Built to Scale with VCF on VxRail and Oracle 19C RAC

The newly released Oracle RAC on Dell EMC VxRail with VMware Cloud Foundations (VCF) Reference Architecture (RA) guides customers to building an efficient and high performing hyperconverged infrastructure to run their OLTP workloads. Scalability was the primary goal of this RA, and performance was highlighted as the numbers were generated. As Oracle RAC scaled, TPM increased to over 1 million TPM, while read IOPs showed sub-milli-second (0.64-0.70 ms) performance. The performance achieved with VxRail is a great added benefit to the core design points for Oracle RAC environments of which the primary focus is the availability and resiliency of the solution. Links to a reference architecture (“Oracle RAC on VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail”) and a solution brief (“Deploying Oracle RAC on Dell EMC VxRail “) are available here and at the end of this post.

The RAC solution with VxRail scaled-out easily — you simply add a new node to join an existing VxRail cluster. The VxRail Manager provides a simple path that automatically discovers and non-disruptively adds each new node. VMware vSphere and vSAN can then rebalance resources and workloads across the cluster, creating a single resource pool for compute and storage. 

The VxRail clusters were built with eight P570F nodes; four for the VCF Management Domain and four for the Oracle RAC Workload Domain. 

Specifics on the build, including the hardware and software used, are detailed within the reference architecture. It also provides information on the testing, tools used, and results.

This graph shows the performance of TPM and Response Time when increasing the RAC node count from one to four. Notice that the average TPM increased with near-linear trendline (shown by the dotted line) as additional RAC nodes were added, while total application response time was maintained at 20 milliseconds or less.

Note: TPM near-linear trendline is shown in the above graph (blue dotted line), As additional RAC nodes are added, an increase in performance is seen as well as an increase in RAC high availability. TPM linear performance (scale equal performance per each note) growth is not achieved due to RAC nodes’ dependency on concurrency of access, instance, network, or other factors. See the RA for additional performance related information.

Summary of performance

Different-sized databases kept the TPM at the same level (about one million transactions) while keeping the application response time at 20ms or below. When increasing the database size, the physical read and write IOPS increased near-linearly, as reported from the Oracle AWR. This indicated that more read and write I/O requests were served by the backend storage, under the same configuration. Overall, when the peak client IOPS was up to 100,000, vSAN still provided excellent storage performance at sub-milliseconds at read and single-digit milliseconds latency at write.

Sidebar about Oracle licensing: While not mentioned in the RA; the VxRail offers several facilities to both control Oracle licenses and in some cases eliminates the need for costly licensed options.  These include a broad choice of CPU core configurations, some with fewer cores and higher processing power per core, to maximize the customer’s Oracle workload performance while minimizing the license requirements. Costly add on options such as encryption and compression can be provided via vSAN and are handled by VxRail. Further, and the vSphere hypervisor features, like DRS, allow Oracle VMs to be contained to only licensed nodes. 

You can speak to a Dell Technologies’ Oracle specialist for more details on how to control Oracle licensing costs for VMware environments. 

Conclusion

Oracle Database 19c on VxRail offers customers performance, scalability, reliability, and security for all their operational and analytical workloads. The Oracle RAC on VxRail test environment was first created to highlight the architecture. It also had the added benefit of showcasing the great performance VxRail delivers. If you need more performance, it is simple to adjust the configuration by adding more VxRail nodes to the cluster. If you need more storage, add more drives to meet the scale required of the database. Dell Technologies has Oracle specialists to ensure the VxRail cluster will meet the scale and performance outcomes desired for Oracle environments.

Additional Resources:

Reference Architecture - Oracle RAC on VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail

Solution Brief - Deploying Oracle RAC on Dell EMC VxRail

Author: Vic Dery, Senior Principal Engineer, VxRail Technical Marketing

@VxVicTX

Special thank you to David Glynn for assisting with the reviews