Nick Howell's Blog

RE: Oracle on VMware - One Man's battle against a titan.

EdwinW — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:26:03 GMT

Hi Nick,

I keep running into the same challenges every time over and over again with Oracle, we do run Oracle on VMware 3.5 and up for several customers out performing physical by a mile. However you do need to know how to tune the Oracle machine with memory PGA and that sort of stuff, same as on tuning your physical machines running Oracle.

One of the battles I had recently with Oracle is described here: http://www.vmguru.nl/wordpress/2009/07/want-to-play-truth-or-dare-with-the-oracle-sales-force

Read and shiver.

We have the principle "Everything virtual, unless...." unless its not possible to run virtual we go physical. (Been a while tho we went physical)

Good luck on your battle and keep us posted.

Regards,
Edwin Weijdema

RE: Oracle on VMware - One Man's battle against a titan.

that1guynick — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:40:49 GMT

don,

As far as transaction-consistent backups, we're a NetApp shop, and plan on using Snapmanager for Oracle. This has built-in functionality to put Oracle in hotbackup mode, snap it, release it once it's done. This still needs to be tested fully. For OS-level backups, well, that's up in the air right now because I'm testing about 4 different products to do VM-level backups. Also, when I was building the Linux VM, I got it to a certain point where we were ready to run the Oracle installer, and took a snap. Once Oracle was installed bare, took a snap. These were saved as templates.

I'm currently entertaining the idea of FT, but there is the problem with it only supporting 1 vCPU currently, which is a tough sell. What the DBA's don't know is that I've already chopped it down to 1, and I want to see if they notice. Closely monitoring performance for now before enabling it. We're going 10GbE next weekend, and I'll be able to fully test FT on the environment.

-Nick

Go virtual, or go home.

RE: Oracle on VMware - One Man's battle against a titan.

that1guynick — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:35:01 GMT

Lou,

Can I say, "It depends?"

We did our testing with a 1:1 config vHardware vs pHardware. VM had 4 vCPUs, and 16GB RAM. We split up 12GB of this between SGA and buffer cache (and the other various settings within Oracle) and left 4GB for the OS.

On the host-side, we're using (2) HPDL380G6 boxes in their own cluster.

Now, with all of this said, we're doing a cutover to a 10GbE storage backbone next weekend, so all of this is going to change, and we're going to pick up even more performance between MPIO/NMP + 10GbE + D-NFS.

We also decided to spend $120 and get Oracle's Unbreakable Linux. I have since redubbed it "Unusable Linux" because they don't install a few things you actually NEED (nfs client, ssh server). In hindsight, I've come to like this, and recently, they've released their "minimalist install" which I'm planning on test driving.

I'll have a hard layout documented and will post here once we've officially put it in production.

Thanks for reading!

-Nick

Go virtual, or go home.

RE: Oracle on VMware - One Man's battle against a titan.

donikatz — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:14:11 GMT

Thanks Nick, good stuff. Looking forward to the follow-up. Also curious how you'll decide to configure resiliency features, and how you'll manage your backups, whether through VM-level tools or just your old agents or what-not.

RE: Upgrading to vSphere 4 - The Experience (Part 1)

donikatz — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:57:15 GMT

Fun post, thanks, just saw it after reading your Oracle post. We're staging out our vCenter upgrade now (upgrading SQL from 2000 to 2005 first), so this was a nice read. So where's Part 2?

RE: Oracle on VMware - One Man's battle against a titan.

LouwP — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:14:56 GMT

Hi Nick,

I am in almost similar situation and would love to get VMware proven to my Oracle-hardened colleagues.

Mind sharing your VM config and any other tidbits for when I setup my Goliath-killing vm?

Cheers
Louw