First Oracle Virtualization

[matt4130]

Afternoon All!

I'm about to virtualize my first Oracle Server, I've never really worked with Oracle before so I was wondering whether there are any special considerations?

The Server has databases across 4 different partitions + the OS. I was planning on just virtualising the OS Volume, creating the disks and copying the files over. Does this sound like a good idea?

Also, should I have a seperate volume for the Page / Swap file? and if so should I put this on a Seperate LUN?

Many Thanks

Matt

[mikepodoherty]

We're running Oracle 10g on Solaris 10 hosts - some production servers, a couple of test servers and a couple of development servers.

You mention that your current arrangement has Oracel split over multiple partitions - are these partitions on different drives or not. We a bit limited in terms of SAN storage but for production, we have the data on one LUN and the index files on another LUN - these LUNs are on different spindles. IF I had the LUN space, I would move the OS and Oracle program files to separate LUNs as well. According to the DBAs, the key to whether performance is improved is whether the LUNs share the same spindles or have their own. Sharing tends to slow performance.

We haven't run into any memory issues so I can't advise on the Page/Swap file. The areas we see the highest usage are CPU and disk access - I can't recall looking at the monitoring tools and seeing SWAP memory being used.

HTH

Mike

[petedr]

We had run an Oracle application environments for a number of years. In our setup we made seperate vmdks for the O/S, application code ( Oracle_Home, APPL_TOP ), and seperate database vmdks ( tables and Indexes ). We also did keep the vmdks on seperate Raids( ours was local drives ).

Good Luck with the implementation

[matt4130]

They are all on seperate physical drives in the current set up, this does include 1 spanned volume comprising 2 280Gb Drives.

The Databases will be on a single LUN, on 15k FC disks. The OS will be on a seprate LUN also on 15k Fibre Channel disks.

[mikepodoherty · Accepted solution]

TO clarify a bit - in terms of performance, the issue boils down to whether or not the database and indexes are on separate LUNs but whether the LUNS are on separate spindles.

With small SANS, having the LUNS on separate drives means that they are not on the same spindles. For larger EMC SANS, the drives may be different but they are on the same spindles and you have an impact similar to having the data and index on the same drive, you need to work with the SAN team to ensure that this doesn't happen.

HTH

Mike

[matt4130]

Ok, now I've got that, thank you! I need some more info.

The current physical server has 6 disks:

0: 2 Partitions (OS and another)

1: 270Gb Dynamic Disk - Oracle Databases

2: 270Gb Dynamic Disk - Oracle Databases

3: 270Gb Dynamic Disk - Oracle Databases

4: 270Gb Dynamic Disk - Oracle Databases - Spanned to create 1 558Gb drive

5: 270Gb Dynamic Disk - Oracle Databases - Spanned to create 1 558Gb Drive

What's the best way to go about P2V'ing this machine? I think I need to break the span? Also do I get the converter to do the lot, or copy the data on the other disks and just P2V the OS Drive?

cheers

Matt

[mikepodoherty]

I'm not going to be able to help on this question as we haven't done P2V for our Oracle databases - they were built on the virtual servers and then we used standard Oracle tools to migrate the data from the old databases. Kind of slow but we could migrate a schema at a time and verify the successfull migration.

If you are P2Ving Windows, please be sure to take a look at the hardware in device manager - use the option to show hidden hardware - most, if not all, of that hardware will need to be removed or your system's performance will be awful. Also keep in mind that the HAL is probably set for multiprocessor. Depending on how you build your VM, you may need to adjust the setting.

I don't recall if our MS SQL team found the P2V process easier than building a server on the ESX host and then migrating the data.

Sorry that I can't be more definitive.

Mike

[matt4130]

No worries, thanks for your help Mike.

Cheers

Matt

[Funtoosh]

Matt,

Please follow the comment from me on this thread . I have tested and got 15 -30% in performance improvement. Believe me you will not regret.

Funtoosh

[matt4130]

Well, there's nothing to worry about with Oracle Virtualisations.

I decided just to stop all of the Oracle related services on the box, and hot convert it. It was super slow (Next time I'll do it cold) but as long as the database is not being used, Oracle is absolutely fine to convert.

Cheers Everyone!