RE: Oracle VM ?

In the recent past, I made the case to use RAC as the database service virtualization mechanism for server and database resources and as a server consolidation mechanism, as opposed to using Solaris zones/containers for that purpose. I am from the camp of using ASM and RAC for virtualizing the server resources (to the extent your Oracle version would allow). We used the OS Virtualization (Solaris zones) where that was not feasible (pre 10g; I did not want to use RAC before 10g).

Where there is a choice between RAC (for myself 10g+) and other virtualization mechanisms, I feel it is cost effective to use the RAC platform than using another layer of abstraction. I have built hybrid clusters with RAC that allows me to move applications, even in the same database, to different nodes with different capacities. The limiting factor, in my experience is that, there tend to be more OS VM experts in an organization than there are RAC experts. Secondly, political pressures by app teams pressure operations into providing sandbox using VM rather than using RAC. I consider DR a seprate problem

Some of my reasons were,

1. In house expertise
2. Leverage RAC to abstract serving resources
3. Redeploy existing inventory
4. Dynamic capacity management for online applications
5. Inherent HA for the database (and for the application if its RAC aware)

If these arguments don't help, I guess we could leave it at, it depends ...

Regards
-Krish

--

http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Nov 15 2007 - 16:20:57 CST