1. 1 Charon-VAX in Rdb Engineering Norman Lastovica Oracle Rdb Engineering Oracle New England Development Center Norman.Lastovica@oracle.com

2. 2 Problem Overview Needed to reduce computer lab footprint – Floor space, power & cooling Very old hardware maintenance headache – Unreliable & difficult to repair – VAX computers over 15 years old Some star Couplers, HSJs, disks even older

3. 3 Problem Overview Performance of CPU, memory, Ethernet, disks, controllers, & busses lag behind Alpha & I64 Need multiple VAX environments for building, testing, debugging & support for Rdb product family

4. 4 Charon-VAX Solution Replace approximately 12 large VAX systems (6000 & 7000 class) in several clusters with Charon-VAX emulators – Consolidate/simplify existing systems & clusters Migrate primarily to SAN-based storage Sub-goal of improved performance & reliability for users (at least no reduction)

5. 5 Remove VAX Hardware? Oracle Corporation supports VAX versions of Oracle Rdb and Oracle CODASYL DBMS and their related products running on CHARON-VAX provided that any problems reported can be reproduced by Oracle Support on an actual VAX. HP Services supports HP OpenVMS software on the CHARON- VAX and CHARON-AXP emulators running on HP systems only. Existing software service contracts are valid on supported OpenVMS VAX and OpenVMS Alpha AXP applications running on the appropriate emulator. HP fixes software problems if they are also seen in the comparable VAX or Alpha AXP environment.

6. 6 Extensive Testing Before announcing support for Rdb on Charon- VAX – Extensive Rdb & DBMS Regression tests – Various Performance tests – Consultations with HP & SRI

7. 7 Performance

8. 8 Prime Number Generation C program from Internet Single-user CPU intensive Dell laptop host system – Single 2GHz Intel CPU – …at 35,000 feet

9. 9 More Prime Number Generation C program from Internet Single-user CPU intensive HP BL25p host – Dual 2.6GHz dual-core AMD

10. 10 Random Floating Point Additions Update random floating point numbers in 1MB global section Single-user HP BL25p host – Dual 2.6GHz dual-core AMD

11. 11 Lock Request Latencies Local & Remote HP BL25p host – Dual 2.6GHz dual-core AMD

12. 12 DBMS Regression Test Sun V65 host – Dual 3.06GHz Intel with HT – MSCP served disks via Ethernet

13. 13 Rdb Database Populate VAX 6650 – HSJ storage HP DL 585 host – Quad 2.4GHz AMD – Single IDE disk Single user store data into database Average for 100 txn

14. 14 Single User OLTP Single user Random DB update Average for 1,000 txn VAX 6650 – HSJ storage HP DL 585 host – Quad 2.4GHz AMD – Single IDE disk

15. 15 Synchronous Random 5-block IO $IOT /COUNT=2000 /QUE=1 /SIZE=5 SYS$SYSDEVICE CI HSJ40 on VAX 6650 Fibre EVA3000 on Charon 6630

16. 16 Queue of Random 5-block IO $IOT /COUNT=2000 /QUE=8 /SIZE=5 SYS$SYSDEVICE CI HSJ40 on VAX 6650 Fibre EVA3000 on Charon 6630

17. 17 Queue of Random 5-block IO $IOT /COUNT=7500 /QUE=8 /SIZE=5 RDB$TEST_SYS1: Fibre EVA3000 on Charon 6630 Software Raid set of 10 disks on CI HSJ40s on VAX 6650

18. 18 Create and Sort File of Random Records 1,000,000 records / 256,167 blocks

19. 19 What Host System To Pick?

20. 20 HP ProLiant BL25p Server Blade 1.7in (4.3cm) x 10.3in (26.2cm) x 28in (71cm) 21 lb (9.5 kg) Two Dual-Core AMD Opteron (2.6 GHz) 6GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM at 400 MHz 4 Gigabit NIC ports Dual Port 2-Gb Fibre Channel Adapter Internal HP 36GB U320 15K disk

21. 21 Why BL25p? Two dual-core processors = 4 effective CPUs – Run CHARON-VAX/6630 Plus for Windows – Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition Only 4GB memory of our 6GB usable due to limit in Standard Edition (larger limits in higher Editions) – whoops More cost & space effective than 4p DL585 – Very near same peak performance (2.6GHz dual-core vs. 2.8GHz single-core)

22. 22 Why BL25p? Up to 8 BL25p servers in single 10.5 tall enclosure – Using existing rack space = no additional floor space Remote management capable – Software KVM switch console / ILO Alternately: BL35p – 2 NIC ports, two 2.4GHz dual- core, 5k or 10k internal disks - Same price per server - Up to 16 per enclosure

23. 23 Blade Enclosure 10.5 inches high 19 inch rack mount 8 BL25p or 16 BL35p

24. 24 How to Deploy?

