Virtualization

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Tue, 2011-08-02 at 15:49 -0400, aragonx at dcsnow.com wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm looking to setup the following environment:
> 
> 4 dual-core 2.6GhZ AMD Opteron Processors (64bit)
> 32GB RAM
> 2 6TB esata disks (each client needs 3T of space)
> 4 GB networks connections (would be nice if I could dedicate one to
> each client OS)
> 
> Starting with Fedora 15 as my host OS.
> 
> 3 Suse 9.3 clients (running a custom 2.6.28.4 kernel) all running
> pretty big Oracle databases.
> 
> So, the question is:  Which virtual environment will run well for this
> kind of setup?  It looks like my choices are VIrtualbox (seems to be
> the current favorite), KVM or Xen.
> 
> I can install the systems from scratch if required but I also have a
> ghost and dumps of other systems that could be used.
> 
> Any recommendations before I start down the wrong path?

A few questions on this one:
- How much CPU and RAM resource do you need/intend to provide to each
Oracle DB?
- What version of Oracle?
- Do you plan to use ASM and Grid Infrastructure?

I specialize in virtualizing Oracle Databases (among other things).
Given the choices of virtualization platforms you gave, I would tend to
go with either VirtualBox or KVM, in that order of preference.

However, if I may, you will be much better off handling these things
from a performance point of view using a bare metal hypervisor, and in
that case, I would recommend the free version of ESXi. It will give you
superior capability and performance, and allow you to do things that you
would otherwise not be able to.

For example, You could take the 4 Gig-E NICs, combine them into a single
virtual switch, and then connect all of the database VMs to it such that
they would automatically share the bandwidth. You could even create
separate port groups on different VLANs to keep the networking traffic
separate and assign different databases to different VLANs. That's just
barely scratching the surface of things on the networking side alone as
well.

I'm happy to discuss specifics further if you like. I am a Linux guy and
major Fedora fan, and I also am a VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD. I do this on my
job every day.

I also will be a panelist at VMworld 2011 later this month on a
discussion about virtualizing Oracle databases (Session BCA1548). If
anyone else is coming, definitely drop me a line!

Cheers,

Chris

-- 

======================
"Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former."

-- Albert Einstein