Virtualization

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Wed, 2011-08-03 at 14:25 -0400, aragonx at dcsnow.com wrote:
> > A few questions on this one: 
> > - How much CPU and RAM resource do you need/intend to provide to
> each 
> > Oracle DB? 
> 
> This macine's only purpose is for the Oracle DBs.  So, I had hoped to
> split up the CPUs and RAM evenly among the clients.
> 
> > - What version of Oracle? 
> 
> 10g
> 
> > - Do you plan to use ASM and Grid Infrastructure? 
> 
> No.
> 
> The real reason for these machines to exist is to act as a kinda live
> backup.  No clients will query these databases.  Our current full
> backups take in the order of 5 hours.  During this time our system
> becomes less responsive than we would like.  So the idea is to just
> run incremental backups and restore them on these VMs.  
> 
> So we would prefer to minimize costs by using a free solution except
> for where we have to.

OK - That makes sense. There are numerous resources available online for
virtualizing Oracle 10g as stand-alone databases. If I were doing this
in this way, I would still go with the free version of ESXi. This gives
you the best overall control for resource assignment between the
databases while using the smallest amount of RAM overhead for the
hypervisor. It also does some things with RAM that will make things more
efficient. And as I mentioned earlier, you have positive control over
the network interfaces such that they can be pooled or dedicated as
needed for performance and security issues.

Check the following URL for some good technical information for
virtualizing Oracle on ESXi, and includes specifics on 10g:
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/partners/alliances/oracle-database-whitepapers.html

What's nice here is that several of the things covered are also
transferable to other hypervisors if you understand how each of them
handles resource management, disk storage, and networking.

Also keep in mind that you will still need to license the box itself for
Oracle. That part doesn't change.

Hope that helps.

Chris

-- 

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

-- Albert Einstein