You’ve probably already heard about VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (VMC on AWS). It’s the same vSphere platform that has been running business critical applications for years, but now it’s available on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Following up on the many tests that we have done with Oracle databases on vSphere, I was able to get some time on a VMC on AWS setup to see how Oracle databases perform in this new environment.
It is important to note that VMC on AWS is vSphere running on bare metal servers in Amazon’s infrastructure. The expectation is that performance will be very similar to “regular” onsite vSphere, with the added advantage that the hardware provisioning, software installation, and configuration is already done and the environment is ready to go when you login. The vCenter interface is the same, except that it references the Amazon instance type for the server.
Our VMC on AWS instance is made up of four ESXi hosts. Each host has two 18-core Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (aka Broadwell) processors and 512 GB of RAM. In total, the cluster has 144 cores and 2 TB of RAM, which gives us lots of physical resources to utilize in the cloud.
In our test, the database VMs were running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 with Oracle 12c. To drive a load against the database VMs, a single 18 vCPU driver VM was running Windows Server 2012 R2, and the DVD Store 3 test workload was also setup on the cluster. A 100 GB test DS3 database was created on each of the Oracle database VMs. During testing, the number of threads driving load against the databases were increased until maximum throughput was achieved, which was around 95% CPU utilization. The total throughput across all database servers for each test is shown below.
In this test, the DB VMs were configured with 16 vCPUs and 128 GB of RAM. In the 8 VMs test case, a total of 128 vCPUs were allocated across the 144 cores of the cluster. Additionally the cluster was also running the 18 vCPU driver VM, vCenter, vSAN, and NSX. This makes the 12 VM test case interesting, where there were 192 vCPUs for the DB VMs, plus 18 vCPUs for the driver. The hyperthreads clearly help out, allowing for performance to continue to scale, even though there are more vCPUs allocated than physical cores.
The performance itself represents scaling very similar to what we have seen with Oracle and other database workloads with vSphere in recent releases. The cluster was able to achieve over 370 thousand orders per minute with good scaling from 1 VM to 12 VMs. We also recently published similar tests with SQL Server on the same VMC on AWS cluster, but with a different workload and more, smaller VMs.
UPDATE (07/30/2018): The whitepaper detailing these results is now available here.
UPDATE (6/5/2020): We’ve updated the 2018 whitepaper with results for 2020. Also see results for similar tests with SQL Server.