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Yet another sign that the Register jumped the shark
Saturday, May 9. 2009
In ancient times (in IT world: 2005 or so) the Register was a good source of informations. Youīve got interesting hints to technology and a realistic view to IT, the major players and the newest hypes. Several years passed and now the Register is totally unreadable. I just keeping it in my feedreader as itīs important to me to be aware of Register articles before customers confront me with the nonsense written at the Register.
One of the names connected to the downfall of the Register (at least in my opinion) is Chris Mellor. Most of the time i ask myself about his connections to NetApp, but one of the best examples to give you an impression about the questionable quality of his articles is his recent output regarding about the Oracle 'faster, cheaper' with VMware. This article is so bug-infested, that i doubt, that Mr. Mellor did even basic research on this article.
One of the names connected to the downfall of the Register (at least in my opinion) is Chris Mellor. Most of the time i ask myself about his connections to NetApp, but one of the best examples to give you an impression about the questionable quality of his articles is his recent output regarding about the Oracle 'faster, cheaper' with VMware. This article is so bug-infested, that i doubt, that Mr. Mellor did even basic research on this article.
To state it at the beginning: Iīm still strongly opinionated that Oracle RAC isnīt a good idea to scale workloads, but itīs a great way to shorten your Oracle installations failover time. This is my opinion and this opinion wonīt change ... even in the light that the logo on my business card may be red in the future 
Due to the nature of RAC it solves the problem of the need to replay the logs of your database after failover. This is a problem that strikes you with normal HA clusters. Dependent on the load on your database there may be enough "to-be-replayed" transactions in the database to hold up the startup of your database for several minutes.
Whatīs the point of Chris Mellor in his article: Well, he tries to pitch the use of VMware as an failover technology. He does it in an intelligent way. Many sentences begin with "Is said to". Journalism is more than paraphrasing articles and prepend the sentences with "Is said to".
The problem is: The foundation of article is based on a blog article of an EMC guy. You know: EMC is the company that purchased VMware a while ago.In order to pitch VMware HA the referenced article omits many facts or represents them in a wrong way.
For example: He is stating in
Cluster Ready Services or Sun Cluster (on Solaris you use Solaris Cluster for clustering for e.g.) is meant to make the infrastructure beneath RAC high available, as Oracle RAC assumes, that the system is made highly available. But the product isnīt bound to Oracle RAC as you you could see in the respective licensing rules of the Oracle software.
By the way: I find this a little bit strange. You could do such a failover with a decent cluster framework on the native operating system without paying the VMware tax. I donīt talk about the license price of VMware, as you have to pay for a cluster framework as well (albeit not as much as for a VMware infrastructure). I talk about the loss in performance and the increase in complexity by moving a virtualisation layer between the native hardware and the database. When you wanīt clustering without RAC just purchase a Sun Cluster License with an Agent for Oracle or the respective Solution of Veritas. Or when you want to use an application specific cluster, you could use the Clusterware cluster, as this product isnīt bound to RAC.
In the licensing information of Oracle 10g R2 you find the following rule:
Furthermore: As far as i understand the HA cluster mechanism in VMware itīs ... well ... itīs just really basic. For example clustering the virtual machine means itīs totally unaware about the application running in the VM. It just checks, if the hardware running the VMware is still available. And thatīs just a really basic functionally. It canīt restart your oracle in the case it had a hickup blocking the listeners for example. It canīt even detect this situation because it doesnīt check this situation, it doesnīt have the mechanisms to check this situation.
The solution pitched by Registers Chris Mellor and the EMC bloggers is not unsimilar to an containerized Oracle in conjunction with the Zone HA agent in Sun Cluster. But this even this really simple solution would be superior to a VMware HA solution as the container HA agent can look into the zone and monitor the components in the zone, thus monitoring the status of the application and not just the status of the hardware.
Of course you need some know how about enterprise computing and clustering to notice this subtle but very important differences. I would like to read articles at the big news outlets showing they were well researched. The article in the Register leaves this wish unanswered, as it doesnīt show a single sign of real know how, a single sign of journalistic research.
To be honest: After all the article iīve read from him, i donīt have any hope to read an decent article written by Chris Mellor. To end this article with a small wish: Mr. Mellor, it would be nice, when you bite the hand of EMC instead of simply copying an EMC blog article.
Due to the nature of RAC it solves the problem of the need to replay the logs of your database after failover. This is a problem that strikes you with normal HA clusters. Dependent on the load on your database there may be enough "to-be-replayed" transactions in the database to hold up the startup of your database for several minutes.Whatīs the point of Chris Mellor in his article: Well, he tries to pitch the use of VMware as an failover technology. He does it in an intelligent way. Many sentences begin with "Is said to". Journalism is more than paraphrasing articles and prepend the sentences with "Is said to".
The problem is: The foundation of article is based on a blog article of an EMC guy. You know: EMC is the company that purchased VMware a while ago.In order to pitch VMware HA the referenced article omits many facts or represents them in a wrong way.
For example: He is stating in
both Oracle Cluster Ready Services (the underlying technology behind Oracle RAC) and VMware HA cluster are cluster software products.This is highly misleading because the core of RAC is the Cache Fusion, the mechanism to provide a single SGA in a cluster.
Cluster Ready Services or Sun Cluster (on Solaris you use Solaris Cluster for clustering for e.g.) is meant to make the infrastructure beneath RAC high available, as Oracle RAC assumes, that the system is made highly available. But the product isnīt bound to Oracle RAC as you you could see in the respective licensing rules of the Oracle software.
