Comments on: Oracle 10g on VMWare

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By: Nicholas Goodman

Nicholas Goodman — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 02:08:30 +0000

Chris O,

I agree with you. I’m a big fan of VMWare and run VMWare fusion on my Mac / etc. This blog was written 3.5 years ago when virtualization (and apps/drivers/OSes that run on ‘em) was just getting going. Also, people (sys admins, DBAs) have been trained and are properly deploying these days.

I’m sold on it. While I believe there are some things that good ole fashioned steel is good for (Data Warehouse consulting means I recommend bunches of spindles and copious amounts of RAM) I’m a big believer in virtualization, and the TCO of it.

By: Chris O

Chris O — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:53:23 +0000

I think you may be a little short-sighted on the TCO… One gigantic benefit to virtualization is in cooling and power. Over the life of a server, you may spend tens of thousands of dollars on cooling and power. The enterprise license of Virtual Infrastructure 3 is only about $5k US, per two processor pair. If a even 6 or 8 virtual servers can be hosted on a single $10k Quad processor server, (something that is not at all unusual) then the ROI on that $10k VMware license is pretty quick.

Virtualization also allows for a certain amount of flexibility and scalability that you just cannot get with physical servers alone. Test/Developments systems can be created in minutes, from underutilized resources, instead of the days or weeks that it might take to procure/configure/deploy a traditional physical server. And when you’re done with it, the test platform can simply “go away”, returning resources to the pool for other vm’s to use. And High Availability becomes easy with Virtualized Servers, as does Disaster Recovery.

I’ve seen some large VMware deployments (>100 VM’s, running all kinds of services, that couldn’t have been achieved, or supported, on physical servers alone. While it may not be suited to all applications/services, it plays a big part in modern data centers.

By: Paul H

Paul H — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 05:45:25 +0000

I do not think the problem has to do with Oracle on VMW. These are inherent issues with VMWare present on most Unix/Linux deployments. The clock shift, network throughput (lack of good drivers), swap, etc., anytime you upgrade/patch your kernel, it requires you to download the new Kernel source so you can recompile VM Tools. The list goes on…

About VM support, we have the same issue with so many products which will not certify/support their system running under VM. IBM was one of them, CA & Netegrity are few other vendors which have denied support to us.

Also you missed one important point when you talked about TCO (total cost of ownership) when you compared to buying physical hardware as compared to using VMWare. Here you did not consider the cost of the VMWare license that well could run into hundred thousands dollars easy to migrate a medium sized corporation.

But thanks for the write-up.

By: Istvan Kiss

Istvan Kiss — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:18:23 +0000

Hi Nicholas,

Sorry, but I am desperately seeking some help and this is the only page I could findwith Google, which describes my problem.

You write as one of the problem with VMware and Oracle: “applications do not use swap space. Linux sees the swap space but does not use it.”

I seem to have the same problem - I am installing WebCenter -, running out of memory, java can’t allocate enough heap space and swap is not used at all.

I wos wondering if you’ve learned any solutions since you’ve ported this message.