Oracle Open World & Intelligent Bot Service

Past week I attended Oracle Open World in San Francisco. I hadn’t been there for last 7 years so it was good to see lot of familiar faces there again. Still what comes to conference itself there are always good presentations but the percentage for hit & miss sessions is a lot higher compared to…

Oracle VM 3.4.x & PVM vs HVM PV

Initially when we started to use Oracle VM we did lot of performance testing and at that point we went with Paravirtualized VM’s (PVM) due to better performance we saw with them. Now with our recent upgrade to Oracle VM 3.4.2 if you are using hugepages (we do!) then hugepages are not supported anymore with…

Resize backup LVM on Exadata

We were patching Exadata and one of the YUM pre-checks failed due to invalid LVM size. We hadn’t done any resizing lately so I think issue had been there already but for whatever reason it wasn’t noticed. For backing up and rolling back on OS updates Exadata takes snapshot on identical LVM volume as the…

Optimizing performance for Oracle VM when using iSCSI storage

We implemented Oracle VM 3.3.2 around two years ago and biggest issue we had was using iSCSI storage having sub-optimal latency and throughput with parallel sessions and high load in our performance tests. In the end this was resolved by linux disk partition alignment and few iSCSI optimizations. Problem After doing the initial Oracle VM installation we started…

Exadata failing RAID HBA card

This is more of informative story what happened to us recently. In the past we had issue with one of the Exadata cell node where the RAID HBA card has failed. After working with support they decided to replace the card and at the same time update the card firmware. That issue was described in detail…

Oracle OVS, Broadcom Netextreme II and 10G network

We recently upgraded our LAN network from 1G to 10G but the Oracle OVS servers network cards showed only 1G link even though the advertised link was 10G. [root@ovs1 ~]# ethtool em1 Settings for em1: Supported ports: [ FIBRE ] Supported link modes: 1000baseT/Full Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link…

Upgrading Oracle VM 3.3.3 to 3.4.2

Now when we have used demo 3.4.2 for some time without issues I decided to upgrade our sandbox Oracle VM setup from 3.3.3 to 3.4.2 to get experience for the actual production upgrade coming later. We have two installations of Oracle VM. One is sandbox which has some old blade servers acting as OVS and…