Deploying Fusion Middleware in a 100% Virtual Environment Using OVM ANDY WEAVER FISHBOWL SOLUTIONS, INC. i
Fishbowl Solutions Notice The information contained in this document represents the current view of Fishbowl Solutions, Inc. on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Fishbowl Solutions must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Fishbowl Solutions, and Fishbowl Solutions cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This Whitepaper is for informational purposes only. FISHBOWL SOLUTIONS MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Fishbowl Solutions Inc. Fishbowl Solutions Inc. may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Fishbowl Solutions, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property. 2014 Fishbowl Solutions Corporation. All rights reserved. Fishbowl Solutions is a registered trademarks or trademarks of Fishbowl Solutions Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. 2014 Fishbowl Solutions Corporation. All rights reserved.
Contents 1 Introduction Executive Overview 1 2 100% Virtualized Enterprise Architecture 1 3 Mapping Out Product Installs 2 4 Resource Sizing 3 5 License Considerations 4 6 Benefits of a Virtual Environment 4 7 Summary 5
1 Introduction Executive Overview The Oracle Fusion Middleware stack encompasses many different software products that can require a large amount of hardware in order to deploy. Virtualization with a product like Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) helps to alleviate some of the issues with an enterprise deployment of Fusion Middleware. In fact the entire production implementation can be done in a virtual environment; however, this setup is not yet the norm for the industry. Architecting and implementing a 100% virtual environment requires a different thought process but provides many benefits over traditional physical hardware architecture. This paper will give an overview of that process and describe the benefits of implementing a completely virtual infrastructure. Designing an enterprise architecture for a software deployment can be a difficult process and deployment of Oracle s Fusion Middleware stack is no different. Hardware sizing, network requirements and topology, security, and manageability of the environment are all major considerations. The Enterprise 2.0 centric products included in the Fusion Middleware stack pose their own unique challenges and requirements for an enterprise architecture. Creating a design that brings together Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Business Process Management (BPM) with an enterprise portal framework (WebCenter) for delivery is a large undertaking. Many of the pain points associated with a large deployment, like the one described above, can be mitigated with the use of virtualization. Virtualization allows the execution of many guest operating systems on a single piece of hardware. This concept provides many benefits, such as lower cost of ownership, easier management, and quicker time to market for new software deployments. The Oracle VM product is uniquely positioned for being the virtualization product for Oracle software by providing templates to help jumpstart the installation of the software. Leveraging the benefits of virtualization with Oracle VM provides a solid base infrastructure to deploy Fusion Middleware. 2 100% Virtualized Enterprise Architecture Many companies are now leveraging virtualization in some part of their environment. This is typically done in development and QA environments to make it easy to duplicate servers for further testing and provide a means for users who are not hardware or system administrators to manage the servers they are working with. The Options: There are several options for leveraging Oracle VM as the virtualization infrastructure for Fusion Middleware. The options are based around the fact that the backbone of the deployment is Oracle WebLogic Server. All of the options are based off of available templates provided for use with Oracle VM. These options are: Full installation of Oracle Enterprise Linux Operating System with WebLogic Server installed.
JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) installation with WebLogic Server installed. jrockit Virtual Edition running WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, no operating system installed. The Process: The process for designing an enterprise deployment architecture on Oracle VM breaks down into four main parts, deciding on a VM template option, mapping out the product installations, sizing the resources in the environment, and considering the impacts of software licensing. Weighing the Options: As mentioned above there are three main options for deploying a virtual machine on OVM that will contain software that uses WebLogic Server as its base. Each option has advantages and disadvantages. The table below gives a summary of the options and their associated advantages and disadvantages. Implementation Summary Advantages Disadvantages Full Operating System install JeOS JRockit Virtual Edition Full install of Oracle Enterprise Linux Specialized build of Oracle Enterprise Linux stripped down to essential components for running WebLogic Server. Oracle jrockit Java Virtual Machine that runs directly on Oracle VM hypervisor. No operating system installed Same environment as installation on physical hardware Familiarity Not reliant on other builds Smaller footprint increases performance Smallest footprint High performance Larger footprint - consumes more disk space and memory Not proactively updated by Oracle Reliant on the build being updated Additional maintenance if other packages are needed Difficult to configure Specialized build provided by Oracle Not production environment proven 3 Mapping Out Product Installs The next step in the process, regardless of operating system/vm template choice is to map out how the products will be deployed into the environment. The logical container for a Fusion Middleware deployment is the WebLogic domain. The WebLogic domain is grouping of all the servers, machines, and configuration around a set of products that are deployed to the environment. There are a few factors that dictate the layout of the WebLogic Server domains. These factors are normally based around the customer requirements, but can sometimes be a limitation of the
software itself. In this case the limitation is with Universal Content Management since, currently, only one instance of the product can be installed per WebLogic domain. This must be taken into consideration when laying out the structure of the WebLogic domains. A typical customer s high level requirements around the overall deployment of ECM, SOA, and WebCenter might be: Deliver content both internally and externally Manage content centrally Provide internal and centralized workflow and process management Provide content conversion functionality Fit the deployment in with existing infrastructure, such as access management and SSO Based on the above requirements and taking into consideration the limitation of installing UCM the following table details the domain layouts that can be used: Layout Description Servers Contribution Central location for all content Contribution UCM Conversion Server (Inbound Refinery) Imaging and Process Management (IPM) Internal Consumption External Consumption Centralized workflow and process management Consumption of content internal to enterprise (work in progress or internal collaborative documents) Targeted for the delivery of content to externally facing entities (web content and external collaborative documents) IPM UCM repository for IPM SOA infrastructure/bpm Business Activity Monitoring Internal UCM WebCenter Spaces WebCenter Portlets WebCenter Collaboration Site Studio for External Apps External UCM WebCenter Spaces WebCenter Portlets WebCetner Collaboration Site Studio for External Apps 4 Resource Sizing Once the domains are laid out, the next step in the process is to size the resources in the environment. The greatest limiting factor when deploying the Fusion Middleware software is memory. Each of the java virtual machines that WebLogic uses to run the server instances require anywhere from 1 to 2.5GB of reserved heap memory space. Looking at the domain layout above this begins to quickly add up.
