Virtualizing Banner/Oracle

Adam Lord the Director of Systems and Architect provided this semi detailed description of Bowdoin's RAC One VM solution for Banner. This Oracle Banner solution was built over the last year. He would be happy to talk with anyone who is considering a similar move. alord@bowdoin.edu We are in process of moving the datacenter, upgrading the network, and migrating everything from HP blades to a Cisco UCS server solution this summer. We are testing next gen storage that provides up to an 80x IOPs improvement over NetApp to complete this solution. 20 ESXi 5.1 Hosts 300 Virtualized Guests approx. 50/50 Windows/Linux VM Data stores backed by NFS attached NetApp cluster 4 ESXi Clusters separating Test Systems, Prod Systems, ERP Systems, and Secure Systems VMWare provides flexibility to quickly adjust resources during periods of high demand System provisioning process is near automated between vmware guest templates and configuration management systems like Puppet With VMWare we have a higher level of hardware utilization lowering capx and opx costs High levels of system availability allowing operations to vmotion and storage vmotion guests while running Plans for leveraging VMWare vSphere site recovery manager and fault tolerant configured systems for delivering business continuity services for critical systems Systems that are not capable of clustered or load balancing are abstracted from physical hardware reducing single points of failure RAC One defined: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_RAC Using Oracle databases to support Ellucian Banner suite, blackboard, and other business applications Operate Oracle in clustered and single instance modes on Windows and Red Hat server platforms Also operate several MSSQL Clusters for other enterprise application systems that support the campus All database systems are managed using Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Currently operate 4 Oracle RAC One node clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to support ERP Systems Clusters use NetApp NFS attached shared disks which keeps storage simple and avoids the additional complexity of clustered file systems Using RAC One to provide database availability by limiting disruption during routine maintenance without added of complexity of full RAC system that would require more care and feeding from a DBA Leverage site license for Oracle as it was best value and allows for flexibility and not restricted by other models of licensing Systems and Applications groups apply change management processes to ensure system availability and consistency between typically 3 zones (Test, Stage, Prod) Within ERP we separate the database clusters as well as the application servers into four zones, Training, Test, Staging, Production given training uses sample data and not cloned production data ************** ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.