By the way: I find this a little bit strange. You could do such a failover with a decent cluster framework on the native operating system without paying the VMware tax. I donīt talk about the license price of VMware, as you have to pay for a cluster framework as well (albeit not as much as for a VMware infrastructure). I talk about the loss in performance and the increase in complexity by moving a virtualisation layer between the native hardware and the database. When you wanīt clustering without RAC just purchase a Sun Cluster License with an Agent for Oracle or the respective Solution of Veritas. Or when you want to use an application specific cluster, you could use the Clusterware cluster, as this product isnīt bound to RAC.
In the licensing information of Oracle 10g R2 you find the following rule:
Oracle Clusterware can be installed and used to protect any Oracle or third-party software provided one of the following conditions are met:This is the point where the arguments of Mr. Mellor and the blogs he has linked to in his article breaks apart. In short you donīt need RAC for clustering, you donīt need the Enterprise Edition for clustering. Even when you want Oracle Clusterware. This information was just a single Google-search away.
1.The software being protected is from Oracle.
2. The software being protected uses an Oracle Database.
3. The software being protected is running on Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
4. The software being protected is running in a cluster where at least one machine involved in the cluster is licensed using the appropriate metric for either Oracle Database Enterprise Edition or Oracle Database Standard Edition.
Furthermore: As far as i understand the HA cluster mechanism in VMware itīs ... well ... itīs just really basic. For example clustering the virtual machine means itīs totally unaware about the application running in the VM. It just checks, if the hardware running the VMware is still available. And thatīs just a really basic functionally. It canīt restart your oracle in the case it had a hickup blocking the listeners for example. It canīt even detect this situation because it doesnīt check this situation, it doesnīt have the mechanisms to check this situation.
The solution pitched by Registers Chris Mellor and the EMC bloggers is not unsimilar to an containerized Oracle in conjunction with the Zone HA agent in Sun Cluster. But this even this really simple solution would be superior to a VMware HA solution as the container HA agent can look into the zone and monitor the components in the zone, thus monitoring the status of the application and not just the status of the hardware.
Of course you need some know how about enterprise computing and clustering to notice this subtle but very important differences. I would like to read articles at the big news outlets showing they were well researched. The article in the Register leaves this wish unanswered, as it doesnīt show a single sign of real know how, a single sign of journalistic research.
To be honest: After all the article iīve read from him, i donīt have any hope to read an decent article written by Chris Mellor. To end this article with a small wish: Mr. Mellor, it would be nice, when you bite the hand of EMC instead of simply copying an EMC blog article.
Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp
in English, The IT Business
at
12:11
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Agreed wholeheartedly.
In addition, most of the articles he authors are riddled with typos, which really does make you wonder what sort of a "journalist" he is.
I see that The Register is one of the online tech news sites that does not require their staff to disclose their industry affiliations - whereas ZDnet for example does.
In addition, most of the articles he authors are riddled with typos, which really does make you wonder what sort of a "journalist" he is.
I see that The Register is one of the online tech news sites that does not require their staff to disclose their industry affiliations - whereas ZDnet for example does.
VMware HA can monitor the status of the OS running in the guest and not just the hardware (although up until the latest update, this monitoring would lead to a failover if you restarted the VMware Tools services), although there is no application specific monitoring.
However, VMware HA just powers on the VM on a different ESX host and therefore you have to wait for the OS to boot and all of the delays inherent therein. Also, with the default settings, VMware HA won't even do that in the case of a network partition event, meaning that your database could quite happily run on and on while the rest of the world fails to reach it.
Thanks for the hint about Clusterware licensing, we would probably do well to look closer at that given those conditions.
Ceri
However, VMware HA just powers on the VM on a different ESX host and therefore you have to wait for the OS to boot and all of the delays inherent therein. Also, with the default settings, VMware HA won't even do that in the case of a network partition event, meaning that your database could quite happily run on and on while the rest of the world fails to reach it.
Thanks for the hint about Clusterware licensing, we would probably do well to look closer at that given those conditions.
Ceri
The rules of the game may change once the fault tolerant solution (from Stratus) is available for Oracle, where you get a fault tolerant 2 node setup with VMWare. (Of course with performance penalty)
Gruss
Bernd
Gruss
Bernd
VMware Fault Tolerance will be standard in vSphere, but as far as I'm aware that's still only one OS instance. Not sure what the Stratus product is.
Limited to one core and 20% overhead. Doesnīt seem to be a viable alternative for Oracle.
I can vouch for the deterioration of The Register. I used to look forward to articles that took an unbiased and at times funny look (Ashlee Vance's were priceless) at IT landscape. Nowadays their anti-Sun (Oracle) bias is too obvious.. I do miss those Itanic articles from Ashlee, Intel clearly got to them.
I go for weeks without visiting the register, need I say more.
I go for weeks without visiting the register, need I say more.
+1
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Okay, okay ... as several people have asked for it ... but you know my opinion.
Heilsbringer gibt es viele auf dieser Welt, in der IT ist es im Moment Virtualisierung. Es gibt eigentlich kein Problem, welches nicht damit gelöst werden kann. Ich denke man muss genau hinschauen, denn manche Dinge lassen sich nur bedingt verglei...
Tracked: May 09, 22:08