Oracle Database on Amazon Web Services Book

The first book that covers running Oracle on Amazon Web Services:
http://www.amazon.com/Oracle-Databases-Amazon-Web-Services/dp/012800956X

Written by these companies:
http://www.appsassociates.com/awslabs/
http://aws.amazon.com/rds/partners/dbvisit/
http://www.e-dba.com/oracle_labs_aws.html

Determining if you are running Oracle VM on EC2

The question has come up on how to determine whether an EC2 instances started from an Oracle AMI is running OVM or Amazon Xen.  You can not find this out on the AWS management console.  You must use the AWS EC2 CLI.  The ec2-describe-instances command shows 'ovm' next to virtualization type (paravitual) or 'xen' of Amazon xen.

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop on AWS

Citrix has a number of virtualization solutions. XenDesktop and XenApp are two of them. The main difference between them is that XenDesktop has one individual desktop (and therefore own VM) only for each user and XenApp is a shared desktop model.  The technical difference between the two is that XenApp is based on MSFT Terminal Services and hundreds of users can get virtual apps and desktops from a single VM.  XenApp is fully supported by Citrix on AWS today. 

Citrix XenServer (just like VMWare and MS Virtual Server) will not run on AWS/EC2.  This is the case even though XenSever (as the name implies) is based upon the same open source kernel as AWS hypervisor.

Amazon CloudFormations and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder

Yesterday I blogged about AWS AMIs and Oracle VM templates. These are great mechanisms to stand up an initial cloud environment. However, they don't provide the capability to manage, provision and update an environment once it is up and running. This is where AWS Cloud Formations and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder comes into play. In a way, these tools/frameworks pick up where AMIs and VM templates leave off.


Once again, there a similar offers from AWS and Oracle that compliant and also overlap with each other. Let's start by looking at the definitions:


AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.


AWS CloudFormations




Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder - Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder makes it possible for administrators to quickly configure and provision entire multi-tier enterprise applications onto virtualized and cloud environments.


Oracle VM Builder




As with the discussion around should you use AMI or VM Templates, there are pros and cons to each:


1. CloudFormation is JSON, Assembly Builder is GUI and CLI


2. VM Templates can be used in any private or public cloud environment. Of course, CloudFormations is tied to AWS public cloud

Amazon AMIs and Oracle VM templates

I have worked with Oracle VM templates and most recently with Amazon Machine Images (AMI). The similarities in the functionality and capabilities they provide are striking. Just take a look a the definitions:




An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of pre-configured operating system and virtual application software which is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2. AWS AMIs




Oracle VM Templates provide an innovative approach to deploying a fully configured software stack by offering pre-installed and pre-configured software images. Use of Oracle VM Templates eliminates the installation and configuration costs, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs helping organizations achieve faster time to market and lower cost of operations.
Oracle VM Templates




Other things they have in common:


1. Both have 35 Oracle images or templates:


AWS AMI pre-built images
Oracle pre-built VM Templates


2. Both allow to build your own images or templates:
A. OVM template builder - OVM Template Builder - Oracle VM Template Builder, an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux “Just enough OS” (JeOS)–based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM.


B. AMI 'builder' - AMI builder

However, AWS has the added feature/benefit of adding your own AMI to the AWS AMI catalog: AMI - Adding to the AWS AMI catalog




Another plus with AWS and AMI is there are hundreds of MySQL AMIs (AWS MySQL AMIs ). A benefit of Oracle VM templates is they can run on any public or private cloud environment, not just AWS EC2.

However, with Oracle VM templates they first need to be images as AMIs before they can run in the AWS cloud.