Oracle on OpenVMS

[Mobeen_1]

I am looking for some experiences on using Oracle on OpenVMS. I would appreciate if any of you who use Oracle on OpenVMS could give your feedback on the lines mentioned below

1. Are you aware of any customers running
Oracle 8/9i on OpenVMS.

2. What do you think of the performance of
using Oracle on OpenVMS. Please highlight
any advantages or disadvantages, especially
on the performance front

3. Anyone considering migrating Oracle to
UNIX or any other OS. If so, please
highlight any reasons for considering this
migrating.

Appreciate if you could share your response. This would help make decision.

Regards
Mobeen

[Mike Naime]

Mobeen:

1.) Yes. We currently have Oracle 7.xxx and 8.xxx running on production clusters. Oracle 9I upgrades will be rolled out sometime after VMS7.3-2 has been certified for our Application.

We have this running on the following Alphaservers: DS20, DS25, ES40, ES45, ES47, GS160, GS320, GS1280.

Our DB's are already playing with 9I on our test cluster.


2.) Advantages of VMS VS AIX. Failover, and the ability to use the SAME disk drives at the SAME time! The version of AIX that I see our AIX folks using does not truly SHARE the LUNS. I have to give then twice as much SAN space that I give a VMS system.

Our Application runs on both AIX and VMS systems. The AIX system takes more SAN bandwidth for the same sized site than a VMS system does. This is an OS difference, not an Oracle difference.

What exactly are you wanting compared? If you can answer that, maybe someone can give you some experience on that. Your question is REAL vauge.


3.)
Reasons for migrating:
I want more downtime!
I want to get hit by all of the Virus's out there!
I want to buy more hardware!
I want to spend more $$$!
I want to wind up with a piece of junk. But by that time that management realizes that, they will have gotten rid of everyone that knew anything about the old systems, so they can't go back!
More disk space is required for a UNIX system than for a VMS system that SHARES the cluster resource.
More SAN bandwidth is required. This can mean that you need more HBA's and SAN hardware than if you used a VMS system.
Volume limitations of AIX. I have my AIX admins telling me that the LUNS I want to give them for non-prod systems are too big because the volue tables that they need to create are too big. (Something similar to a registry concept I am told) They are not able to carve up the larger LUNS that I want to give them. This means that I need to make more smaller LUNs to accomodate this limitation.

There was an entire thread that discussed this issue in greater depth. Look through the older posts for it.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hi,

one thing to be aware of, if you do want to cluster Oracle servers you will need another of Oracles products RAC (Real application clusters).

Greetings, Martin

[Steve Reece]

I've not run Oracle 8.xx or 9.xx on VMS, but with Oracle 7.xx (I think it was 7.2.3.x), there was an issue introduced where the bequeath processes would take out mutexes and, with poorly designed searches and such like I could end up with maybe five jobs running on a 3 CPU system and freezing just about everything else out of the CPU. It was something that only came in as the result of a "minor" patch update (yeah, right!) but hurt us quite badly on a few occasions.

That company have now moved off VMS and have gone to Oracle on Solaris. There are more parts of the Oracle family available for Solaris than for VMS and the port is apparently quicker at being released to customers.

The reasons for migrating are a well-known story:

* more applications available on the Unix platform to use the Oracle back end than are available on VMS;

* cheaper to buy Solaris than VMS;

* more sys admin type people on Solaris than VMS;

* college grads are more familiar with Solaris than VMS;

* Sun were the blot in dot com and the corporate decision makers are more aware of what Solaris can do as an "Open standard" for Unix than the "proprietary" environment that is VMS.

In the environment that I was running using Oracle 7.xx, we didn't use Oracle Parallel Server or anything like that. We (because of the DBA's ways of setting things up) had instances that came up on one node and if the instance was required on the other node in the 2 node cluster the DBAs had to alter the config files for that instance and bring it up manually on the other node. It's a cheaper way of doing it, but it detracts from the reasons that you have this stuff running on a cluster in the first place!

