DEPLOYING IBM DB2 9.7 FOR LINUX, UNIX, AND WINDOWS DATABASES IN A VBLOCK ENVIRONMENT

Transcription

1 White Paper DEPLOYING IBM DB2 9.7 FOR LINUX, UNIX, AND WINDOWS DATABASES IN A VBLOCK ENVIRONMENT Accelerating IBM DB2 deployment in the private cloud Abstract This white paper describes the benefits of using IBM DB2 9.7 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows database software (DB2 9.7) on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms (or Vblock). Vblock is an enterprise- and service provider-class infrastructure solution that consists of VMware vsphere or VMware vcenter running on a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) connected to EMC CLARiiON CX4, EMC VNX series storage, or Symmetrix VMAX arrays via a Cisco MDS 9506 Multilayer Director class SAN switch or, optionally, a MDS 9222i Multiservice Modular Fibre Channel switch. September 2011

2 Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation and IBM Corporation. All Rights Reserved. The authors believe the information in this publication to be accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. The information contained in this publication is provided for informational purposes only. While efforts were made to verify the completeness and accuracy of the information contained in this publication, it is provided AS IS without warranty of any kind, express or implied. In addition, this information is based on EMC and IBM s current product plans and strategy, which are subject to change by EMC or IBM without notice. Product release dates and/or capabilities referenced in this paper may change at any time at IBM s sole discretion based on market opportunities or other factors, and are not intended to be a commitment to future product or feature availability in any way. Nothing contained in these materials is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, stating or implying that any activities undertaken by you will result in any specific sales, revenue growth, savings or other results. All performance data contained in this publication was obtained in the specific operating environment and under the conditions described and is presented as an illustration only. Performance obtained in other operating environments may vary and customers should conduct their own testing. The information in this document concerning non-ibm products was obtained from the supplier(s) of those products. IBM has not tested such products and cannot confirm the accuracy of the performance, compatibility or any other claims related to non- IBM products. Questions about the capabilities of non-ibm products should be addressed to the supplier(s) of those products. EMC and IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to, this publication or any other materials. Nothing contained in this publication is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from EMC, IBM or their suppliers or licensors, or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable license agreement governing the use of EMC or IBM software. 2

3 The furnishing of this document does not imply the grant of a license to any EMC or IBM patents. References in this document to IBM products, Programs, or Services do not imply that IBM intends to make these available in all countries in which IBM operates. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC or IBM software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. If you are viewing this information in softcopy, photographs and color illustrations may not appear. EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems Inc. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and DB2 are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at Copyright and trademark information at Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. Unix is a registered trademark of the Open Group in the United States and other countries. Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Intel Xeon is a trademark or registered trademark of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. 3

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5 Table of Contents Executive summary... 6 Audience... 7 Vblock Infrastructure Platforms... 7 Benefits of Vblock Infrastructure Platforms... 8 Vblock design principals... 9 DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows... 9 IT maturity trend for enterprise databases Consolidation Standardization Automation DB2 9.7 and the cloud Guidelines for DB2 9.7 virtualization The proof-of-concept benchmark Conclusion

6 Executive summary It has only been in the past few years that the notion of cloud computing infrastructure, hardware, and software as an IT service has been taken seriously in its own right and championed by pioneers who have proved the model s viability. Today, the benefits of private clouds are capturing the collective imagination of IT architects and IT consumers in organizations of all sizes around the world. By harnessing the power of virtualization, private clouds place important business benefits within reach. These benefits include: Business enablement Increased business agility and responsiveness to changing priorities; improved speed of deployment and the ability to address the scale of global operations with business innovation Service-based business models Ability to operate IT as a service Facilities optimization Lower energy usage; better (less) use of data center floor space, power, and cooling IT budget savings Efficient use of resources through consolidation and simplification Reduction in complexity Movement away from fragmented, accidental architectures to integrated, optimized technology that lowers risk, increases performance, and produces predictable outcomes Flexibility Ability to gain responsiveness and scalability through federation to cloud service providers while maintaining enterprise-required policies and control To remove risk from the infrastructure virtualization process and to enable enterprises to accelerate their journey to the private cloud, Cisco, EMC, and VMware have joined forces to deliver Vblock Infrastructure Platforms. Vblock Infrastructure Platforms (or simply, Vblocks) are integrated IT offerings from the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition that combine best-of-breed networking, compute, storage, security, and management technologies with end-to-end vendor accountability. The integrated units of infrastructure that Vblocks provide facilitates the rapid implementation of a virtualized infrastructure, so customers can quickly realize a return on investment (ROI). Vblock Infrastructure Platforms are available with varying storage capacity, processing, and network performance; additionally, these extensible packages offer incremental capabilities such as enhanced security and business continuity to satisfy service-level agreements (SLAs). Another important aspect of building a cloud infrastructure involves choosing the right foundation software. This includes not only the operating system, but also the middleware that enables business applications to run on the cloud. For example, databases are required for practically every type of business application. Therefore, choosing the right database management system can mean the difference between success and failure of the business layer of your cloud. 6

