While this scenario may not currently be quite
as common, it is increasingly becoming much less unusual. Sometimes
customers will buy third party reference data to support their own
applications or even to support other third party software. For
example, you might want to add a US postal verification and
completion option to your bogus ERP or BERP deployment. You also
know that this need is so common that you can reuse it multiple
times across many different applications within your company.
It would be much easier to purchase a virtual
machine based product for that data that offered two methods for
utilizing its data. First, it could simply be a virtual machine that
serves as a self-contained application server for the business logic
necessary to verify and complete address information. That way you
could deploy it once and use it many times. But many people are
still uncomfortable with DBLINKs, so this might not be their first
choice. But with cheap hardware these days, why not allocate a small
virtual machine per application that performs this task just for
that specific application? That way, you can keep the remote
database access to a minimum, i.e. 1 level deep, and also not
introduce any potential cross application performance problems.
Repository Platforms
Many third party products require a repository
or centralized database to record historical information, and/or to
permit the management of processes from a single location. This is
especially true in the database world and we will look at time
prevalent and almost identical product lines within the Oracle DBA
support software arena.
We all have to do backup and recovery because
data is the most important asset any company has. Many backup and
recovery tools have a centralized management console and repository
that they recommend setting up on a dedicated server. From there,
the products often deploy light weight agents on the servers being
serviced in order to actually perform the work. In many ways, the
steps to set this type of product up might be quite like the prior
BERP example, which includes a lot of steps, but restricted to a
single physical server this time. As before, it would be very easy
to package this up as a single virtual machine and, once again,
place it wherever spare capacity exists. In fact, you might perform
backups just once a week, like Saturday at midnight, and then you
can load balance execution of that sporadic task onto whatever
server each Saturday morning has capacity to host that weekly
process.
Another mission critical area is database
performance, or the users perception of it, such as response time
and meeting your service level agreements (SLAs). As with backup and
recovery products, many Oracle monitoring and diagnostic tools have
a similar architecture. It is not uncommon to also have a dedicated
monitoring server for its repository and management console. But
unlike backup and recovery which is generally executed on a defined
schedule, your performance efforts will be unpredictable as to when
they will occur and how long they will last. You might even leave a
monitoring dashboard up at all times. So you cannot relocate your
monitoring tools based upon spare capacity at the time like you did
with backup and recovery. But you still could deploy your monitoring
and diagnostic product as a virtual machine and just treat that VM
like any other mission critical system. Hence, it would be up at all
times and be allocated a permanent slot within your resource pool.
In fact, these last two examples make so much
common sense that it is my hope that all third party database
software vendors start using this software delivery model
exclusively. I would even go so far as to say we as users should
demand it. It is a win-win scenario for both vendor and customer and
it lets the DBA focus on the task instead of the technology of the
product used for that task. Thus, it is truly a beneficial black
box solution and one that could make DBA life a little better.
This is an excerpt from
Oracle on VMWare:
Expert tips for database virtualization
by Rampant TechPress.
and include the URL for the page.