The final laugh was that the company involved debated running the Solaris version of the Oracle servers on a SunCluster which didn't have anything like the functionality of the VMScluster they wanted to decommission. Sat in the presentation that Sun gave, I heard that Sun now had this wonderful attribute (don't remember what it was) and it was going to make their cluster so much better. The Sun guy and I looked at each other and he said, before I could say anything and like he was reading my mind, "I know, it's 10 or more years behind VMS having it". That was nice!

[Douglas Buxton]

We are currently running Oracle 8i and 9i (test environment) on VMS 7-3.1. We have no complaints on performance. The GS140, and ES40 perform very well with our OLAP application.

One big problem is the inability to tune Oracle for VMS. All changes to working sets from oracle support (or even they're default settings) are done through sysgen PQL_ parameters. These settings affect EVERY process. If they're equivalent authorized working set param is less than the PQL_ param, they get the larger of the two. This makes it very difficult to use the tuning features of VMS. In addition, if you do NOT have the parameters set the way Oracle recommends, they will not respond to your problem.

We are planning to migrate to Linux on Itanium II for, basically, one reason: Oracle's support of VMS is dropping drastically. It usually takes us 2-3 days before we get a response to a problem. And the instances sited above are killing our ability to effectively use VMS for Oracle.

[Ian Miller.]

the Oracle people are doing 9i RAC on VMS. There's a demo here in Nashua this week. They seem to be keen on that. I'm told oracle are busy with 10i at present. I think hp are very keen for Oracle to succeed on VMS.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

CERNER is actively selling their Healthcare solution on OpenVMS + Oracle. Supposedly 1/2 their saled (which are significant).

Performance is nicely 'in the ballpark'. Some things are a little slower, some a little faster. It is close enough not to make is a descion point... IMHO. In My Humble Opinion even up to a 20% performance delta could not make it a decision point as other factors would have a large impact: do you know/trust the platform? Total Cost of Ownership? Security? Availability...

And ofourse noone does clusters better than OpenVMS!

Hein.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Mobeen,

I can not comment on support for Oracle Classic, but we do run some applications using Oracle Rdb. While this is not my immediate speciality it is my impression that support is pretty fair in this area. We did have some serious technical problems about a year ago and got very high level support from Oracle on this.

Greetings, Martin

[Jan van den Ende]

Douglas,


If they're equivalent authorized working set param is less than the PQL_ param, they get the larger of the two.


This is the defined VMS behavior!
What do you mean by "authorized working set param"? If it is the value in SYSUAF for the account running the ORA processes, then this is the standard, normal, default behavior.
If the ORA processes get started by a RUN command, specifying (directly or indirectly) NOUAF, then the values in the startup command itself get used, any non-specified taken from PQL_Dxxx. But ALWAYS, PQL_Mxxx is the MINIMUM value. Any value specified, whatever way, below PQL_Mxxx gets superceeded by PQL_Mxxx.

-- this is irrespective of Oracle, it holds for ANY VMS process.

My own personal experiences with (native) oracle ended at ORA 6.1.xx, but my experiences with Oracle supprt regarding Rdb & DBMS are quite good.

hth,


Jan

[Ian Miller.]

re the point about use of PQL parameters - it is bad practice to force all processes have larger quotas. However the affect in system resources is not generally worth bothering about unless you are very resource constrained.

[Nicolas Dumeige]

Hello,

My boss was a hudge fan of VMS untill Oracle Application was abandonned ...
Does Oracle eBusiness Suite runs on VMS ?

Cheers

Nicolas

[Uwe Zessin]

Ian,
has BACKUP become more robust when it comes to a set of quotas that do not match the formulas?

A number of years ago I was able to produce corrupted save-sets, which I luckily detected due to a verify. Can't say about recent versions as I don't run BACKUP that often these days.

[Richard Helmke_2]

I consult for a group of colleges/universities using an application that is currently running on Oracle 9iR2. These are small systems: DS10, DS20, DS25, AS4100, and ES40 servers on the various campuses. We see adequate performance on these systems and we rarely shut them down for patches or tuning (of course, they don't crash).