7 Cloud computing is the evolution of IT best practices that have been learned and earned with decades of innovation aimed at reducing data center costs. And DB2 9.7, the most recent version of database management software from IBM for open system platforms, was developed with many of the attributes of cloud computing in mind. With industry-leading autonomics, security, standardization, and virtualization support incorporated into its design, DB2 9.7 is the ideal database management system for cloud computing environments. DB2 9.7 is the first database software to receive the coveted VMware Ready mark, which is given only to those that deliver outstanding performance and reliability when deployed on VMware vsphere. Thus, running DB2 9.7 on a VMware infrastructure is a proven solution for business-critical environments that want to move to a cloud infrastructure. And because Vblocks are pre-engineered, productionready (fully tested) IT infrastructure units that rely on VMware for virtualization, the deployment of DB2 9.7 databases on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms is relatively straightforward. Jointly developed technologies and solutions for Vblocks enable database administrators and architects to manage and operate DB2 9.7 databases in a private cloud while still allowing flexibility in database and application deployment. Audience This white paper is intended for DB2 9.7 database administrators, engineers, field consultants, advanced services specialists, and customers who are interested in creating a virtualized DB2 9.7 infrastructure using VMware vsphere or VMware vcenter on a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) connected to EMC Symmetrix VMAX and CLARiiON storage products. Vblock Infrastructure Platforms Jointly created, validated, tested, and supported by Cisco, EMC, and VMware, Vblock Infrastructure Platforms are virtualization infrastructure building blocks that enable organizations to accelerate their journey to the private cloud. Vblock Infrastructure Platforms are available with varying storage capacity, processing, network performance, and capabilities; from entry-level data center environments to enterprise environments running mission-critical applications with high-performance demands, Vblock Infrastructure Platforms provide pretested, prepackaged, turn-key private cloud solutions that can easily be scaled as needed. The following Vblock offerings are available: Vblock 0 Designed to support virtual machines in small to medium size enterprises; ideally suited to test and development deployments, shared services, file and print, and other smaller production environments. Vblock 0 is comprised of a Cisco UCS B-series, EMC Celerra unified storage, and VMware vsphere. Vblock 1, 1u Designed for medium to high numbers of virtual machines; ideally suited to a broad range of usage scenarios, including shared services, , file 7

8 and print, virtual desktops, and collaboration. Vblock 1 and Vblock 1u is comprised of a Cisco UCS B-series plus Nexus & MDS storage switching, EMC CLARiiON or EMC Celerra unified storage, and VMware vsphere. Vblock Series 300 Designed to address a wide spectrum of virtual machines, users, and applications; ideally suited to achieve the scale required in both private and public cloud environments. Vblock Series 300 is comprised of a Cisco UCS B-series plus Nexus & MDS storage switching, EMC VNX series storage, and VMware vsphere. Vblock Series 700 Designed for deployments of very large numbers of virtual machines and users; ideally suited to meet the higher performance and availability requirements of an enterprise's business critical applications. Vblock Series 300 is comprised of a Cisco UCS B-series, EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage, and VMware vsphere. Vblocks grew out of an idea to simplify virtualized infrastructure acquisition, deployment, and operations. To that end, many decisions regarding current form factors limit the scope to which components can be customized or removed. For example, substituting components is not permitted as it breaks the tested and validated principle. While Vblocks are tightly defined to meet specific performance and availability bounds, their value lies in a combination of efficiency, control, and choice. Another guiding principle of Vblocks is the ability to expand the capacity of Vblock infrastructures as the architecture is very flexible and extensible. Benefits of Vblock Infrastructure Platforms Anyone seeking to accelerate the deployment of a virtualized IT infrastructure and adoption of the private cloud model can take advantage of Vblock Infrastructure Platforms. Key pain points that Vblock Infrastructure Platforms address are: Difficulty leveraging features and benefits of solutions created with components from different vendors Long test and development cycles that require the infrastructure to be validated Underutilized IT assets Complex environments that are difficult to manage and maintain (and therefore, drive up operational costs) Consequently, Vblock Infrastructure Platforms provide the following benefits: Accelerates the journey to pervasive virtualization and private cloud computing while reducing risk and minimizing costs Simplifies expansion and scaling storage and/or compute capacity can be added nondisruptively as necessary Provides a self-contained SAN environment with known standardized platforms and processes 8

