RE: Oracle VM ?

At the meeting the VM guy basically bragged about VM's high availibility. All the DB storage is on a SAN. He seemed to feel that he could replicate a VM partition to another server and basically provide both HA and DR. He didn't feel the need to mention rack space, heat, power or any of that other stuff. The servers cost a fraction of the cost of software so that's not a plus. He thinks his solution is as good as or better than RAC for HA and DR. I know the devil is in the details. After I gather a few rocks to throw here and other places I'll meet with him and throw down : ).

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Jesse [mailto:rjoralist_at_society.servebeer.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 9:29 AM To: dofreeman_at_state.pa.us
Cc: Oracle-L Freelists
Subject: RE: Oracle VM ?

I think there's a fundamental difference between VM and clustering. To me, the benefit of VM is in the consolidation of many disparate servers onto a single physical server, with the savings in rack space, power, cooling, annual hardware maintenance and potentially software licensing (OK, the last one's a stretch). Contrast that to RAC, where the hardware is multiplied for performance, HA, DR, etc.

The benefit for us to use VM is to be able to consolidate smaller independant servers onto a single (yet redundant) server. The obvious drawback/consideration with a move like this is HA/DR. Now, 5 or 6 VMs will be tied to the same physical server. In our case, the idea is to greatly reduce the management needs of aging hardware and Windows foibles (e.g.
regular rebooting *needed* to solve issues). Instead of replacing 5 aging servers with 5 new ones where each new server's capabilities will be well over the need for it's hosted app, we can buy one quad-core (or dual*2) with redundant components and host all the previous apps in their own virtual server. The savings for us should be substantial over the life of the server.

This topic is enough for a week's worth of long, drawn-out meetings. As with most everything, YMMV with VM.

Rich

Disclaimer: Ohhhhhhh, I thought you said "BM". Completely different. ;)

[snip]

> The way I see it VM is a competing technology with RAC and clusters.
> What I am thinking if we put these databases on VM's then as DBA's we
> lose some visibility into performance issues because we (me) don't
> have a VM appliance and can't really see through the VM abstraction.
> Also, it seems like a lot of the responsibility for availability and
> recovery shift to the server administrators. I have not been able to
> find a side-by-side comparison between DB clustering technology and VM

> technology. Can somebody point to something or comment?

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