RAC Database on Oracle Ravello Cloud Service O R A C L E W H I T E P A P E R | A U G U S T 2 0 1 7

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Oracle Ravello is an overlay cloud that enables enterprises to run their VMware and KVM applications

with data-center-like (Layer 2) networking ‘as-is’ on public cloud without any modifications. With

Ravello, enterprises don’t need to convert their VMs or change networking. This empowers the

business to rapidly develop and deploy existing data-center applications on the public cloud without

the associated infrastructure and migration cost and overhead for a variety of use-cases such as dev-

test, staging, UAT etc.

Oracle RAC Overview

Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) is a shared cache clustered database architecture that

utilizes Oracle Grid Infrastructure to enable the sharing of server and storage resources. Automatic,

instantaneous failover to other nodes, and therefore enables an extremely high degree of scalability,

availability, and performance.

Originally focused on providing improved database services, Oracle RAC has evolved over the years

and is now based on a comprehensive high availability (HA) stack that can be used as the foundation

of a data base cloud system as well as a shared infrastructure that can ensure high availability,

scalability, flexibility and agility for any application in your data center.

Fig. 1: Oracle Database with Oracle RAC architecture

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Why run Oracle RAC Database on Ravello?

Enterprises run Oracle RAC as a part of bigger application in variety of scenarios. They also need

such environments for development, testing, staging and running User Acceptance Tests. It is

expensive to have on-premise environments for such transient needs. Ravello provides a great

platform for such use-cases by offering data-center like environments on public cloud with VMware

and Layer 2 networking.

An Oracle RAC database is a shared everything database. All data files, control files, SPFILEs and

redo log files in Oracle RAC environments must reside on cluster-aware shared disks so that all of the

cluster database instances can access these storage components. All database instances must use

the same interconnect, which can also be used by Oracle Clusterware. Public cloud environments do

not provide shared storage and Layer2 capabilities required by Oracle Clusterware for RAC natively.

However, such functionality can be achieved using Ravello.

Moving Oracle RAC Database application to Ravello

The following implementation is broadly followed from the reference article to setup Oracle RAC DB

installation in VMware ESXi environment1. The deployment diagram

for the implementation:

Fig. 2: Deployment diagram

For the deployment, we have 4 configured subnets

- 192.168.56.0/24 - public network

- 192.168.1.0/24 - cluster inter-connect/private

- 192.168.20.0/24 - shared storage access

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The ‘racnas’ node is running Openfiler 2.99.1 and is setup as an iSCSI target for the RAC nodes to

connect to. Two logical volumes are setup as iSCSI targets as below:

- ocr – for OCR and voting disk

- data – for database (datafiles, control files, redo log files, spfile)

Database access is configured through iSCSI with Automatic Storage Management (ASM). The binaries

for Grid Infrastructure and Database are stored locally on each RAC node.

Setting up imported VMs into Ravello

1) As a first step, we import the 4 VMs that were setup on the on-prem VMware environment into

Ravello’s VM Library, and then create a new application by dragging the VMs onto the canvas –

two RAC nodes, one storage node – namely, ‘rnode1’, ‘rnode2’ and ‘rnas’ respectively. We also

add a test node, ‘rtest’ to test overall functionality of the deployment.

Fig. 3: Building the application with the imported VMs

All VMs are using Oracle Linux 7.3 distribution with the RAC DB nodes configured with 4VCPUs and

16GB of memory. The storage node is running Openfiler and is configured with 4VCPUs/16GB

memory, while the test node running OL7.3 is configured with 2VCPUs and 8GB of memory.

On the network tab, Ravello automatically re-creates the underlying network by looking at the ESXi

configuration files and VM disk images.

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Fig. 4: Network view of the application

We will now make sure all the settings in each VM are as per our expectation. Let us take a look at

‘rnode1’ in the Ravello UI.

2) Let us start with the ‘General’ tab. Make sure that the hostname field is populated and it matches

to the hostname in the VM.

Fig. 5: General tab for node1

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3) Under the ‘Disks’ tab, Controller we select is a para-virtualized controller for better performance.

Fig. 6: Disks tab for node1

4) Under the ‘NICs’ section, we select paravirtualized devices for each of the NICs for better

performance. RAC requires a ‘public’ interface and a ‘cluster inter-connect’ interface per node. As

pointed out earlier, we have used a separate subnet to handle shared storage traffic. We verify

that all the NICs are present and configured correctly for each of the nodes with the right IP

configuration.

Fig. 7: Public interface for rnode1

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Fig. 8: Private interface for rnode1

Fig. 9: Storage interface for rnode1

We have provided ‘ssh’ and ‘Enterprise Manager express’ by enabling port 22 and port 5501 on the ‘Services’ tab.

Fig. 10: External services

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Next, we ‘Edit and Verify’ all the VMs on the application in a similar fashion. Once this is done, the

application is ready to be published.

5) Publish the application to bring up the VMs in the public cloud either using ‘Cost-optimized’ or

‘Performance-optimized’ selection.

Verifying the RAC setup on Ravello

1) Login to any node and check to see if the shared storage is mounted on the RAC nodes over

iSCSI

Fig. 11: Shared storage details

2) Confirming that Grid Infrastructure is up and running

Fig. 12: Grid Infrastructure status

3) Check the RAC DB configuration by running the ‘srvctl’ command.

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Fig. 13: RAC configuration for DB check

4) Check status of DB running on RAC

Fig. 14: RAC DB status check

We now have a fully functional Oracle RAC environment running Oracle Database 12cR1 running on

the cloud using Ravello. One can test out the deployment by connecting to the database from the test

node ‘ractest’.

Fig. 15: RAC UI verification

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Learn more

Learn more and sign up for a free trial at https://cloud.oracle.com/ravello

Figure 13. Sign up for a free trial.

Oracle Corporation, World Headquarters Worldwide Inquiries

500 Oracle Parkway Phone: +1.650.506.7000

Redwood Shores, CA 94065, USA Fax: +1.650.506.7200

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contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Agile PLM on Oracle Ravello Cloud Service August 2017

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