9 Provides multi-tenant administration, role-based security, and strong user authentication Reduces risk and ensures compliance by offering a tested and validated solution with unified support and end-to-end vendor accountability Vblock design principals Vblock Infrastructure Platforms are architectures that are pre-tested, fully integrated, and scalable. They are characterized by their: Utilization of repeatable units of construction based on matched performance, operational characteristics, and conservative use of power, space, and cooling Usage of repeatable design patterns to facilitate rapid deployment, integration, and scalability Having been designed from the Facilities to the Workload so they can be scaled for the highest efficiencies in virtualization and workload re-platforming Utilization of an extensible management and orchestration model that is based on industry-standard tools, APIs, and methods Having been built to contain, manage, and mitigate failure scenarios in hardware and software environments One guiding principle of Vblocks is the ability to expand the capacity of Vblock infrastructures. The Vblock architecture is very flexible and extensible and is architected to be easily expandable from a few hundred VMs/users to several thousand. In addition, this capacity may be aggregated (clustered) as a single pool of shared capacity or segmented into smaller isolated pools. Vblock provisioning is simplified by addressing the resource needs of the entire system rather than treating the infrastructure components individually. The use of templates and built-in automation facilitates rapid provisioning and a high level of standardization and duplication of new resources, as needed. Compute and network resources are provisioned by using Cisco UCS Manager, and optionally, EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM), while storage resources are provisioned using Cisco Fabric Manager, EMC Navisphere Management Suite, and EMC Symmetrix Management Console. DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows DB2 9.7 and the DB2 purescale Feature software (DB2 9.8), are the latest releases of IBM s popular data management software for distributed open systems. Like previous versions, DB2 9.7 and DB2 9.8 run on a wide variety of distributed platforms (AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows), and is available in several editions each of which has been designed to meet a specific business need. 9

10 The latest release of DB2 9.7 is designed for the cloud; its evolution followed the natural trend of IT maturity that started with on-premise enterprises seeking to improve their data center economics. Additionally, DB2 9.7 leads the industry with features such as autonomics, virtualization, native support for Oracle applications, native support for Sybase applications, and more. IT maturity trend for enterprise databases When you talk with enterprise customers about their plans for utilizing database clouds, a predictable path emerges that nearly every IT organization is following, whether they are aware if it or not. Figure 1 illustrates this path. (100s or 1000s of DBs) Cloud Greatest cost savings and IT maturity for a DB + Automation Automation reduces the costs of mundane tasks (deployment, backups, day-day ops, etc.) Standardization Corporate IT standardization reduces complexity. It also reduces required skills and the number of unexpected problems encountered. Consolidation Costs reduced via virtualization and hardware sharing. This includes multitenancy. Bare Metal 90% of the systems are 10% utilized Energy/cooling costs Capital expenditure costs Operations costs Figure 1. Typical path to database cloud computing The normal trend follows a path toward IT maturity and it moves in lock-step; each step usually occurs when IT budget challenges force discussions and decisions regarding data center cost reduction. Note: IT maturity trend starts with departmental OLTP databases; large, missioncritical databases tend to be fewer in number and present more of a challenge to standardize and automate. On the other hand, there are often many small to medium size databases within an enterprise IT shop (hundreds to thousands), each of which can benefit from increased IT maturity. Consolidation With a bare-metal deployment, a single set of software products is installed on a single physical machine. For example, a single operating system, a single DB

