Tag: Bare Metal

Google Bare Metal in numbers.

In the previous posts I shared my first impression and how to start using the Google Bare Metal Service (BMS). In this post I will try to show some numbers related to the performance of the solution and you can compare it with your existing environment.

Let me start from the box characteristics. For my tests I was using a “o2-standard-32-metal” box located in the us-west2 zone (Los Angeles) . The solution was configured with 2Gbps interconnect and had a couple of storage resources attached to it. The first one was represented by two 512Gb disks based on HDD storage where I placed my binaries and a recovery ASM disk group and the second was a 2Tb volume “all flash” I used for data.  Here is summary table:

Characteristic
BMS Box typeo2-standard-32-metal
CPU Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6234 CPU @ 3.30GHz
CPU sockets2
CPU cores16
Memory384 GB
Disk 1512 Gb – Standard disk
Disk 2 512 Gb – Standard disk
Disk 3 2048 Gb – All flash
Network4 NICs Speed: 25000Mb/s
OS Oracle Linux 7.9
BMS box characteristics.

Before starting the tests I updated my Oracle Linux and installed a number of packages required for my Oracle database and packages to test IO and Network such as fio and iperf3. Here is a summary table with software and tools used to test the performance.

PackageTesting scope
fioIO performance
stress-ngCPU. Memory
swingbenchOracle database performance
SLOBOracle database IO
iperf3Network
oratcptestNetwork
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Google Bare Metal – how to start.

In the previous post I put some of my thoughts on why you would use the Google Bare Metal Service (BMS) and my first impression about it. In this post I want to talk about the first steps and how you can start to work with the Google Bare Metal Service (BMS).

To put your hands on BMS you need to contact your Google Cloud sales representative and order it. It means you need to know to some extent your requirements and prepare for that. The major preparation steps are described in the Google documentation and here I will try to go through some of them.

The first main step is to outline your architecture and identify the region for the BMS. The service is a region extension and it means it is connected to your regional Google cloud infrastructure by high speed low latency network interconnect. It makes sense to place it where the most of your applications and users are going to be. For example, in my case I’ve chosen the us-west2 (Los Angeles) and it was aligned with my main test app servers and provided the best response time. The 64 bytes ping from an app server in the same region was 0.991 ms on average.

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Google Bare Metal for Oracle.

Since the first days of working in the Google public cloud there have been debates about the possibility to move an Oracle workload to GCP. The major concerns were coming not from the technical challenges but rather from Oracle’s licensing policies and guidelines. In the famous Oracle’s document about licensing Oracle software in the public cloud it was stated – “This policy applies to cloud computing environments from the following vendors: Amazon Web Services – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform (collectively, the ‘Authorized Cloud Environments’)”. So the Google Cloud was not listed as an ‘Authorized Cloud Environment’ and it was unclear how to apply the Oracle licensing there. I believe it will be sorted in time but in the meanwhile as a solution Google presented a Bare Metal Service as the platform for Oracle workload.

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