Oracle VM - Anti-Affinity Groups

Using Oacle VM to virtualize machines and run them as virtual machines is a great way to reduce the number of physical machines you need to run a large estate of virtual machines. In general cloud administrators should not be worried about the exact physical machine a virtual machine is started. Oracle VM will select, based upon an algorithm on which physical machine the virtual machine will start. However, in some cases you should very much need to worry about the fact where a virtual machine will start. Especially that you do not want a virtual machine started on the same machine as some other specific virtual machines are running.

An example of this is when you run a high availability cluster of databases on virtual machines. What you want to prevent is that all nodes of the cluster run on the same physical hardware. Obvious reason for this is that you do not want your entire cluster to fail in case one physical box fails. For a long time you where required to ensure this manually or use custom scripting. However, within Oracle VM server you now have the Anti-Affinity groups option.

Virtual machines placed in the same Anti-Affinity group will not be started on the same physical hardware. Meaning, if you have a cluster of n virtual machines, all hosting a node of the same database cluster you can place them into one Anti-Affinity group and the algorithm responsible for selecting a physical machine to start the virtual machine will take this into account.

The above image shows a Anti-Affinity group named MyAAGroup which holds 3 virtual machines all members of database cluster. By placing them into the same Anti-Affinity group you will have the insurance that they will never be started on the same physical hardware and by doing so you will honor the Maximum Availability Architecture principles in this specific area.