Virtualizing Oracle Databases – The Time Has Come!
Overall, virtualization of IT applications and databases is quite pervasive. Estimates from industry analysts show that some applications and databases have virtualization penetration rates of 80 to 90%. Overall the estimates for datacenter virtualization range from 60 to 70%. One curious exception is the rate of virtualization for Oracle Databases. Some estimates put the Oracle Database virtualization rate below 20%. The big question is why so low for Oracle Database?
While I have never seen any formal research documenting the reasons, ad-hoc discussions with many DBAs and Architects and other Oracle users indicates that some of the major reasons for their reluctance to virtualize include:
Fear of performance degradation
Concern over availability and stability
And an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” view
And for mission critical Oracle Databases those are valid concerns. Any outage or performance degradation is costly. Status quo is the safest approach. But what I am hearing from customers and the Oracle community at large is that the time has come for virtualization. The improvements in configuration flexibility, reduced deployment times, dramatically improved disaster recovery and cost savings are great motivators for virtualization by themselves. One of the early adopters for virtualizing and Oracle infrastructure was EMC. lets hear what EMC’s Chief Database Architect, Darryl Smith, has to say about the benefits of EMC’s virtualization efforts with EMC’s Oracle Infrastructure.
So EMC found great performance, improved availability and a reduction in database licenses all because of their move to virtualize their Oracle infrastructure. Here is more of Darryl talking about Oracle virtualization and the cloud.
EMC took the next logical step from initial virtualization and moved their Oracle infrastructure to a full cloud implementation with even more benefits thanks to the improved Oracle workload mobility.
EMC is a great example of why there appears to be a growing tide of Oracle users who are ready to ride the wave of virtaulization. To learn more about EMC’s virtualization efforts and results, these two whitepapers on Cisco.com will provide a more complete overview of their journey:
Cisco announced the best 2-socket SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) on Linux Benchmark result with the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) delivering impressive scalability and performance to growing deployments of SAP Business Suite applications.
Cisco’s results on the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark support for up to 6,530 concurrent users and a 35,680 SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS)score derived from the processing of 713,670 order line items per hour and 2,141,000 dialog steps per hour.
The benchmark results successfully demonstrate how a Cisco UCS® B200 M3 Blade Server delivers high scalability and low latency to SAP Business Suite solutions by supporting up to 6,530 concurrent users in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Sybase ASE environment. High-performance blade servers and network fabrics enables application throughput optimization as Cisco UCS handles many SAP application tasks, with results showing that the system can process 713,670 order line items per hour or 2,141,000 dialog steps per hour.
The tested configuration consisted of a Cisco Unified Computing System™ chassis equipped with one Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3. The server was configured with two 2.90-GHz, 8-core Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2690 CPUs and 256 GB of 1600-MHz memory. The blade server ran both the SAP Business Suite application software and the 64-bit Sybase ASE Server 15.7. The SAP Enhancement Package 5 for SAP Enterprise Resource Planning 6.0 was used in this scenario. One LSI 400GB SLC WarpDrive provided solid-state disk capacity for database log files that require low-latency write access.
Cisco UCS deployed with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® provides additional flexibility, efficiency and savings. Combined with enterprise-class open source operating system Cisco UCS servers are the perfect foundation for any standards-based infrastructure solution. The LSI 400GB SLC WarpDrive enables storage performance to be decoupled from storage capacity. Using solid-state disk technology and intelligent caching software, the LSI 400GB SLC WarpDrive integrates a powerful new memory tier that is uniquely designed to accelerate in-server application performance for database workloads.
By deploying SAP Business Suite on Cisco UCS configured with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, LSI solid-state storage and running Sybase ASE Server, IT departments can support more users and accelerate response. IT departments can choose from a full range of Cisco UCS blade and rack server models to scale deployments further with larger servers, or add servers, to create scale-out deployments with a small footprint. These innovations and a dramatic reduction in the number of physical components demonstrate Cisco’s commitment to delivering systems that provide value to SAP deployments.
Cisco continues its cloud computing performance leadership with the announcement of Industry’s First VMware vSphere 5.1 Benchmark Result published on September 5th 2012.
With this world-record-setting 8-node VMware VMmark 2.1 score of 42.79@36 tiles, Cisco UCS is best in performance, best in scalability, and the result is the first to incorporate VMware vSphere 5.1—all critical contributors to effective cloud computing environments.
UCS has established many records for Cisco and for the industry with this benchmark result.
The Cisco UCS results show that eight 2-socket Cisco UCS B200 M3 servers outperform four 4-socket Fujitsu servers, contradicting the conventional wisdom that vertical scaling outperforms horizontal scaling.
Cisco is the first to publish VMmark benchmark results on VMware vSphere 5.1, demonstrating the speed at which Cisco UCS can adapt to support new environments and surpass the competition
