Oracle and Microsoft to Interconnect Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure

Posted on June 11, 2019 by Zed DBA Standard Reply

On the 5th of June 2019, both Oracle and Microsoft made a joint announcement on the interconnection between Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure:

Oracle’s Press Release
Microsoft Press Release

The key aspects of the announcement are:

A direct interconnect between Oracle Cloud and Azure Cloud, starting in Oracle’s Ashburn (North America) region and Azure Washington DC (US East) region, with plans to expand additional regions in the future*.
Unified identity and access management, via a unified single sign-on experience to manage resources across both Oracle Cloud and Azure.
Supported deployment of custom applications and packaged Oracle applications (such as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite typically referred to as Oracle Applications Unlimited) in Azure Cloud with the Oracle databases (such as RAC, Exadata, Autonomous Database) deployed in the Oracle Cloud.
A collaborative support model for customers leveraging these new capabilities.

*With only one region available in both Oracle and Azure, this will allow for failure in a Availability Domain in Oracle Cloud and/or Availability Zone in Azure Cloud but not a failure of a whole region in either. So until more regions are added, Disaster Recover will be limited to Availability Domains/Availability Zones:

Figure 4 from Oracle’s blog “Overview of the Interconnect Between Oracle and Microsoft“.

What does this mean?

In a nutshell, for those customers who have Microsoft Azure as their Cloud platform of choice, can now migrate their application tier to Microsoft Azure, whilst migrating the database tier i.e. Oracle database (mandatory for Application Unlimited) without having to worry about the all important latency (high-throughput, low-latency as stated in Oracle’s blog post). It is however unclear if there will be any charge for outbound/inbound traffic between the clouds, but it does seem from the documentation and blog post that both Oracle’s dedicated FastConnect and Azure’s dedicated ExpressRoute are required, which are both fix rate products. It also helps those customers who require the favourable database licensing on the Oracle Cloud, more info can be found in my blog post here.

This is certainly a step towards the trend of multi-cloud/hybird-cloud platforms.

More info can be found regarding this announcement from our Version 1’s blog post here.

Another interesting read from SearchCloud Computing in regards to this announcement.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition – Day 3

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Zed DBA Standard Reply

Day 3 kicked off again with another early start at 7am, yawn 🙂

Again, it was a very intense day, with lots of presentations and then ending with video interviews of each attendee:

Dean Bolton from VLSS, talked to us about “License Fortress from VLSS”
- Very interesting product, where VLSS can advise you how to run your Oracle on VMware, then protect you from Oracle with the License Fortress guarantee, that has lawyers ready to defend you in case of license compliance backed by an insurance policy if required. So the customer is never at risk when they take out the “License Fortress from VLSS”.
- Plug for my current employer who also offer License Audit Consulting.
Chris Rohan from VMware, talked to us about “VMware vSphere Core & SDDC – Networking – NSX & VCNS”
Marcus Thordal from Brocade, talked to us about “Brocade and VMware Technology and the VMware Solutions Lab”
- Interestingly Brocade have worked out a way to tag network packets, so you can identify which VM guest is causing network traffic
- Also had a good example of how NVMe is causing need to higher network bandwidth
Simon Guyennet from VMware, talked to us about “Emerging Products” & “VMware Integrated Containers and Oracle”
- Lot of NDA stuff, so those interested in this area, keep a look out, some interesting stuff coming soon 🙂
Mike Adams from VMware, talked to us about “The CPBU, vSphere and Friends, and the Experts Program”
- Key take away that was not NDA, is VMware on AWS that is currently available to select customers and will be Generally Available soon 🙂
Somu Rajarathinam and Ron Ekins from Pure Storage gave a Technical Session
Feidhlim O’Leary from VMware, talked to us about “High Availability and Disaster Recovery in the SDDC”
Alain Geenrits from Blue Medora, talked to us about “Management & Monitoring – Blue Medora and Oracle on vSphere”
Daniel Hesselink from License Consulting, talked to us about “License Audit with License Consulting”
The duo Sudhir Balasubramanian and Mohan Potheri, talked to us about “vSphere HA or Oracle RAC, SRM or Data Guard, they are all complimentary when Oracle is run in the SDDC”
- I enjoyed the labs from this duo, with their “good cop, bad cop” style 🙂