11 instance, and a single DB2 9.7 database reside on a single physical machine. In this low-maturity deployment for small to medium databases, it is not uncommon for the hardware to be underutilized. (An example is, 90 percent of the systems are 10 percent utilized. ) Consolidation is therefore usually the first step toward cloud computing. There are several ways to consolidate, although the two most common are: Server consolidation Database consolidation Server consolidation is the practice of using hypervisors, which allow multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on one physical machine. The role of the hypervisor is to have software such as DB2 9.7 act as if it is running on its own bare metal machine. Database consolidation, on the other hand, is the practice of putting more than one instance on a single physical system, putting more than one database under a single instance, or both. (There are companies that are using database consolidation to place 50 or more test and development databases on a single physical machine.) Regardless of the consolidation method chosen, the end result is that several databases can be run within a single physical machine. This allows multiple databases to share the same hardware, which reduces hardware expenses for a data center. Standardization Consolidation almost always increases the need for IT standards; therefore, standardization is normally the next step toward cloud computing. Without standards, IT organizations have to deal with many unique deployments, each of which has their own costs and challenges. The lack of standards can go unnoticed when databases are spread out loosely across an organization, but consolidation forces unique deployments into a single IT model. Standardization may dramatically reduce IT costs instead of doing 300 things in unique ways, standardization means doing one thing very well 300 times. Problems due to uniqueness in deployments immediately disappear, quality of service improves, and it becomes possible, for the first time, to do a significant amount of automation. Automating 300 unique database deployments can be cost-prohibitive but automating a single standard for deployments and getting the benefits 300-fold may likely reduce data center costs. It is important to note that one of the goals of a good IT standard is to maintain flexibility. A standard should reduce IT costs without inhibiting the business. Automation Automation directly targets the highest cost contributor to the data center the cost of operation and maintenance. Automation also frees up talented technical staff from having to do mundane operational tasks so they can focus on more important things 11

12 like driving the business forward. Yet, automation is where most resistance comes from as companies try to migrate toward cloud computing. One of the primary concerns relates to a feeling of loss of control for the operations team. The truth is that continuing to perform mundane tasks actually reduces technical vitality. It is much more vital to be focused on high business value activities. DB2 9.7 and the cloud DB2 9.7 contains time-tested features that were designed with many of the attributes of cloud computing in mind: It led the industry into automatic maintenance and coined the term autonomics for databases. It has consistently been at the top of performance benchmarks for more than a decade. Performance leadership and virtualized platform exploitation make the most of the resources on the cloud. Its compression technology may help to save up to 80 percent on cloud storage requirements. In many cases, it may reduce storage costs and improve performance at the same time. It contains cloud-ready security features such as the ability to prevent database administrators from accessing the data in a database. It provides outstanding availability with HA features such as HADR. It provides support for Oracle and Sybase applications. The native Oracle Compatibility introduced with version 9.7 extends the SQL standardization to include support for both DB2- and Oracle-specific syntax. Thus, a single standardized Database as a Service (DBaaS) interface can support a variety of database applications. This provides flexibility for the application tier. It can be run on many operating systems including AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and Windows. This provides flexibility for the operating system layer and hardware. In short, DB2 9.7 makes the most of the hardware, helps to provide security, is selftuning, and supports a wide variety of applications (DB2, Sybase, and Oracle) running on a variety of operating systems. Guidelines for DB2 9.7 virtualization How DB2 9.7 is installed on a VMware virtual machine is dependent upon the operating system chosen for the virtual machine, just as is the case when DB2 9.7 is installed on a physical server. In a virtualized environment, you can particularly benefit from DB2 9.7 s autonomic features and compression technologies when these features are enabled, the database engine is capable of detecting changes in the number of processors and memory available and dynamically adjust its utilization of these resources without the need to restart the instance; DB2 9.7 will apply the necessary adjustments automatically to optimize performance. 12

