"Virtual" Test

Budgets, budgets, budgets. We all have to deal with budgets. Making sure we can pay the mortgage, make the car payment, and feed the family fit into the home budget. For anyone that is a member of an organization, such as IOUG, we may want to start a really cool project, but being a volunteer organization, the budget will not support it this year. Even sending my daughters to school has become interesting as the private school system that they attend has run into budgetary issues. Most everyone in the technology field, definitely has run into budget constraints at work. In my case, the most recent budget "issue" has been creating a test system for our latest project.

A project was started to consolidate some remote MS Access databases into a centralized Oracle database. This is a vendor application and either installation method is supported. As the application becomes more mission critical, however, the decision was made (and the correct one, in my opinion) to consolidate to our Network Operations Center. The issue that came up though was dollars. When the original budget was written for the project, dollars for a test system were forgotten. The production system was budgeted as a two-node cluster to support two different application databases. This was fine and should support what we want to accomplish, but test was completely overlooked.

So, how do you create a test cluster to support a production implementation when dollars are limited? In our case, the decision was made to purchase one physical server and user Oracle VM to create a test cluster. Not exactly the same as production, but at least we will have somewhere to test out operating system, database, clusterware, and ASM upgrades and patches before going directly into production.

Of course, we have had issues. There is a larger VM learning curve than we expected especially as it relates to storage. We are also feeling our way through resource allocation. Originally we underallocated CPU resources and couldn't install anything. The virtual guest machine showed that the CPU was pegged, but the physical host showed no activity. Allocating an extra virtual CPU took care of that issue, but we still had issues installing and configuring ASM. The normal installation of 11g and configuration of ASM was hanging and showing full CPU utilization, although it was creating the instances. My coworker has spent a couple days with Oracle support trying to figure things out and finally ended up creating everything manually instead. Just one instance of how virtualized environments are not quite as seamless as the are touted to be.

In any event, we have the viritual servers up and running. So now we need to create the databases and away we go! That is just one example of how, if necessary, budgets can be saved. Of course, we haven't proven that we can support any kind of test load on this architecture, but we should at least be able to see if the applications still function after an upgrade or patch.

One final plug, by the way, for the IOUG Forum at Collaborate 09. If you are looking for more ways to save budget dollars, there are lots of tips and tricks you can learn from your peers. I'm hoping to learn more about virtualization and how we can better tune our test system. Since budgets are tight everywhere, make sure you register online before April 30 to save $200. Also, the conference hotel rates have been discounted. There is not better bargain for training than learning from people that have actually used the technology...

Why Collaborate?

I have mentioned in previous posts that I will be presenting a paper at Collaborate 09 in May. This will be my third year presenting and I have found it very rewarding. I attended IOUG events back when the conference was called IOUG Live, and it has only gotten better since I have been involved with presenting. So why should someone go to Collaborate instead of taking an Oracle class? Why should you fight to go when training budgets are being cut? I have several reasons.


Content
Collaborate is one of the few places that you can find the best technologists in the Oracle community all in one place. These are people who are really doing the work and managing the projects to implement and support Oracle technology. Go through your list of Oracle authors and chances are they will be there. Tom Kyte, Rich Niemiec, Michael Corey, Ian Abramson, Michael Abbey, Carey Millsap, Jonathan Lewis... and the list goes on. There will be 350 sessions and that is just from the IOUG Forum. Add in OAUG and Quest International and the options are almost endless.

Are you having issues with Real Application Clusters? Can't quite figure out how to get PeopleSoft monitored with Enterprise Manager? Need help designing a process to patch eBusiness Suite? Starting your first BI project and don't know what BI means or what it has to do with stars? Answers to these questions and more can found at Collaborate. Many times I have been sitting in a session when the speaker said something and I thought, "so that's how you do that!"


Networking
I already listed some of the well known authors/presenters that will be in Orlando this year, but that's really only half the story. Ask the Experts sessions, topic specific orientations, the IOUG/SIG Welcome reception, "Tuning" Open Mic Night, lunches and receptions are all great places to meet new people that are doing some of the same things you are doing. Personally, there have been many times that I have been stuck on an issue, or just wanted to bounce an idea off of someone, that I have e-mailed or called someone I have met at Collaborate or through the IOUG. The network of people that I have connected with has been a huge time saver for me and a money saver for the companies I have worked for.


Cost
Recently I did a comparison between what it would cost for me to go to and Oracle instructor led training course instead of going to Collaborate. To just attend the conference, you could get away with traveling Sunday to Thursday and only pay for four hotel nights at one of the Conference hotels.

