Yesterday, I came across this white paper from Oracle Corp about Oracle RAC Support on Third-Party Clouds. The paper is definitely a must-read for those who want to run Oracle RAC on AWS, Google or Azure cloud providers. The first paragraph was promising where it stated:
Oracle also maintains an open policy for Third-Party Cloud vendors to support the Oracle Database in their infrastructure.
This sounds great, but the quote is talking about the Oracle Database and not about the RAC option. I found it interesting that the paper spends a great deal of time talking about AWS and Azure but never mentions Google’s cloud.
Here is the bottom line on Oracle’s position for supporting RAC on other cloud offerings:
Oracle RAC is supported on all cloud environments supported by the Oracle Database, as long as the environment is able to provide the hardware, storage, and networking requirements as specified in the Oracle RAC and Grid Infrastructure documentation. With the exception of the Oracle Cloud, Oracle has not tested nor certified Oracle RAC in these environments.
The paper goes to great length to illustrate how AWS muddies the waters with respect to the storage and networking requirements needed to run RAC in AWS.
It should be obvious that Oracle is trying to steer its customers away from running RAC in AWS by reading this paper. Amazon has put out information letting us know how easy it is to run RAC in AWS. But after reading this Oracle white paper, I would have some concern on how well the AWS environment would work for mission-critical RAC deployments.
AWS provides shared storage for RAC by using iSCSI targets on VMs, which I would never use for anything other than a testbed. One issue is redundancy at the storage level. In order to have redundancy at the storage level:
Damiana leaf is an tadalafil cialis active composition of volatile oils, flavonoids, tannin and damianin. Some firms are trying to mimic the popularity and wide acceptance of tadalafil free, a prescription drug for males with erectile dysfunction. There are other natural remedies that could reduce and buy cialis usa even eliminate the irritable bowel syndrome symptoms. The cheap cialis pills effects reduce fatigue, restore libido, and boost erectile function by modulating levels of cortisol, testosterone, and other hormones.
Amazon’s proposed solution is “deploying two or three of these NAS instances and mirroring the storage between them using ASM Normal or High redundancy.” However, should both storage instances fail or be taken down (e.g. for maintenance) at the same time, there will be a complete data loss.
For the private network, AWS does not support multi-casting, a requirement for the Grid Infrastructure Cluster Interconnect. AWS gets around this by using a point-to-point VPN network using n2n ntop. But from ntop’s own website, there is no further development on this in the last two years.
Don’t get me wrong. I think that AWS is a great cloud solution for lots of different things. Admittedly, I have not run RAC on AWS, at least not yet. But if I were looking to move my company’s RAC database infrastructure to the cloud, I would seriously investigate the claims in this Oracle white paper before committing to the AWS solution. That last sentence is the entire point of this blog post.
