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Official support and engineering policy for running IQ in virtual machines

Former Member
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What exactly is the official policy for both support and engineering for running IQ in a virtual machine?  If it is supported, which virtual machine systems are supported (also versions if possible)? 

  • (RedHat/SuSE) Linux KVM
  • (RedHat/SuSE) Linux containers
  • VMware ESX
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Oracle VirtualBox
  • et cetera

Which "Cloud" environments are supported?   Amazon?  Microsoft Azure?  et cetera

What, if any, restrictions are imposed on such environments from a Sybase policy perspective?

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markmumy
Advisor
Advisor
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IQ is currently supported in VMware vSpehere 5.1 (ESX was the old name to the new vSphere architecture.  Check out the SCN post on that 10 days ago at http://scn.sap.com/community/sybase-iq/blog/2013/06/06/sap-sybase-iq-multiplex-running-on-vmware-vsp...

IQ also supports virtualization under the IBM P-series hypervisor, Solaris zones and containers, and the HP Virtualization Manager.  In short, on the RISC platforms they have some sort of virtualization that is native and been in place for decades that we work with.  On the Intel side that feature has been seen only recently (3-5 years).

We've completed certification for VMware.  The certification with other virtualization technologies will have to come from IQ product management.  The same is true of the cloud environments.  At one point we certified against the Amazon Cloud.  I haven't been asked by a single customer for support within a cloud for IQ.  Most of it seems to be talk with little or no actual work being done to put an RDBMS into a cloud.  At least not for analytics and the massive historical data that IQ typically retains.

By policy, do you mean licensing?  If so, is this from a legacy Sybase licensing perspective or a new SAP sale?  There are differences due to contractual obligations, etc.

Mark

Former Member
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Thanks Mark. That makes sense. 

We have a number of IQ systems on KVM that perform adequately.  So I was thinking that using Huge Pages at the KVM hypervisor layer for the VM would avoid the whole THP/Direct I/O bug. 

AFAIK, the licensing is inline with the other vendors at a 1,000 mile high view:  if it is a container that can hard restrict the CPU allocation to the container (APAR, Solaris container, etc), then it is licensed per core of that container.  If it is a 'regular' vm, ala VMware, then it is licensed per the physical hardware.

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Unless throughly tested, I am not 100% sure that Huge pages at KVM hypervisor layer of VM would avoid the issue realted to TSP, Direct I/O and fork() call problem.

Former Member
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It might *IF* THP was disabled within the virtual machine.  Since the KVM instance itself would be using huge pages, there would be no need for THP within it. 

That being said, we still don't have any information regarding the following statement:

Huge page support was disabled with SA CR 728597 due to RH bug.  <-- Which RedHat bug?  Is it a RedHat specific bug or a Linux (kernel?) bug?

http://scn.sap.com/thread/3375634

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Hi - I know this is an old thread but do you know where I can find an updated document/list of which virtualisation options are supported in IQ 16 ?

I found the updated PAM but it does not seem to specify virtualisation.

Thanks

Clint

markmumy
Advisor
Advisor
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Hi ,

The last statement that I saw to a client on another forum was that we don't much care.  Our certification is with the OS.  So long as the OS is supported by IQ, we can run it on any platform that makes sense for the business.  It could be bare metal machines, logical partitions, physical domains, or virtualization engines.  The only point of contention for us will be that the OS must be on our certified list.  Beyond that, you are free to choose your "hardware" as you see fit.

Mark

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Thanks so much Mark !

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