Executive summary

This document describes the best practices for deploying the IBM DB2 Version 9 product with the IBM System p™ virtualization technology. When you run the DB2 product on the System p platform, selecting the right blend of virtualization features and their configurations to achieve desired business goals, while improving the utilization of IT resources, is a challenge. Achievable business goals are reducing administration, power, cooling, or floor space costs by consolidating data servers. Examples of ways to improve resource utilization are optimizing the performance of the DB2 product, improving processor utilization, sharing system resources, using dynamic resource allocation without rebooting, and using workload management.

Logical partition type

Increasingly, with most hardware systems being heavily under-utilized due to sizing based on forecasted peak server activity, businesses today continually face the challenge of driving the average level of system processor utilization even higher in order to maximize their return on investment (ROI). By using shared processor partitions, businesses can efficiently consolidate multiple databases that are housed on different physical servers or dedicated partitions onto shared processor partitions on a single physical server. This sharing of processor resources, while balancing the processor requirements for both peak and average operations, reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO). One can then assign a quality of service for each of the shared processor partitions to ensure more important workloads will always get the processor resources they need while lower priority workloads will get resources on a best-effort basis. Hosting test and
production applications together, on different shared processor partitions, can also help improve the quality of the test results as the test environment faithfully mimics the production environment.

Disk I/O type

With the capability to create multiple shared partitions, each with a fractional entitlement capacity, it is possible to exhaust all the physical I/O slots of the machine if a dedicated I/O slot was assigned to each logical partition. Also, in many production environments with multiple databases consolidated into multiple logical partitions, the I/O performance requirements vary quite significantly between many applications. In these cases, the virtual I/O server (VIOS) enables sharing of the disk adapter and I/O resources across multiple applications to better utilize the overall storage infrastructure and meet varied performance needs while maximizing the ROI. The VIOS feature also provides additional value-added capabilities, such as Live Partition Mobility – a feature on the POWER6™ processor family – that allows for the movement of a running partition from one POWER6 server to another with no application downtime, resulting in better system utilization, improved application availability, and energy savings.

Network type 

Similar to the reasons already mentioned for the sharing of storage resources, the VIOS also handles the sharing of network adapters and, therefore, the sharing of network bandwidth across various partitions on a system. This maximizes both system resource utilization and ROI.

Workload management considerations

The types of workload management capabilities available with System p virtualization technologies are most important to businesses running customer relationship management (CRM) or transactional workloads with CPU intensive batch jobs during off-peak hours and less intensive CPU activity on the transactional system during peak business hours. These capabilities also have applicability in industries similar to retail in which typically the demand on the data server system is much higher on particular days of the year, such as Black Friday after Thanksgiving or Boxing Day after Christmas, than on other days. Efficient workload management maximizes both system resource utilization and ROI, while reducing TCO.

Test these best-practice guidelines in your test environment before implementing them in your production environment.

Introduction

Virtualization is a broad term encompassing a set of server deployment and management features. According to one definition, virtualization is a technique used to abstract the physical characteristics of the resources of a system from other systems, applications, or users interacting with those resources.

Virtualization is extremely useful because you can use it to make a single physical resource appear to be multiple logical resources, or multiple physical resources appear to be a single logical resource; for example, a processor core can appear to function as multiple virtual processors, or multiple storage devices can be consolidated into a single logical pool in order to increase utilization of the available storage space. Therefore, virtualization makes server deployment and utilization more flexible. You can reduce the costs of administration, power, and floor space by consolidating data servers through virtualization. As an added benefit, you can use virtualization to significantly increase server utilization and improve overall performance efficiency.

This DB2 best-practices document describes how to select the right blend of System p virtualization features and configurations to help you to achieve your desired business goals. (Unless otherwise noted, DB2 Version 9 refers to both DB2 Version 9.1 and DB2 Version 9.5). This document provides guidance in the following areas:

• Understanding DB2 performance and scalability in a virtualized environment
• Using Advanced Power Virtualization on IBM System p
• Choosing the right virtualization method for your DB2 environment by
  considering the following primary considerations:
  
  • Logical partition type
  • Disk I/O type
  • Network type
  • Workload management
• Planning and sizing

As other virtualization technologies, such as VMware® ESX and Windows hypervisor, become available in future, this document will be extended to incorporate best practice guidelines applicable to them. It should be noted that the concepts and techniques presented in this paper are primarily applicable to the System p platform.

DB2 Version 9 and System p virtualization overview

The System p virtualization technology offers a rich set of virtualization features implemented in the hardware and firmware. These features range from simple resource isolation to an array of the most advanced and powerful functions, including server resource partitioning, autonomic dynamic resource reallocation, and workload management. The IBM System p family of servers has incrementally delivered virtualization features with several processors in the IBM POWER™ processor family and multiple supported operating systems. The System p platform now boasts mature, well-proven server virtualization features. 

Unlike traditional hosting environments where an operating system instance controls all of the hardware resources of a server (for example, the processors, memory, and I/O devices), virtualization, in its rudimentary form, allows partitioning of server resources (logical partitioning). The virtualization is made possible by a layer called IBM POWER Hypervisor™ (PHYP), which provides an abstract view of system hardware resources to the operating system of the shared processor partition.

Virtualization features, such as IBM Micro-Partitioning™, virtual I/O (VIO), and virtual ethernet, deliver value through methods such as resource sharing, workload
management, and dynamic resource allocation without operating system instance reboots (dynamic logical partitioning). VIO enables you to perform storage partitioning and sharing with just a few commands. Running in a partitioned environment, VIO can also alleviate storage administration overhead by providing a centralized focal point. The DB2 product works with VIO without any special package or driver installation.

System p hardware supports the IBM AIX, IBM i, SuSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) operating systems. This document focuses primarily on the AIX operating system, but you can extend the same guidelines to all other supported operating systems running on POWER-based processors with little or no modification.

The DB2 Version 9 data server is IBM’s fastest-growing, flagship database offering. It comes equipped with host dynamic resource awareness, automatic features such as selftuning memory management (STMM), and enhanced automatic storage, which greatly reduce administrative overhead for tuning and maintenance. These functions make the DB2 product well suited for the virtualization environment and enable it to leverage the System p virtualization technology.

The DB2 product works seamlessly in the System p virtualization environment, straight out of the box. DB2 recognizes and reacts to any dynamic LPAR event, such as runtime changes to the computing and physical memory resources of a host partition. The STMM feature automatically adjusts and redistributes DB2 heap memory in response to dynamic changes in partition memory and workload conditions.

You can obtain additional information from the various Web sites listed in the “Further reading” section.

Download the full report for more on Improving Data Server Utilization and Management through Virtualization.

Download the report to get started!