RE: Your experience - positive or negative - with Oracle on VMWare...

  • From: "Allen, Brandon" <Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "robertgfreeman@xxxxxxxxx" <robertgfreeman@xxxxxxxxx>, Matthew Zito <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 10:41:56 -0700

Regarding performance, I tested Linux on bare metal vs. Linux on VMWare, 
because I was skeptical at first after hearing many horror stories about I/O 
performance on VMWare.  I noticed a decrease of up to 10% in the number of IOPS 
I'd get when running ORION on VMWare vs. bare metal in some tests, but in other 
tests running multiple concurrent executions of ORION to max out the system the 
VM would actually outperform the bare metal.  I didn't have enough time to test 
as thoroughly as I'd like to find an explanation for the variations.  I 
would've liked to try running the tests on raw devices instead of filesystems 
to eliminate the caching effect, but didn't have time to do that and our 
production system is on filesystems, so it wasn't really relevant.  I think 
it's a given that there will be some CPU and memory overhead for the VM layer, 
however it's probably under 5%, and we didn't even bother testing the limits of 
CPU since we weren't planning on pushing the CPU on the box that hard - it's 
very rarely a bottleneck with the speed of CPUs these days.  We're currently 
running 17 small databases (about 10GB each) across three Dell 2950s, each with 
two quad-core Xeons (X5450@xxxxxxx) & 32GB RAM, fiber attached to a CX3-40 disk 
array with RAID 5 groups striped across 5 disks - and performance has been 
great.  It's not exactly a "large" environment, but there are a total of about 
250 concurrent users running an Oracle Forms ERP application and you can see 
here from "sar -u" that the boxes are pretty much sitting idle:

08:30:01 AM       CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal     
%idle
08:40:01 AM       all      3.60      0.00      1.64      0.22      0.00     
94.54
08:50:01 AM       all      2.71      0.00      1.33      0.37      0.00     
95.59
09:00:01 AM       all      3.81      0.01      1.42      0.24      0.00     
94.52
09:10:01 AM       all      4.91      0.00      1.60      0.27      0.00     
93.21
09:20:01 AM       all      2.67      0.00      1.30      0.16      0.00     
95.88
09:30:01 AM       all      3.07      0.00      1.47      0.23      0.00     
95.23
09:40:01 AM       all      4.94      0.00      2.12      0.31      0.00     
92.63
09:50:01 AM       all      1.64      0.00      1.16      0.12      0.00     
97.07
10:00:01 AM       all      1.40      0.01      1.10      0.14      0.00     
97.35
10:10:01 AM       all      2.53      0.00      1.64      0.54      0.00     
95.29
10:20:01 AM       all      3.13      0.00      1.40      0.34      0.00     
95.13
10:30:01 AM       all      2.31      0.00      1.35      0.25      0.00     
96.09
Average:          all      2.47      0.00      1.22      0.26      0.00     
96.05


-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Robert Freeman

I'm interested in performance with respect to IO, memory utilization, CPU and 
the like


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