Discover best practices for deploying DB2 9 with the IBM System p™ virtualization technology. Select the right blend of virtualization features and their configurations to achieve desired business goals, while improving the utilization of IT resources.
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.
This paper describes the primary System p virtualization technologies that concern the
selection of the types of logical partition, disk I/O, and network interface, as well as
workload management considerations. The following brief summaries describe the major
considerations discussed in this paper and how they can benefit your business.
Logical partition type
Increasingly, with most hardware systems being heavily under-utilized due to sizings
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.
- Executive summary
- Logical partition type
- Disk I/O type
- Network type
- Workload management considerations
- Introduction
- DB2 Version 9 and System p virtualization overview
- Virtualization terminology and concepts
- Choosing virtualization features
- Logical partition type
- Partition type: dedicated compared to shared processor
- Linear scalability
- Capped or uncapped processor partition
- Number of virtual processors in a shared processor partition
- Additional processor-type considerations
- Logical partition type decision-tree flowchart
- Disk I/O type
- Virtual I/O in practice
- Virtual disk I/O scalability
- Virtual I/O and VIOS tuning
- Network type
- Workload management settings
- Best Practices
- Summary
- Appendix: Test environment
- Further Reading
- Notices
"
Best Practices:
Improving Data Server Utilization and Management through Virtualization
"
(May 2008)
Discover best practices for deploying DB2 9 with the IBM System p™ virtualization technology. Select the right blend of virtualization features and their configurations to achieve desired business goals, while improving the utilization of IT resources. (pdf; 704KB; 35 pages)
Also available in the following translated versions:
Comment, edit, or add your own insights to the Improving Data Server
Utilization and Management through Virtualization best practices
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