RE: Oracle VM ?

  • From: krish.hariharan@xxxxxxxxxxxx
  • To: dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:20:57 -0800 (PST)

In the recent past, I made the case to use RAC as the database service
virtualization mechanism for server and database resources and as a server
consolidation mechanism, as opposed to using Solaris zones/containers for
that purpose. I am from the camp of using ASM and RAC for virtualizing the
server resources (to the extent your Oracle version would allow). We used
the OS Virtualization (Solaris zones) where that was not feasible (pre
10g; I did not want to use RAC before 10g).

Where there is a choice between RAC (for myself 10g+) and other
virtualization mechanisms, I feel it is cost effective to use the RAC
platform than using another layer of abstraction. I have built hybrid
clusters with RAC that allows me to move applications, even in the same
database, to different nodes with different capacities. The limiting
factor, in my experience is that, there tend to be more OS VM experts in
an organization than there are RAC experts. Secondly, political pressures
by app teams pressure operations into providing sandbox using VM rather
than using RAC. I consider DR a seprate problem

Some of my reasons were,

1. In house expertise
2. Leverage RAC to abstract serving resources
3. Redeploy existing inventory
4. Dynamic capacity management for online applications
5. Inherent HA for the database (and for the application if its RAC aware)

If these arguments don't help, I guess we could leave it at, it depends ...

Regards
-Krish

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