Re: Oracle RAC on VM
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 08:07:49 -0700
Message-ID: <CAJgcjABcp2FOeqV0hwYuMigJXHwvBfNMjmuZBYAahEEzgi7rsw_at_mail.gmail.com>
I hear this argument often, and when I do, I encourage people to consider:
- if you open an SR and Oracle thinks it's a hardware or OS problem, they will likely direct you to the HW/OS vendor. No reason to expect anything different with hypervisor problems.
- If *Oracle* is your HW, OS, or hypervisor vendor in a situation where one of this components of you stack is suspected, you can expect your SR to be moved to an appropriate group. It's not "one throat to choke," it's a hydra. ;-)
I'm a fan of virtualization in principle, but like any platform/infrastructure decision, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. The licensing issue, already discussed in the thread, is a legit concern with VMWare, but people also find a way to either live with it or work around it. Performance *could* be an issue, but you really don't know that until you run some tests with your workloads and can quantify the differences. Then you (as an organization, not Kevin ;-) get to decide if those differences are significant enough to impose the operational overhead of introducing an exception to your strategic direction. Your best bet is to be prepared for a data-driven discussion. :)
This is coming off sounding a bit lecture-y and jerky, and I apologize. I blame email, lack of coffee, and typing with thumbs. ;) Good luck with the decision/exploration.
On Friday, August 22, 2014, Justin Mungal <justin_at_n0de.ws> wrote:
> If you open an SR and Oracle thinks it's the hypervisor, they will tell
> you to reproduce the issue in a non-virtualized environment in order to
> continue getting support. This has never happened to me, but we don't have
> that many virtualized systems running Oracle.
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 5:14 PM, Kevin Lidh <kevin.lidh_at_gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','kevin.lidh_at_gmail.com');>> wrote:
>
>> As a DBA, I never wanted to work on Oracle on VMware but it seems to be
>> the trend. Now that I’m a manager, I’m looking to propose moving to RAC
>> for HA and also back to physical machines. Since this goes against the
>> strategic direction of our organization, I’m sure I’ll be asked why we
>> can’t do RAC on VMs. I have my personal opinions about this but I was
>> wondering what the broader audience of experts believe.
>>
>>
>>
>> Factors I’m considering are:
>>
>> 1) Servers closer to the storage for performance. In
>> virtualization, you have an intermediary processing your requests and
>> responses.
>>
>> 2) Access to all resources licensed. We keep a certain percentage
>> of our hosts free to handle the load in case one in the cluster fails.
>> With RAC, you have access to all the resources all the time. And since you
>> have to pay for it all anyway, I see that as a good thing.
>>
>> 3) Performance in general. I don’t have any evidence but I can’t
>> believe that another layer between my OS calls and the hardware could be as
>> fast as not having that layer.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>>
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>
>
-- Sent from a mobile device, because leaving the couch to find a real keyboard would unnecessarily delay this vital communication. So would proofreading, so don't be surprised by typos. -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Fri Aug 22 2014 - 17:07:49 CEST