Virtualization – Oracle VM on HP Blades
It’s been years since I’ve been on the computer-floor of one of our datacenters in Groningen, NL., but today we (a co-worker and yours truly) were allowed access to install Oracle VM on a pair of HP Proliant BL25p G2-blade servers. These servers include two AMD Opteron 2000 Series processors and 16GB of RAM each.
FYI – Oracle VM is based on Xen, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for x86-compatible computers. Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines, each running its own OS, on a single physical system with close-to-native performance.
One node was installed with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit) and will be used as a management-console for virtual machines, to be installed on the other node: the Xen-based VM Server.
Since this is all being conducted as a PoC (Proof of Concept), e.g. “unknown territory” for anyone in our department, I’m yet unsure what will come our way.
We will be experimenting with running various Linux-distributions (RHEL4/5, OEL4/5) and Oracle databases (10gR2, 11g) in virtual environments and report to management about how all of this scales under different conditions and what possible purposes this might give us to sell to our customers (think test- and development-servers).
I’ll try to keep you updated.
Well, at the end of this day I was able to start up a paravirtualized, 32-bit machine from Oracle-provided templates, based on OEL4 including an installation of the Oracle 11g-database.
But not after I ran into various issues: missing directories after installation but mentioned nevertheless in the documentation; missing RPM-package(s) when trying to update the hypervizor; cached webpages with outdated information in the webGUI (come on, Oracle… how hard is to provide a webGUI with a meta-tag content=”no-cache” enabled by default?!) and python-processes going defunct (aka zombie) when checking the status of Xen.
But besides these minor disappointments I managed to get a nice overview about how to deploy an Oracle virtual server-environment. 
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