Since Oracle software is at the core of many enterprise business systems, it is one of the most commonly virtualised applications where virtualisation has been deployed not just to save costs, but also to manage the lifecycle and development processes of what can be a large and complicated system.

Deploying Oracle on VMware also adds flexibility to existing systems, where high availability is desirable but the licensing costs and implementation of Oracle RAC can be prohibitive.

Some Oracle and VMware facts:

• Oracle is supported on VMware and there are joint support agreements in place to ensure that any potential problems are resolved quickly.
• The Oracle database its self relies on virtualisation; data that is presented to users is abstracted from its underlying storage. Running Oracle within a VMware environment further extends the virtualisation that is already present in the database.
• Running Oracle instances on VMware delivers performance at, or near native speed.
• Database I/O is not limited by running under the ESX hypervisor. VMware ESX 3.5 is capable of handling 65,000 I/O operations per second; this is the equivalent of running 600 disk spindles running at 100%.
• An Oracle environment may consist of many different components from many different vendors. VMware lifecycle manager and VMware Lab Manager can provide invaluable mechanisms to coordinating the rapid development, testing and deployment of these environments.

Some Oracle and VMware questions?

• Do I really need to deploy Oracle RAC? Will Oracle Standard Edition and VMware High Availability give me a cheaper and more flexible solution?
• If I can use VMware to run a fully fault tolerant Oracle system on standard x86 hardware, do I really need to maintain a SPARC / Solaris cluster?
• Is the load that Oracle places on the CPU peaky? Will a VMware DRS cluster ensure that the database has the right amount of CPU power for a given time of day?
• What infrastructure is required for the entire Oracle system? Is it advantageous to virtualise this first, followed by the actual database?

Summary

Oracle has been virtualised thousands of times on VMware and provides some significant business advantages if it is planed properly.

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