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had its own separate physical server. Logical Domains also provides a “physical
to virtual” (P2V) tool, further simplifying the process of moving from separate
servers to a consolidated environment.
This capability will be demonstrated here with an example based on a real-
world scenario. This data center used 16 servers: a combination of Sun Fire V490,
V880, and V890 servers, plus one Sun Enterprise 6500 occupying more than 80
rack units. It ran a combination of an Oracle database, SAP R/3, J2EE, portal, and
web applications, in both production and test environments.
These aging machines took up a substantial space and energy footprint that
could be reduced by the use of modern T-Series servers, which could offer improved
total cost of ownership (TCO). Logical Domains would provide a one-to-one cor-
respondence of physical server to virtual server, permitting different kernel patch
levels and maintenance windows. Each domain would have the same RAM as the
original physical machine, and sufficient CPU threads to meet or exceed the previ-
ously consumed CPU capacity.
This example uses concepts and features described in Chapter 3, “Oracle VM
Server for SPARC.”
The first step was to enumerate the existing applications, the servers that they
ran on, and their capacity requirements. It was determined that the system in-
cluded 10 production servers and 6 test and development servers. Planning also
established network and storage requirements.
Based on available performance data, it appeared that a single T5240 would have
approximately enough capacity to handle the entire workload. That would cut the
margin of available capacity too close for comfort, however, so a pair of identical
T5240s was chosen as a better solution. A second server would provide sufficient
capacity headroom and redundancy in case the other server failed or needed to be
taken down for maintenance. Production and test domains would be split over the
servers, avoiding a single point of failure. If necessary, test workloads could be shed
during emergency situations if one server had to do the work of two. Domain isola-
tion was considered to be adequate for securely separating test from production
workloads. Because use of the pair of machines provided application redundancy,
there was no need in the original implementation to use redundant service domains.
Networks were configured similar to the physical environments, with virtual
network devices replacing physical network devices in a one-for-one manner.
Separate virtual switches and VLANs could have been used to isolate production
networks from test, but were not needed because a single shared network was
in use in the existing environment. Storage was split between operating system
images residing on internal disk, and application data residing on physical disks.
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