Re: Oracle standalone or Oracle RAC on VMWARE support

In a virtual environment, OS metrics (and whichever tools they are gathered from) should not be trusted as accurate indicators of performance. OS metrics lie because, by design, they are not aware they are virtualized and do not realize they are sharing CPU, Memory, and Disk.

The issues that become difficult to troubleshoot will vary based on your tooling.

If you have no visibility/tooling into the VMware environment, almost any issue becomes difficult to troubleshoot. You essentially have no access to accurate performance indicators at all, how are you supposed to troubleshoot without accurate metrics? If someone over-provisions your environment, this problem is only exacerbated.

Some companies I've worked with have provided vCenter access to those whose workloads have been virtualized. This is a middle of the road solution as you now have access to accurate information, but it still takes a while to identify the issue and requires learning a new console. vCenter is also made for VMware Admins and focuses more on lifecycle management than monitoring, anyone who has used vCenter extensively can vouch for this. The DBA's I've worked with tend to dislike it.

If you're monitoring Oracle databases or other workloads, chances are you are already using Enterprise Manager. The VMware vSphere plugin, found here<http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=34841:11>on Oracle's Extensibility Exchange, provides visibility, monitoring, thresholding, etc... of VMware within Enterprise Manager 12c. If your company is instead standardizing on VMware vCenter Operations Manager (this is NOT vCenter), you can monitor your Oracle workloads inside VMware's monitoring solution (See
here<https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/blue-medora-vcenter-operations-management-pack-for-oracle-enterprise-manager> on
VMware's website).

Hope that helps! Thanks,

Kyle Wassink

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Upendra <nupendra_at_hotmail.com> wrote:

> What tools other than guest OS tools you use to monitor the VMWare
> environment? What kind of issues are difficult to troubleshoot in a VM
> environment (compared to physical hardware) ?
>
> People love to over-provision the VM farm.. have you encountered any
> issues around it?
>
> Thanks for sharing your experiences.
>
> -Upendra
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2014 09:14:09 -0600
> Subject: Re: Oracle standalone or Oracle RAC on VMWARE support
> From: andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com
> To: smishra_97_at_yahoo.com
> CC: niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com; oracle-l_at_freelists.org
>
>
> I have found that Oracle standalone and RAC on VMware works very well.
> And properly tuned, I cannot see any performance hit at all. Also, by
> using the VMware HA features, you can reduce the necessity of using the
> more expensive Oracle HA features such as RAC. If you truly have a HA
> requirement to 6 9's or more, you cannot eliminate the necessity entirely,
> but combining VMware and Oracle HA features can reduce the cost.
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 8:58 AM, Sanjay Mishra <smishra_97_at_yahoo.com>wrote:
>
> Thanks Nial for important point on Oracle Support/request and VM links.
>
> Regards
> Sanjay
>
>
> <SNIP
>
>
>
>
> --
> Andrew W. Kerber
>
> 'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'
>

--
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