Re: vmware & Oracle
- From: Job Miller <jobmiller@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: pythianbrinsmead@xxxxxxxxx, p.mclarty@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 04:42:55 -0700 (PDT)
If there is any confusion about vmware and other soft partitioning schemes, the
licensing doc covers it pretty well I thought.
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/partitioning.pdf
Soft Partitioning:
Soft partitioning segments the operating system using OS resource managers. The
operating system limits the number of CPUs where an Oracle database is running
by creating areas where CPU resources are allocated to applications within the
same operating system. The database administrator can set the number of CPUs to
the number of licensed CPUs. This is a flexible way of managing data processing
resources since the CPU capacity can be changed fairly easily, as additional
resource is needed.
Examples of such partitioning type include: and Solaris 9 Resource Containers,
AIX Workload Manager, HP Process Resource Manager, Affinity Management, VMware,
etc. This is not a comprehensive list of all the different types of
technologies or resource allocation devices/programs that would fall into the
category of Soft partitioning. For technologies not listed, please consult
pricinginquiry@xxxxxxxxxx
As a result, soft partitioning is not permitted as a means to determine or
limit the number of software licenses required for any given server.
-------
If you need to stand up 15 dev environments that need to be logically separate
and none of them use any volume resources, and a 4 cpu server with 15 vms can
handle that, you'll save some hardware and oracle licensing costs, IF the
alternative was to buy 15 2-cpu machines for that logical separation.
That seems to be the sweet spot for vmware and oracle to me. There are surely
other use cases I am overlooking, but better server utilization of otherwise
unutilized hardware seems to be a key motivator.
Mark Brinsmead <pythianbrinsmead@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Let's not forget potential
licensing issues...
Where Oracle Corp is concerned, VMware is a "soft partitioning" technology (or
was the last time I checked, about 3 years ago). This means that you need to
Licence your Oracle software for the entire machine, not just for the VMs in
which you run Oracle.
This can be a bit painful for sites who plan to take a 16-way i86 box, run HTTP
servers on VMs consuming 14 CPUs, and run Oracle on the "remaining" 2 CPUs.
You have to licence Oracle EE for all 16 CPUs ($640,000), versus potentially
licensing Oracle SE-1 for a 2-way physical server ($10,000; $5,000 if it uses
multi-core processors).
Sites planning to run Oracle in all VMs will be less affected, except for being
compelled to use EE where SE (SE-1) may have otherwise been permitted.
This information might be out of date. I encourage people to double check.
Preferrable with at least 3 independent sources within Oracle -- I have
historically found it to be extremely difficult to get correct answers to
questions like this.
On 7/19/07, Peter McLarty <p.mclarty@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: There is now bug fixes
for time issues with vmware, clocks running away with themselves.
...
My 0.02c
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: QuijadaReina, Julio C [mailto: QuijadJC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, 20 July 2007 10:50 AM
To: Sean.oneill@xxxxxxxxxx; List, Oracle-l Freelists
Subject: RE: vmware & Oracle
Sean,
I used to have a Linux VM as a node on development RAC enviroment. On a regular
basis - about twice a week - the node was evicted, fenced which would panic the
kernel and cause a reboot. I did not dig to deep on the cause - I took the VM
out of the cluster. But as far as I remember the reason was that the guest OS
(RedHat 4) would continually miss the VM host's clock ticks. That really messed
up the time on the guest - making it lag behind up to 3 hours every week. I did
not have this problem with the other 2 physical nodes in the cluster.
Julio
________________________________
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of O'Neill, S. (Sean)
Sent: Thu 7/19/2007 9:18 AM
To: List, Oracle-l Freelists
Subject: vmware & Oracle
Hi Folks,
Has anyone had much experience (good or bad) with running their Oracle DB's on
the "vmware" product from VMware Inc. Speaking to local re-sellers there
appears to be a division of opinon as to whether or not there are performance
hits when doing so. We've a mixed bag of Oracle versions ( 8.1.7 to 10.1.0.4),
underpinning various applications on our site all running on Windows Server
2000 or 2003. Any feedback, pointers, or links to useful papers would be
appreciated, though I'm really interested in "real life" experiences with the
product.
Regards,
Se�n O'Neill,
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Cheers,
-- Mark Brinsmead
Senior DBA,
The Pythian Group
http://www.pythian.com/blogs
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