25. 25 Phased Implementation Plan 1.Replace 3 test clusters (total of 8 nodes) with single 2 node cluster Install and test and experiment with new hardware and then migrate workload and shutdown old systems Work out installation and configuration issues to avoid impacting development cluster or test environments 2.Replace 3 VAX nodes in development cluster

26. 26 Best of Intentions Multiple UPS failures in a single day 2 VAX systems in development cluster suffer serious hardware damage – multiple power supplies failed Leads to Accelerated Charon-VAX deployment

27. 27 Original Development Cluster Configuration 2 I64 rx4640 V8.2-12 Alpha V8.2 EVA5000 2Gb San Ethernets DECnet, TCP/IP, SCS 2 VAX 6650 V7.3 2 CI Rails 2 Star Couplers HSJ40s

28. 28 New Development Cluster Configuration 2 I64 rx46402 Alpha3 BL25p / Charon-6630 EVA5000 2Gb San Ethernets DECnet, TCP/IP, SCS

29. 29 Test Cluster Configuration 2 BL25p / Charon-6630 EVA5000 2Gb San Ethernets DECnet, TCP/IP, SCS

30. 30 Host Detail Configuration 6 BL25p / Charon-6630 EVA5000 Shared DUA disks per cluster VMS system & data disks Raw LUNs on SAN presented to Windows Local windows system disk & page / swap container file per host for VMS

31. 31 VAX Disks on SAN Charon presents raw SAN LUN as MSCP DUA device VAX/VMS sees it as DUAx: just like from HSJ If needed - must be MSCP served from VAX to other Alpha/I64 nodes –can not access LUN directly because it appears as DGA device Multiple Charon-VAX systems in cluster access same SAN LUN with same DUA name

32. 32 Memory Configuration Various 128MB, 256MB & 512MB on 76x0, 66x0, 65x0, 64x0 test and development systems 1GB on our Charon-6630 – Can be increased to 2GB with enough host system memory Perhaps allow VMS processes larger caches and/or working sets to reduce paging & IO

33. 33 Disk Configuration Local host Windows system disk – Could alternately have been on SAN VAX system disk on EVA5000 disk unit shared between multiple Charon hosts in Cluster VAX system page/swap disk is container file on local host disk

34. 34 Disk Performance Access to VAX system disk on SAN roughly 2 to 50 times faster than CI based HSJ storage MSCP served disks from Alpha about equal from Charon-6630 (via NI) as hardware VAX (via CI) Once new configuration proves reliable, CI-related hardware will be retired

35. 35 System Performance Single Charon-6630 roughly 3 times faster than hardware 6650 – On our host, Charon-66x0 CPU runs around 3 to 6 times faster than hardware 66x0 CPU Less CPUs should result in less inter-processor contention (ie, MPSYNCH time)

36. 36 Application Performance First Rdb regression test suite run time reduced from about 12 hours to about 8 hours – 33% increase

37. 37 Relatively Simple Deployment Install & configure Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition – Install windows updates / patches, anti-virus, Charon – Disable documented windows services – Configure prototype Charon-VAX emulator template files Replicate Windows disk to other hosts

38. 38 Relatively Simple Deployment Create VAX disk LUNs on SAN 1. Make visible to existing Alpha or I64 system in cluster 2. BACKUP/IMAGE existing VAX disks to new LUNs 3. Make LUNs visible to PC host servers 4. Shutdown VAX systems cluster-wide, dismount CI disks on remaining nodes 5. Start Charon-VAX and boot from LUN on multiple hosts 6. Mount new disks (served via MSCP to cluster from Charon-VAX nodes) on remaining nodes

39. 39 Watch Out For… Read all documentation before you embark – Charon-VAX, Windows Server 2003 Difficult to work with raw LUNs from SAN to Windows for VMS cluster disks Disk unit numbers presented to cluster & disk allocation classes

40. 40 Watch Out For… Boot options & saving in ROM file Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition limits 4p & 4GB – Other editions offer higher limits Users concerned that things may be broken because they run so fast!

41. 41 Questions & Comments?