VMTN Blog

If you still think that databases are too resource intensive or otherwise not suitable for virtualization, or if you think that running enteprise apps like Oracle on VI3 immediately impose huge overheads, this new article from Richard McDougall on VMware's performance team is a must read.

Link: Ten Reasons Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware - VMware VROOM!.

We’re really excited about the buzz around Oracle in virtualized environments. One of the best kept secrets is just how well Oracle performs on VMware ESX. This didn’t happen by accident – there are a number of features and performance optimizations in the VMware ESX server architecture, specifically for databases.

In this blog, I'll walk through the top ten most important features for getting the best database performance. Here are a few of the performance highlights:

• Near Native Performance: Oracle databases run at performance similar to that of a physical system
• Extreme Database I/O Scalability: VMware ESX Server’s thin
  hypervisor layer can drive over 63,000 database I/Os per second (fifty
  times the requirement of a typical database)
• Multi-core Scaling: Scale up using SMP virtual machines and multiple database instances
• Large Memory : Scalable memory - 64GB per database, 256GB per host

We’ve continued to invest a great deal of work towards optimizing Oracle performance on VMware, because it’s already one of the most commonly virtualized applications. The imminent ESX 3.5 release is our best database platform to date, with several new advanced optimizations.

In this blog article we’d like to explain the unique and demanding nature of database applications such as Oracle produces and show the performance capabilities of ESX Server on this type of workload.