 >/sys$DEVPATH/timeout'"

    1. Reboot the system or run the following command to apply the rule without rebooting:

    udevadm trigger --action=add

    1. Verify the new setting:

    lsscsi –l or

    cat /sys/block/sdX/device/timeout

    1. Assign ownership and permission to the virtual disks for Oracle and make the setting persistent across restart. This can be configured using the Linux udev facility. See Oracle ASM for Oracle single instance or RAC for more information on configuring Oracle ASM and an udev example.
    2. For Oracle Linux, install the Oracle preconfiguration script from Oracle’s yum repository. The package automates some of the Oracle preinstall configuration steps such as adjusting kernel parameters, configuring the oracle users OS limits, verifying and installing pre-requite packages.
      1. Enable ol7-addon or ol6-addon in /etc/yum.repos.d/public-yum-olX.repo:

    yum list oracle-rdbms-servers*

    oracle-rdbms-servers-12cR1-preinstall

    oracle-rdbms-servers-11gR2-preinstall

    1. Install the corresponding package version using yum install command.
    2. For other Linux distributions, follow the 12c Oracle Database Preinstallation Tasks and 12c Oracle Grid Infrastructure Installation Checklist. Other Oracle versions can be found on https://docs.oracle.com.
    1. When using virtual disks with VMware storage virtualization, Multipath IO (MPIO) is not required because each disk will only have a single path in the guest OS.
    2. If Nutanix ABS is configured and virtual disks are presented directly to the guest OS through iSCSI, the Linux iSCSI software initiator must be configured. MPIO with iSCSI disks is no longer required starting with Acropolis OS 4.7 because it accomplishes session resiliency and HA with the new external application service IP and iSCSI redirection. For versions prior to 4.7, MPIO with iSCSI disks are necessary.
    3. Nutanix recommends increasing the iSCSI MaxTransferLength to 1MB for large block sequence workloads with I/O sizes of 1MB or larger. This setting can be changed in /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf.

    node.conn[0].iscsi.MaxRecvDataSegmentLength = 1048576

    Find more information on Acropolis Block Services and client iSCSI configuration for use with ABS at the Nutanix portal.