Collaborate Early Bird Registration:	$1,335
Airfare:	$200
Airport transfer:	$29
Hotel - Four nights@$140 + tax:	$625
Food:	$100
Total:	$2,289

Oracle Instructor Led Class:	$3,000
Train Fare:	$44
Cab Fare Roundtrip:	$40
Hotel - Four nights@$160 + tax:	$739
Food:	$125
Total:	$3,948

As you can see, you can save at least $1700 by going to Collaborate instead of an Oracle class. And that is if you have access to taking the train to an Oracle education site on Monday morning. If you have to fly, there would be added cost for the flight, plus an extra hotel night. Collaborate is four days and the Oracle class is five days, so that is part of the difference.

If you add a Sunday University Seminar for $459 and one extra hotel room night at $155, you would still only be spending $2903, a full $1000 less. You could also add a Thursday University Seminar for just the cost of the session and not add to the travel budget. The University Seminars are targeted deeper dive training. I would highly recommend trying to go to at least one of them.


Why Collaborate?
You can now see what I Collaborate! You could say it has become a little bit of a passion, but it is something I very much believe in. Check out the registration link at www.ioug.org/collaborate09 and look for the top ten reasons to attend. Also, you can find a proposal to give to your management on why it is important to be at Collaborate. Hope to see you in Orlando!

Until next time... stay clean!

Upcoming Webinar – Auditing Database Activity for Security and Compliance with Oracle Audit Vault

In my initial entry, I mentioned that I am involved with the Independent Oracle User Group and the Special Interest Groups. The Enterprise Best Practices SIG is sponsoring a very exciting webinar next week that any Oracle technologist should be participating in. Tanya Baccam is an instructor with the SANS Institute and Roxana Bardescu is a Senior Principal Product Director in the Database Security Marketing Group at Oracle. They are co-presenting a webinar on Audit Vault, Oracle’s new tool for capturing audit information. The webinar is scheduled for Wednesday, March 11 at 2:00 pm Central Time. Here is the abstract:

Using the native auditing capabilities provided by the Oracle Database and Oracle Audit Vault, organizations can easily monitor their databases for suspicious activities and simplify compliance reporting without costly investments in third-party solutions. In this session, you will learn best practices for effectively auditing your Oracle databases as well as how Oracle Audit Vault can proactively collect and analyze that data in real-time to generate alerts and reports that satisfy internal security policies and regulatory compliance.

I have heard both Roxana and Tanya present before and they are very knowledgeable. This should be a very informative webinar. You can register by following this link.

If you want more on security, you can really get an in depth view of database security at Collaborate 09. Tanya will be presenting a University Seminar on Sunday that is an abbreviate version of the SANS Institute’s week long Securing Oracle Database training. This will give you enough information to scare the heck out of your manager!

Check out the webinar… nothing like free training in this day! Happy auditing!

Oracle Releases Grid Control 10g Release 5!

I know I said my next entry would be about my paper for Collaborate 09, but I sat through Oracle’s webinar today about Grid Control 10gR5 and decided to write about that instead. I’ve been waiting for this release because a lot of the 11g database features have been built into the Enterprise Manager interface. Real Application Testing and Transparent Data Encryption are features that are in the 11g database, but you had to use the local Enterprise Manager to use them. Now they are built into Grid Control. The release number is 10g Release 5, but this was actually supposed to have been the 11g release. Rumor has it, and presenters at conferences have backed this up, that they were ready to call this 11g, but when the BEA purchase went through they decided to hold off on the 11g release until they evaluate revamping Grid Control to use WebLogic instead of Oracle Application Server. We shall see…

The webinar from today is supposed to be posted by tomorrow, but the slides are already there. This really does look like a very nice, feature packed, upgrade. We are on HP-UX/Intanium at my company so I have to wait a bit longer, but if you are using Windows 32 or Linux/Intel, you are good to go. Check out the Enterprise Manager page on OTN and read about the new features. The Real User Experience Insight looks to be a nice feature for measuring performance at the user level. There are accelerators already created for E-Business Suite, Seibel, and PeopleSoft. This should be fun to play with since I support PeopleSoft.

Oracle is building in their acquisitions as fast as they can. One new acquisition that was mentioned on the webinar is mValent. The acquisition was just completed a couple weeks ago and Oracle is already working to build those features into Grid Control. I’m not familiar with the mValent software at all, but apparently it is supposed to make managing complex applications even easier. It should be interesting to see how all these new features for managing complex application environments fit in with already existing plug-ins. As you will see in my later post, I have had several headaches getting the PeopleSoft plug-in implemented and if these tools turn out to be easier, it may be the end of the current plug-in model.

I better get going on my Collaborate paper. Hopefully once I finish it, I can actually write the blog posting about it. Feel free to drop me a line if you like the blog or have some suggestions. Also, I’d love to hear from you if you have had a chance to play with 10gR5!