The staff's skill set is OpenVMS so we stay with a proven system with a known track record. When new folks not trained in VMS come onboard, they quickly pick up the DCL and utilities that they need to perform their work.

At this time there doesn't appear to be a reason to migrate to something else.

[Ian Miller.]

Oracle appear to be serious in VMS support and VMS are serious about supporting Oracle. It is being ported to itanium vms.

Uwe - i've not seen a problem - can you provide more details in another thread.

[Mahmoud_1]

Mobeen,

I agree with all whom said OpenVMS is more reliable than any OS.

I am system support Eng. for more than 120 systems running oracle under OpenVMS with some of them cluster systems.

the major point I want to talk about is the disaster recovery system , as we know the disaster recovery configuration is based on storage , so if the main system down the backup system will start using the same configuration of the the main system , here the OpenVMS will not face any problem because the OVMS will not look to the new HW all what you have to do is booting the backup servers.
In UNIX you have to redefine the new HW to the kernel.

About performance , I have the tow bigest computerized departements in my country running Oracle under Openvms without any problems or degradation in perforamnce.

Another thing is the satbility as all we know that the only operating system you can install and keep it running for long time without followup is the old-new system OpenVMS.
I know operators doing the operations in sites running OVMS with little education in computer science.

I have customers migrate applications from VMS to UNIX then they returned back to VMS.

Hope I help you

Mahmoud Ad-Dabbas

[jeff daniels_2]

(A) 9i on vms

We run oracle 9i RAC (9.2.0.4) on a 2-node, 2*1 Ghz CPU es45 cluster on ovms 7.3-2.

o Migrated from 7.1.5 (exclusive mode) on alpha2100 cluster in March 2004

o 3 oracle code-trees

o SAN of partitioned 3 member shadow-sets

o Total of 12 databases - about 1/2 running in rac mode.

o Cluster also runs server-side bespoke application (cobol + dcl + sqlplus) - all in batch

(B) Performance

o Average of 6-10 times performance gain over 2100 - to be expected I guess.

o No performance issues to report

(C) Future

o Need to consider skills and knowledge in the market - however - any decent DBA should be resonably comfortable with VMS in
a few weeks - even with little or no previous exposure.

o Will examine alternatives when ready to go for 10g - either UNIX or LINUX favourite alternatives now.

cheers

[Jim Strehlow · Accepted solution]

We and our customers have been running Oracle 8.0.5 through 9.2.0.2 on OpenVMS for four years on minimal DS10 and DS20 systems with 1 GB memory and 3 member RAID 5 disks.
I typically see forty concurrent user sessions at our customer sites.
Our customers with 500 to 1000 concurrent sessions have Oracle on Windows (with reoccurring SGA memory problems and reboots.)

One of our law enforcement customers runs Oracle 8.1.7.4 on OpenVMS 7.2-1 up now for 463 days.

Drawback is when Oracle only creates Oracle Mobile applications and Oracle does not port it to OpenVMS.

Jim, OpenVMS and Database Systems Manager,
Data911 (Law Enforcement Hardware and Software Solutions)
Alameda, CA, USA

[Chris Foster_2]

Hi Mobeen,

We are running Oracle 9.2.0.3 on several systems including GS-140's, GS-160's, DS-10's and ES-45. We have had some issues with Oracle eating up system resources, but have been able to modify Sysgen params and set up logicals that are Oracle specific for quotas, and have been running without too many head aches since.

Chris

[Lawrence Czlapinski]

1. Our customer is running Oracle 8i on Alpha OpenVMS 7.3-1.
2. Stable and secure OS. Operating system is more likely to be around. Support for some other operating systems has disappeared. For instance Microsoft frequently changes their OS and discontinues support for previous OS. Microsoft servers are less stable and are more easily hacked.
3. No. However, customer is considering migrating Oracle from NT Server OS (which is no longer being supported by Oracle) to OpenVMS.
Lawrence

[Mobeen_1]

I have gathered enough feedback