Create a Linux VM on Azure

In this post I’ll show you how easy is to create a Linux VM in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
Once you login to Azure using your account you will be presented with the main dashboard.
Click on Virtual Machines and then click Add.
The first section contains the basic information of your VM.
Select a subscription. In my case is the Free Trial subscription.
For Resource group we are going to click Create new. A resource group is a logical way to organize your resources.
I just created an oracle-vm-resource-group.



Type a VM name and select the desired Region for your VM. The region is where the datacenter is located. You may want to choose the closest one to you. For availability I’m going to choose no infrastructure redundancy required as this is a test VM. There are different availability types for your VM. Below URL links to a document that explains the Azure regions and sets in detail.
The size of the VM will have a direct impact on your bill. Be careful when you chose the sizing as you don’t want to waste resources and money and on the other side you don’t want to have a system that is underperforming. Click on Change size and below table will show you all your options.

I selected 2vcpus, 8 GB memory VM.
For the ADMINISTRATOR ACCOUNT I’m going to chose SSH public key to connect to my VM.
In the SSH public key, I’m going to provide the public key of my local computer so I can gain access to the VM.
I don’t have a corporate Active Directory in my lab, so Login with Azure Active Directory is turned off.
Public inbound ports will allow SSH to connect.


Nor for Disks. There are 3 options. Premium SSD is the fastest option available and is used for production like workloads. Standard SSD still delivers good performance while the Standard HDD is the cheapest and slowest option.
I’m going to create a 300 GB Standard SSD disk for this VM.


For the NETWORK INTERFACE section my Virtual Network is going to be under my oracle-vm-resource-group. The Subnet and the Public IP will be created (new) and as previously selected the SSH inbound port is going to be open. 



For Management and Guest config I’ll leave the defaults and I’m going to jump to the Review + Create section. In this Review + create section you can see an estimate of your VM pricing.


Now, if you need to create multiple VMs like this, you may want to automate the process using the Azure CLI. Click on the Download a template for automation link located in the bottom right part of the page. I’ll cover Azure CLI in a later post.


Now click on Create and wait for your VM to be provisioned. You’ll receive a notification once the VM is created. 


Now is time to connect to it. From the VM dashboard find the Public IP address. Or you can click on connect button for more details.


Now connect to it using SSH. As we already shared our public key this should work without using a password.
$ ssh alfredokrieg@23.99.209.18
The authenticity of host ‘23.99.209.18 (23.99.209.18)’ can’t be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:yfdef8ToOBoI5a/FCogDbVMGCsdsZXmSylnH4yZ4sZs.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added ‘23.99.209.18’ (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
$ hostname
oraclevm
Thanks,
Alfredo

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Database Service – Bare Metal

The Database service part of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers the autonomous and user-managed database options. The user-managed can be customized and you can choose between using Bare Metal, Virtual Machine or Exadata systems. These are called DB Systems.
The autonomous database cannot be customized as they come pre-configured. You can choose between Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse.
Licensing wise there are two models. License included covers the costs of the license in the cloud service. Bring Your Own License (BYOL) allows to use costumer’s Unlimited License Agreement or Non-Unlimited License Agreement with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. There are some restrictions that apply to BYOL. More details about pricing can be found in below link:
There are two ways to access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You can use the Console (browser) and the REST API. Below is the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure menu.
Let’s start looking at Bare Metal DB Systems. They are available as a single metal server running Oracle Linux 6.8 and NVMe storage locally attached. NVMe provides additional boost in performance for these systems.
When a bare metal DB system is created you select the Oracle Database Edition for the whole system. This means that you can have multiple DB homes with different versions but all with the same edition.
Bare metal comes in two shapes available. BM.DenselO2.52 that provides 1-node with up to 52 CPU cores, 768 GB of memory and eight 6.4 TB NVMe storage drives. BM.DenselO1.36 that is 1-node with up to 36 CPU cores, 512 GB of memory and nine 3.2 TB drives.




Database versions available are 11.2.0.4, 12.1.0.2, 12.2.0.1 and 18.0.0.0.

As you can see from the previous screenshot. You can opt for automatic backups going to an Oracle Cloud Object Storage. 

I’ll cover Virtual Machine and Exadata DB systems including backups in my next post. Stay tuned!
Thanks,
Alfredo

Oracle 19c Available for Exadata On-Premises

Oracle just released Oracle 19c for Exadata On-Premises. This is just close to a year when they released the 18c version for Exadata On-Premises on February 16th 2018.

If they follow the same schedule, we may expect 19c for the Database Cloud Service early next month.
Release dates can be found in the MOS Doc Id 742060.1
I did check the versions available in the Oracle Cloud for VM, Bare Metal and Exadata.
No 19c version as expected.

Now is time to start playing with the new features of 19c. Stay tuned!
Thanks,
Alfredo

OEM 12c/13c Metric Extension – Collection Result Maximum Flood Control

I recently had an issue in OEM 12c while creating a Metric Extension that was returning more than 5000 records. In OEM 12c versions 12.1.0.4 and 12.1.0.5 there a flood control mechanism in order to limit the maximum number of rows for a metric.


You can also verify this in the agent_inst/sysman/log/gcagent.log file:
2018-10-08 13:38:50,330 [66:F119EDFE:GC.Executor.1 (host:hostname:ll_host_config) (host:hostname:ll_host_config:ECM_OS_COMPONENT)] WARN – Result set exceeding min flood control level
The solution is provided in the MOS Doc Id 1499381.1
We didn’t want to proceed to apply the patch but rather we limited the number of rows from the Metric Extension.
This OMS patch is available also for 13.1 version and the bug states that is fixed in 13.2 versions.
Thanks,
Alfredo