What is Era support in Sizer

Sizer focuses on both the sizing and the license aspects of using Era to manage your databases that are defined in Sizer.  So for a long time you could size either Oracle or SQL databases a customer may want to run on a Nutanix cluster.  With Era you can manage those databases but also set up data protection policy and manage clones.  Sizer then does the following in regards to Era that is turned on for either Oracle or SQL workloads

• Determine the licensing required for the Oracle or SQL VMs defined in Sizer. Era is VCPU based and so number of VCPUs under management
• Determine all the sizing requirements for the data protection policy defined in the workload including time machine requirements
• Determine the cloning requirements (if enabled) for either database only (just storage) clones or the database plus VM clones (entire database VM clone)
• Determine the sizing requirements for Era VM itself

Era License/Sizing

• Let’s say you just want to buy Era for the Oracle workloads but not snapshots or clones. In next sections we will deal with database protection policy and cloning.  So here we just want to add the Era licenses
• Here is the setting in the Oracle workload. We are saying here we want Era for all 10 Oracle VMs and each VM has 8 VCPUs.  Coincidentally it is VCPU:pCore of 1:1 and so 8 cores.  Era licensing though is VCPUs

• Here is the budgetary quote and indeed shows 80 VCPUs must be licensed.

• Here is the Era sizing. We do add the VM to run Era which is lightweight

 

Era Data Protection including Time Machine

• To invoke data protection Era must be enabled and the licensing is scoped as described above.
• Sizer will now let you define the data protection policy you would define in Era and figure out the sizing requirements.
  • Daily Database Change rate can either be in % or in GiB but is the amount of change per day for the databases defined in the workload (the database VMs defined in the workload)
  • Daily log size is either % or GiB. This is used by Time Machine to allow for continuous recovery for the time frame specified.  All the transactions are logged and Time Machine can allow for rollback to a given point in time
  • Continuous Snapshots is in days
  • Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly are number of snapshots kept for snapshots done in those time frames

• Here are the sizing results.
  • Era VM – the logs are kept by the Era VM in SSD. This is for Time Machine to do continuous recovery
  • The other snapshots are put in cold storage and like anything stored in a cluster has its RF overhead (here it is set to RF2).
  • Should note the quarterly snapshots add a lot of storage

Era Database Only Clones

• You can define cloning policy in Era and thus in Sizer so it can calculate the sizing requirement
  • Define number of clones for all the database VMs in the workload. Here we had 10 VMs and so 2 clones per VM
  • Clone daily change rate – this would be the % or GiB change each day by typically developers that are using those clones.
  • Refresh rate. At some point (in days) organizations typically refresh the clones with new data and so represents maximum time the clones are kept

• Here is the sizing. Note the impact is Era DB only clone is added in the workload summary and the just the capacity is added.  All the calculations form the Era data protection policy is not impacted

 

Era DB plus VM clones

• Here we add in clones of the VMs and so the storage and VMs themselves
  • Define number of clones for all the database VMs in the workload. Here we had 10 VMs and so 2 clones per VM
  • Clone daily change rate – this would be the % or GiB change each day by typically developers that are using those clones.
  • Refresh rate. At some point (in days) organizations typically refresh the clones with new data and so represents maximum time the clones are kept
  • VCPU per VM. In the workload we defined a database VM needed 8 VCPUs.  Well if this clone is test/dev it could be less
  • VCPU:pCore ratio. In workload it is 1:1 but for test/dev 2:1 is more common
  • RAM per VM is needed

• Here is the sizing. Note the impact is Era DB Plus VM Clone is added in the workload summary.  Where for the Era DB Only Clone it is just added capacity, the Era DB Plus VM Clone adds VMs.
  • 20 VMs were added as we have 10 VMs in the workload and we asked for 2 clones per source database
  • 80 cores are needed as those 20 VMs need 8 VCPUs but we specified 2:1 VCPU:pCore ratio. Thus 160 more VCPUs but just 80 cores.  Do note those VCPU’s are added into the Era licensing as Era is managing those VCPUs.
  • We need 2.5 TiB of RAM as we have 20 VMs and each needs 128 GiB
  • Capacity is same as what we had for the DB only clone as same settings
  • All the calculations form the Era data protection policy is not impacted