Using virtualization helps immensely when sizing the environment for memory. This is because instead of thinking in terms of physical machine memory restrictions the memory can be looked at as a larger pool of resources. Oracle VM itself will end up managing where a virtual machine runs within that pool of resources. The only task left for the architect is to figure out the number of virtual machines and the memory requirements of each to fit within that total pool of memory. 5 License Considerations Along with sizing the virtual machines for the environment, careful consideration needs to be taken for how software licenses are handled. While CPU-based licensing helps a company to easily scale out the number of users for a piece of software, it can quickly add up from an infrastructure standpoint. Oracle VM provides a mechanism to help with managing the number of CPUs being used by a particular virtual machine, thereby allowing companies to more effectively leverage their licenses. This feature is called hard partitioning. Hard partitioning allows the Oracle VM administrator to specify which CPU cores are to be used by a particular virtual machine. This means that a virtual machine running the contribution UCM instance can be limited to 1 core, instead of having to license all 12 cores of the physical machine on which the virtual is running. Another item to consider while deciding how many virtual machines to create for the environment is conflicting license sizes. An example of this is where WebCenter may have 24 CPU licenses available while UCM only has 4. If UCM is run on the same virtual machine as the WebCenter instance, WebCenter will always be limited to the number of CPUs available to UCM, leaving licenses unused and limiting the scalability of WebCenter itself. The solution to this is to match products that have similar license counts on the same virtual machine. 6 Benefits of a Virtual Environment There are numerous benefits to deploying Fusion Middleware into a completely virtual environment. The benefits impact not only the hard dollar cost of an environment but also the soft cost for resources needed to maintain and use that environment. Below are some of the benefits of using a virtual environment: Hardware Cost Savings/Server Consolidation: Physical hardware cost savings are the most obvious benefit of using virtualization. As mentioned above the servers are no longer looked at individually but as a pool of resources to be used by guest virtual machines. This allows for a much higher utilization of the physical hardware than is normally possible. Efficiency Improvements: Along with fewer physical servers to manage also come improvements in efficiency. Leveraging Oracle VM s centralized management console allows fewer resources to manage a larger amount of servers. Use of VM templates also allow a standardized process to be put in place for provisioning new servers. A different set of resources can be leveraged to execute this process.
License Cost Savings: Another benefit of using Oracle VM to manage the virtual infrastructure is saving in license costs. The savings are not only for Oracle VM itself, which is free, but also for license on the products being installed into the environment. As mentioned in a previous section the hard partitioning feature of Oracle VM can be leveraged to maximize the use of the available CPU licenses for a product. This means fewer licenses may be required to deploy the products since they are being more fully utilized. 7 Summary Enterprise deployment of Oracle Fusion Middleware is a large and complex undertaking. Oracle VM provides several different options for how to deploy and manage the infrastructure. Despite these different options planning and sizing an environment is not much different that planning on deploying to a physical environment. Leveraging Oracle VM and virtualization as the infrastructure to host the environment provide benefits not only to the process of planning the deployment but also to the enterprise as a whole. The benefits of virtualization range from hardware and license cost savings, to efficiency improvements saving cost on the amount of labor needed to manage a production environment. Oracle VM is uniquely positioned as a virtualization technology for deploying Oracle software by use of provided VM templates first line support for the entire software stack, and low cost of ownership. This makes Oracle VM a natural fit for being the underlying infrastructure for deploying and managing the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite of products.