RE: Oracle Performance on VMWare

  • From: "Johnson, William L (TEIS)" <WLJohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "dreveewee@xxxxxxxxx" <dreveewee@xxxxxxxxx>, "Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx" <Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx>, "Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx" <Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx>, "oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 14:40:39 -0500

I believe I have seen conversations related to the comment I am about to make, 
but make sure you check on licensing requirements.  Unless Oracle recently 
changed their policies, you have to license the entire source machine for 
Oracle - even if you are only running a 1 CPU vmware on top of 8 processors 
under the covers.  This can be a costly mistake if you are audited...



________________________________
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Andre van Winssen
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 2:35 PM
To: Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx; Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Oracle Performance on VMWare

There's  webcast from Vmware on database performance. 
http://www.vmware.com/a/webcasts/details/161 with useful up to date info
They claim that overhead of vmware is dropping to only a few percent in the 
upcoming releases.

My experience with vmware is only on non-production databases. If there would 
not be a certification issue with Oracle then I would recommend it for a lot of 
production databases.

Regards,
Andre


From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Allen, Brandon
Sent: vrijdag 2 januari 2009 18:42
To: Jon.Crisler@xxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Oracle Performance on VMWare

Hi Jon,

Could you please provide more details on the bad performance you've seen with 
Oracle on VMWare?  I've tested performance with 64-bit Oracle 10.2.0.4 on OEL 4 
& 5 both running on VMWare ESX 3.5 and performance was just as good on VMWare 
as it was on bare metal.  I've also implemented a production environment in 
this configuration and another one running Oracle App Server 10g on VMWare with 
excellent performance as well.  Maybe you were testing on an older version of 
VMWare, or VMWare Server instead of ESX, or had some misconfiguration or bug 
that was causing problems?  For example, I had horrible performance when I ran 
32-bit OEL4 on 64-bit VMWare, but when I switched to 64-bit OEL4, performance 
was great.

Here is a good article about Oracle on VMWare (maybe a wee bit biased given the 
source):
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2007/11/ten-reasons-why.html

No, I don't work for VMWare, and I don't have extensive experience with it - 
only about 6 months, but so far, so good in my experience.

Regards,
Brandon

From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Crisler, Jon
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 11:18 AM
Subject: RE: db_recovery_file_dest_size
Virtualization is pretty cool and has its place, but it has to be used wisely.  
High stress mission-critical environments that I would not hesitate to put on 
any other vendors hardware or OS, including RH Linux, IMO should never be put 
under VMware...performance is so bad.   My findings are that production 
databases just don't belong on VMware unless the application is really small.  
You really hit the nail dead-on- its got to be low stress (i.e. light 
activity).   Although performance is my big complaint, reliability seems to be 
fine.


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