The workshop ended with a short video interview, where we were each asked to introduce ourselves, answer a few questions about the workshop and Pure Storage. I’m not the best at this sort of things, so I don’t think I’ll end up in the marketing video of the event, but time will tell 🙂

My OCM buddy Yvonne Murphy, then gave a few of us an extended tour of the Global Support Services (GSS) whilst we waited for the shuttle back to the hotel.

Then it was a quick chauffeured ride to the airport and a short flight back home to Manchester.

Another great day that concluded the workshop, it increased my knowledge of VMware and gave me a great opportunity to network with Oracle Database Experts from around Europe 🙂

Many thanks to VMware and Pure Storage for organising this workshop and allowing me to be a part of it 🙂

My tweets for the day can be seen here.

The VMware Expert Database Workshop Program hashtag is #VMWORA

My related Blog Posts

VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition
VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition – Day 1
VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition – Day 2

VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition – Day 2

Posted on July 20, 2017 by Zed DBA Standard 1

Day 2 kicked off again with another early start at 7am, coupled with the late night, I was a bit tired to say the least, but was all worth it 🙂

Again, it was a very intense day, with lots of presentations and technical deep dives, ending with a lab session:

My OCM buddy Yvonne Murphy, kicked the day off by talking to us about “The Best Oracle Support Team on Earth – Global Support Services Oracle Team”
Dave Welch, House of Brick, talked to us about “Oracle on vSphere Licensing”
- Some interesting Oracle license cases of which the main one discussed is available here
Jad El-Zein, talked to us about “vRealizeAutomation and Oracle”
Andreas Scherr, talked to us about “vSphere Core Storage Fundamentals” & “Modern Converged Storage, & vSAN & vVols”
- I was impressed with the vSAN concept of using spare drive bays in an ESXi host to put a Hard Disks or SSD Drives in and/or using spare PCIe slots to put a Flash Cards in (including NVMe 🙂 )
- Then these server attached storage devices are pooled together to provide a shared Datastore that has resilience built in using software rather then hardware 🙂
- Can be all flash or hybird but each ESXi needs a cache device i.e. SSD Drive or Flash Card
- More info can be found here
Valentin Bondzio, gave us an very enjoyable deep dive on CPU usage in Virtual Environment and how to troubleshoot 🙂
We then finished the day with a lab session with Sudhir Bala and Mohan Potheri, where we got to for example:
- Create a Virtual Hard Drive
- Attach an Existing Virtual Hard Drive (useful for RAC clusters 🙂 )
- Then we played a game to stress test a Pure Storage, however I could only get 2Gb a second using 10 sessions running a parallel query of 10 on the largest object in the database. This is not because the Pure Storage but because of I/O queue in the VMware stack, which we didn’t get time to change but highlight the point 🙂

Another great day of the 3 days workshop, in which I got to gain even more new knowledge in regards to VMware, in particular CPU usage and vSAN 🙂

The day ended with a meal and drinks at The Oliver Plunkett, more socialising with Johannes Ahrends, Ron Ekins, Frits Hoogland, Tim Hall and Mohan Potheri. Then a nice walk back to the hotel with Mohan Potheri, Johannes Ahrends and Martin Klier. It’s a small world as I found Martin Klier and I had overlap with some customers and people 🙂 The socialising then continued in the reception lounge with Carl Dudley, Ron Ekins, Frits Hoogland and Tim Hall.

Many thanks to VMware and Pure Storage, I’m looking forward to the rest of the workshop 🙂

My tweets for the day can be seen here.

The VMware Expert Database Workshop Program hashtag is #VMWORA

My related Blog Posts

VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition
VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition – Day 1

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VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition – Day 3

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