13 When deploying DB2 9.7 databases in virtualized environments, there are several important recommendations to keep in mind: Keep the maximum database size to 250 GB per core. Create no more than two instances or two databases per core. Keep the maximum number of virtual CPUs provisioned on the system under 50 percent of the physical CPUs available. (For example, on a 32-way system 2s/16c/32t maximum virtual CPUs provisioned should not exceed 48.) Place database transaction log files and data files on separate file systems or on separate disks. When possible, use automatic storage. This feature provides a great relief for DBAs by automating the management of table space containers; DB2 9.7 creates table space containers automatically on the given data paths. This feature also helps with performance, as DB2 9.7 places the table space containers in a way that allows the most concurrent access. Use the NO FILE SYSTEM CACHING parameter of the CREATE TABLESPACE command for all data and index table spaces. Because this data is already cached in the buffer pools, there is no need for additional caching at the file system level. Use the FILE SYSTEM CACHING parameter of the CREATE TABLESPACE command for LOB table spaces. This data is not cached in the buffer pools, so enabling caching on the file system level increases performance. For optimal memory usage, enable the Self Tuning Memory Manager (STMM) (SELF_TUNING_MEM=ON). STMM tunes several memory heaps, according to the database workload, when these memory consumers are set to AUTOMATIC. The proof-of-concept benchmark Testing for this white paper was conducted using a Vblock Series 700 Infrastructure Platform, which consisted of a Cisco UCS B-series, EMC Symmetrix VMAX, and VMware vsphere 4. First, a virtual machine containing the Red Hat Linux operating system was created and storage for the database was provisioned and made accessible to this virtual machine. The resulting system looked like this: 4 x Intel Xeon 2.93 GHz 32 GB memory (8 GB used as a buffer pool) Ten file systems (ext3, 25 GB each) for data storage the file systems were created on individual LUNs; each LUN was created from a RAID disk group (15k rpm Fibre Channel drives) One file system (ext3, 200 GB) for log files and a temporary table space One file system (ext3, 200 GB) for backup 13

14 Testing began by creating and populating a 200 GB DB2 9.7 (FixPack 3) database across the ten 25 GB file systems using automatic storage. For this testing, neither the virtual machine nor the Symmetrix were well tuned, since the focus was on validating that a DB2 9.7 database could be successfully deployed in a Vblock environment. Next, approximately 200 GB of data was generated and used to populate the database. Once the database was populated, it was then backed up so that it could be restored prior to each test run, if necessary. The finished database had the following characteristics: Scale: ~200G (2,000 customers) Buffer pool: 8G, single buffer pool Table space: Automatic storage, stripping data across all 10 file systems Log and temp table space I/O was separated from data I/O Finally, the entire system, along with the database storage and the database backup image, was cloned to create two identical Red Hat Linux virtual machines, each of which had identical 200 GB databases. IBM s DB2 Transaction Workload (DTW) benchmarking tool was then used to generate an OLTP workload that was evenly distributed across all available system resources; each test began with a 20-minute ramp-up time and continued with a 30-minute runtime. During the 30-minute runtime, monitoring was performed on the server to see how well the database was performing. The test run was kicked off from one virtual machine named DB2-RHEL-01; the DB2 9.7 server and the DTW client (50 clients) were run on the same virtual machine. The average TPS was , the CPUs were fully saturated (76 percent for I/Os, 17 percent user time, and 7 percent system time) and roughly a 9 ms wait time, along with 800 IOPS, was observed on each data LUN (8,000 IOPS in total). At the same time, a 3.68 ms wait time and 235 IOPS was observed on the log LUN. From the system perspective, the data looked good. From DB2 9.7 snapshot data collected (database, table space, and application), the test run also looked fine. Here, an 85 percent hit ratio was observed, with only a few synchronous I/Os and all DB2 agents in execute status the majority of the time, which was also good. Again, the purpose of this testing was not to achieve optimum performance, but rather to determine how easily a DB2 9.7 database could be deployed (and cloned) in a Vblock environment. And our testing showed that setting up a DB2 9.7 database was easy and that the database performed well without requiring any major tuning effort. Conclusion Cloud computing is the evolution of IT best practices that have been learned and earned with decades of innovation aimed at reducing data center costs. And Vblock 14

15 Infrastructure Platforms enable customers to quickly deploy virtualized infrastructures using advanced technologies from Cisco, EMC, and VMware to accelerate their journeys to the private cloud. DB2 9.7 is the first database software to receive the coveted VMware Ready mark; therefore, running DB2 9.7 on a VMware infrastructure is a proven solution for business-critical environments that want to move to a cloud infrastructure. Consequently, anyone seeking to accelerate the deployment of a virtualized private cloud database infrastructure can take advantage of Vblock and DB2 9.7 technology. Proof-of-concept testing has shown that these technologies work well together and that DB2 9.7 databases deployed in a Vblock environment deliver good performance and are easy to clone. 15