Using Best Practices for Running Oracle on VMware

Much has been said about Oracle’s position on support for VMware, much of it by Oracle itself. Despite the rumors and innuendos, Oracle offers its full support to Oracle databases on VMware, even though Oracle offers its own suite of similar products.

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Even though Oracle promises full support for VMware, you should always perform test conversions on smaller pre-production environments. It’s clear that Oracle provides the necessary support for Oracle software running on VMware, especially Oracle 9i and 10g, but always do your due diligence and test first.

Even though Oracle offers similar products, it’s unlikely that they will entirely cut off VMware any time soon. After all, VMware runs their IT infrastructure on Oracle VMware. Still, you should always test before instituting an enterprise-wide change.

Best Practices for Running Oracle Software on VMware
Even though VMware makes great effort to ensure that their products are fully compatible with Oracle Database, there are several best practices you should follow in achieving optimal performance and operation of Oracle on VMware. Here are a few:

- Make sure that computing environments are optimized for vSphere by following the recommended hardware and network configurations
- Keep intial numbers of vCPus lows until you better understand workload requirements. Performance will be degraded by too many vCPUs
- Database workloads should be assigned their own datastores This enables more predictable and reliable resource allocations
- Oracle Automated Storage (ASM) is essential to success
- OEM storage providers will have recommendations on how to best layout your Oracle database They will know how to best configure their products to meet the requirements of Oracle VMware
- Separating VM traffic from infrastructure traffic will improve data isolation and security
- Use NIC teaming for availability and load balancing

Performance should be monitored by VMware vCenter and esxtop/rexstop. Third-party solutions like IgniteVM should also be considered for their ability to look at performance issues across both the physical and virtual environments.

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For more best practices recommendations and configuration requirements, DBAs should read the Oracle Databases on VMware Best Practices Guide available from VMware.