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Oracle Database Performance with VMware Cloud on AWS

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.

Skylake Update – Oracle Database Performance on vSphere 6.5 Monster Virtual Machines

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We were able to get one of the new four-socket Intel Skylake based servers and run some more tests. Specifically we used the Xeon Platinum 8180 processors with 28 cores each. The new data has been added to the Oracle Monster Virtual Machine Performance on VMware vSphere 6.5 whitepaper. Please check out the paper for the full details and context of these updates.

The generational testing in the paper now includes a fifth generation with a 112 vCPU virtual machine running on the Skylake based server. Performance gain from the initial 40 vCPU VM on Westmere-EX to the Skylake based 112 vCPU VM is almost 4x.

The performance gained from Hyper-Threading was also updated and shows a 27% performance gain from the use of Hyper-Threads. The test was conducted by running two 112 vCPU VMs at the same time so that all 224 logical threads are active. The total throughput from the two VMs is then compared with the throughput from a single VM.

My colleague David Morse has also updated his SQL Server monster virtual machine whitepaper with Skylake data as well.

Updated – SQL Server VM Performance with vSphere 6.5, October 2017

Oracle Database Performance on vSphere 6.5 Monster Virtual Machines

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We have just published a new whitepaper on the performance of Oracle databases on vSphere 6.5 monster virtual machines. We took a look at the performance of the largest virtual machines possible on the previous four generations of four-socket Intel-based servers. The results show how performance of these large virtual machines continues to scale with the increases and improvements in server hardware.

Oracle Database Monster VM Performance across 4 generations of Intel based servers on vSphere 6.5

Oracle Database Monster VM Performance on vSphere 6.5 across 4 generations of Intel-based four-socket servers

In addition to vSphere 6.5 and the four-socket Intel-based servers used in the testing, an IBM FlashSystem A9000 high performance all flash array was used. This array provided extreme low latency performance that enabled the database virtual machines to perform at the achieved high levels of performance.

Please read the full paper, Oracle Monster Virtual Machine Performance on VMware vSphere 6.5, for details on hardware, software, test setup, results, and more cool graphs. The paper also covers performance gain from Hyper-Threading, performance effect of NUMA, and best practices for Oracle monster virtual machines. These best practices are focused on monster virtual machines, and it is recommended to also check out the full Oracle Databases on VMware Best Practices Guide.

Some similar tests with Microsoft SQL Server monster virtual machines were also recently completed on vSphere 6.5 by my colleague David Morse. Please see his blog post and whitepaper for the full details.

This work on Oracle is in some ways a follow up to Project Capstone from 2015 and the resulting whitepaper Peeking at the Future with Giant Monster Virtual Machines . That project dealt with monster VM performance from a slightly different angle and might be interesting to those who are also interested in this paper and its results.

SQL Server VM Performance with VMware vSphere 6.5

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Achieving optimal SQL Server performance on vSphere has been a constant focus here at VMware; I’ve published past performance studies with vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 which showed excellent performance up to the maximum VM size supported at the time.

Since then, there have been quite a few changes! While this study uses a similar test methodology, it features an updated hypervisor (vSphere 6.5), database engine (SQL Server 2016), OLTP benchmark (DVD Store 3), and CPUs (Intel Xeon v4 processors with 24 cores per socket, codenamed Broadwell-EX).

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VMware vCloud Air Database Performance Scalability with SQL Server

SQL Server VM Performance on VMware vSphere 6

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Last October, I blogged about SQL Server performance with vSphere 5.5 using a four-socket Intel Xeon processor E7 based host. Now that vSphere 6 is available, I’ve run an updated set of tests using this new release, on an even more powerful host, with Xeon E7 v2 processors. A variety of virtual CPU (vCPU) and virtual machine (VM) quantities were tested to show that vSphere can handle hundreds of thousands of online transaction processing (OLTP) database operations per minute.

DVD Store 2.1, an open-source OLTP database stress tool, was the workload used to stress the VMs. The first experiment in the paper was a generational performance comparison between the old and new setups; as you can see, there is a dramatic increase in throughput, even though the size of each VM has doubled from 8 vCPUs per VM to 16:

There are also tests using CPU affinity to show the performance differences between physical cores and logical processors (Hyper-Threads), the benefit of “right-sizing” virtual machines, and measuring the impact of the advanced Latency Sensitivity setting.

For more details and the test results, please download the whitepaper: Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.

Monster Performance with SQL Server VMs on vSphere 5.5

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VMware vSphere provides an ideal platform for customers to virtualize their business-critical applications, including databases, ERP systems, email servers, and even newly emerging technologies such as Hadoop. I’ve been focusing on the first one (databases), specifically Microsoft SQL Server, one of the most widely deployed database platforms in the world. Many organizations have dozens or even hundreds of instances deployed in their environments. Consolidating these deployments onto modern multi-socket, multi-core, multi-threaded server hardware is an increasingly attractive proposition for IT administrators.

Achieving optimal SQL Server performance has been a continual focus for VMware; with current vSphere 5.x releases, VMware supports much larger “monster” virtual machines that can scale up to 64 virtual CPUs and 1 TB of RAM, including exposing virtual NUMA architecture to the guest. In fact, the main goal of this blog and accompanying whitepaper is to refresh a 2009 study that demonstrated SQL performance on vSphere 4, given the marked technology advancements on both the software and hardware fronts.

These tests show that large SQL Server 2012 databases run extremely efficiently with VMware, achieving great performance in a variety of virtual machine configurations with only minor tunings to SQL Server and the vSphere ESXi host. These tunings and other best practices for fully optimizing large virtual machines for SQL Server databases are presented in the paper.

One test in the paper shows the maximum host throughput achieved with different numbers of virtual CPUs per VM. This was measured starting with 8 vCPUs per VM, then doubled to 16, then 32, and finally 64 (the maximum supported with vSphere 5.5). DVD Store, which is a popular database tool and a key workload of the VMmark benchmark, was used to stress the VMs. Here is a graph from the paper showing the 8 vCPU x 8 VMs case, which achieved an aggregate of 493,804 opm (operations per minute) on the host:

There are also tests using CPU affinity to show the performance differences between physical cores and logical processors (Hyper-Threads), the impact of various virtual NUMA (vNUMA) topologies, and experiments with the Latency Sensitivity advanced setting.

For more details and the test results, please download the whitepaper: Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 5.5.

from VMware's performance team