April 2020: Robin.io Newsletter
March 2020: Robin.io Newsletter
Global Fortune 500 Financial Services Leader Gains Efficiency and Agility on Robin
Robin Platform
Provision Oracle RAC Database as a Service with Robin Platform
Robin Video – Robin Hyper-converged Kubernetes Platform in Two Minutes
Oracle RAC Database as a Service – Provision with Robin Platform
See how easy it is for anybody to stand up an entirely new Oracle RAC environment including the grid infrastructure installation the ASM configuration and finally create the RAC database tool.
Log into the Robin Hyperconverged Kubernetes Platform console. Go straight to the application bundle screen. In this case, we just have a couple of simple bundles, one of which is our Oracle RAC bundle. So we’ll just simply click on that to provision Oracle RAC. On-click, we are immediately presented with the provisioning workflow associated with this application.
We will name our application. We’ll just call this Oracle RAC demo. Now we’ve got a couple of network interfaces we need to consider because for Oracle RAC both the public and private IP address ranges are available here. This is where we specify the public address because this is how the application will receive connection requests we’ve got the ability to specify the size of the cluster – both in terms of the number of nodes and the amount of compute and memory capacity.
This gives us the ability to shape the way in which the database will be laid out. In this case, we are going to change the default from flash to spinning disk because we, in this case, don’t have enough flash memory available for this particular deployment. We will then move down here to specify our private interconnect IP address and specify our single client address name for RAC. We’ll scroll on down to find a number of other environment variables which may be passed through robin for this deployment.
We’ve got the ability to define how we will declare ASM disk group redundancy – various credentials and then we have our placement rules where we can control how these resources will be deployed on the physical robin cluster. In this case, we need to be able to allow for multiple RAC instances on the same physical node in the cluster because we only have two nodes in our demo environment.
Simply click on provision application from that screen. This will kick off the deployment of our RAC environment. The provisioning process goes through a number of different phases beginning with the deployment of the V nodes or the actual virtual nodes or pods in the cluster running a variety of scripts to complete the configuration of the RAC environment itself from an Oracle perspective through the UI. After this, it is really just in a matter of minutes as we have our entirely fresh new RAC environment up and running.
View Provision Oracle RAC demo to learn more.
Scale Out Oracle RAC Database as a Service with Robin Platform
Robin Video – Robin Platform in Two Minutes
Oracle RAC Database as a Service – How to Scale
See how easy it is for anybody to stand up an entirely new Oracle RAC environment including the grid infrastructure installation the ASM configuration and finally create the RAC database tool.
You have seen how easy it is to deploy a fresh new Oracle RAC database environment. But what if we want to know how our workload might respond when adding a third node to the cluster? In other words, test the scalability of that particular workload when adding a third node.
So it’s really easy. We just click on “Scale Out” for the application and here we can define the number of nodes by which we want to extend this cluster. This is done simply by sliding across this bar but for this demonstration purpose, we need to add a single node. We can also explicitly
call out a hostname for the new node. We can go back and tweak some of the environment variables as input for this new operation but for this demo, we really don’t need to make any of these changes.
So let’s just close these out and just simply click on the “Scale Out” button to begin the process for extending our RAC cluster. Behind the scenes, Robin is making all the necessary calls to Oracle to affect the extension of the cluster – in very much the same way as you might through conventional means for any other installation ensuring that from an Oracle perspective things are all agreeable with the configuration. You can see the success of the operation in this window. We’ll close this window and now we are back on our application screen with the newly refreshed view to find that our third node has been added.
We can see the new IP addresses – the physical host on which the new container has been deployed. Let’s just jump back into the new container – rather do a similar verification to see that we have actually successfully reshaped RAC database environment with three nodes from two nodes. We now log into Oracle set our environment through SRB CTL. Let’s just do a status again of our Robin database so we can see that we’ve got our Robin three instance now, which has been added and it’s now running on our new V node.
In the new container in the Robin cluster, we can see the new vip is added and is up and running. The resources have been successfully configured across the new node and if we go back into SQL plus and log back into the database itself and do once again a query of gv$instance, we can see that we had the databases up and fully available across all three instances of the cluster. Okay, so we exit out of that. We’re back to the UI and so now what if we want to scale back in? So we need to shrink that cluster – testing is completed – so we need to shrink that cluster back to two nodes –
Watch the demo to understand how to scale back.
Clone Oracle RAC Database as a Service with Robin Platform
Robin Video – Robin Platform in Two Minutes
Clone Oracle RAC Database as a Service with Robin Platform
We have a database application that is up and running. Now let’s take a look at how easy it is to take snapshots of that application and then subsequently perform cloning operations.
Create Snapshot
Creating a snapshot is quite easy with Robin. We have the option to provide a name for the snapshot or just use the default – which is what we’ll do here. We can look at some of the operations behind the scenes that are going to occur with respect to freezing IO and quiescing the application to maintain consistency. We will then see the newly created snapshot.
From here we have the option for restoring back to that point in time or in this case we were going to perform a thin clone operation based on that snapshot. Here we want to name the clone. It’s essentially an entirely new application stack that will be stood up as part of this operation. So we need to give it a name just as we would give the original application when it was provisioned.
Therefore, we also need to specify both the public and the private IP addresses, because again, this is a RAC database application. We could tweak the capacity for this app and we’ll just leave that the same specify the private IP address and just simply launch the operation by clicking on the clone. This takes a few minutes.
We can again take a look at some of the operations that are occurring behind the scenes with respect to deploying the application. It’s relatively quick and at this point, we can close out this window.
View Oracle RAC Clone and the original application
Now we will be presented with the new application screen as it relates to this new clone cloned app with all the related information in terms of the new nodes that have been provisioned – IP addresses etc. So then if we go back and just click on the general application screen then we can get a summary. you can see the original application and the newly cloned deployment and the snapshot on which it was based.
Implementing Oracle Database-as-a-Service for Cloud-Like Agility
Implementing Oracle Database-as-a-Service for Cloud-Like Agility
Robin Explainer Video – Robin Hyper-converged Kubernetes Platform in Two Minutes
Bringing Oracle and Oracle RAC to Life using Hyper-converged Kubernetes
What You Need to Know
A growing number of organizations are turning to Docker containers to help solve really big application requirements. Among the biggest out there are those imposed by Oracle and Oracle RAC. What if you could deploy Oracle or Oracle RAC as a stateless cloud-native workload in your environment? Transform a complex process into one with an App Store-like experience.
Innovative enterprises are graduating to the next step – employing Kubernetes to orchestrate stateful databases and big data applications. Don’t believe it? See lifecycle management tasks for Oracle and Oracle RAC in action!
- Discover the essentials that you need to know to run an Oracle database or even Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) using clustered Docker containers that are orchestrated using Kubernetes.
- Be treated to a live demo during which you will see how various different database lifecycle management tasks can be performed with just a click of a button
- Receive an introduction to the Robin Hyper-Converged Kubernetes Platform
- Get real-world examples from enterprise customers who are deriving value by modernizing their data infrastructure using the Robin Hyper-Converged Platform