Re: Oracle on AIX/Power5 LPARs

On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 23:11:17 +0000, Bob Jones wrote:

> Are you having problems running VMware? I used it for web servers and it
> is pretty sleek. There is a slight performance penalty though. IMO,
> Opteron is definitely a better value. You can run Solaris, Windows or
> Linux on it.

From what I've been able to find out, I do not feel that VMware will allow us to virtualize our entire server environment for this application. While it seems to be fine for application and web servers, I have been cautioned against running database servers on VMWare ESX due to IO contention issues that arise when the database server is engaged in heavy disk activity.

I've been talking with IBM and Sun about their servers and am looking at the Sun v890 (or v490) and the IBM P550 series. The v890 only supports containers - you have to go to the e4900 to get Dynamic System Domains and that server starts around $200,000 which is way out of range for us.

Interesting FUD from the vendors. Sun tells me that AIX micro-partitions have high overhead - up to 40% on the CPU if you are running more than 11 micro partitions (we will have 4-5 per machine) and that a fault in a micro-partition can affect the entire system. IBM tells me that Sun's Containers aren't robust since the OS layer under them can crash and bring down all of the Containers.

John G - Are you running just Solaris 10 Containers for your Oracle installations? Or that in combination with the Dynamic System Domains? On which hardware?

I have found another site using the same software as us that runs it in LPARs on a IBM P650 and apparently quite successfully.

--Glenn Received on Tue Oct 25 2005 - 08:28:12 CDT