Using Oracle in Prod. environment on ESX301

[rock0n]

Hi Folks,

can you give me any Pro's and Con's about running a productive Oracle DB inside a VM.

Specially: Licensing, Performance on SAN, HA / DRS Cluster environment.

many, many thanks!!

[FredPeterson]

All I remember being told by our Oracle admin, and laughing my ass off, is that regardless of how many vCPU's you assign the VM, licensing apparently still wants to know how many pCPU's are in the host because technically the VM will still use them all and Oracle has no way of proving you have set affinity to one CPU etc etc.

We don't run Oracle in VM though, but it came up once and that was all I remember taking out of the conversation.

[rock0n]

I know, the licensing is a very painful topic.

Anyone else with some experience?

[daniel_uk]

Yeh its a joke isnt it. I was lucky and had enough processors in my box to match licenses.

Its an arse if you have multiple Oracle boxes you want to consolidate with different CPU counts too I can imagine.

Dan

[petedr]

We have been running our Oracle production environment as an ESX VM for a number of years. We also run development and testing environments as well.

We are running 9.2.0.2 and also the E-Business Suite 11.5.9, Guest OS is Red Hat Linux. The VM has 2 CPUs. Disks are direct attached, we don't have a SAN. DB is about 75GB, about 250 users, performance has not been an issue.

In our experience I haven't see too many down sides at all. Licensing has not been an issue as all of our licenses are based on Named Users.

Couple of nice benefits we have had is ease of backups (the ability to backup the entire machine at the vmdk level is nice). Also VMs have made it much easier to duplicate the environment, copying the VM, etc. Also in development being a VM has made patch and development testing much easier.

[petedr]

here are also a couple of recent topics on the board discussing Oracle and ESX.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=610773

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=607512

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=552856

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=522865

[petedr]

thanks for the helpful