Some time ago I wrote an article about EMC’s Blueprint for Successful Large Scale Oracle Virtualization on vSphere. Now Cisco IT has published a similar whitepaper and study after having virtualized a large number of their corporate Oracle databases on top of their Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. The results are quite impressive in my opinion and you may be able to learn a lot from their effort. The difference here is that Cisco tested with NFS and D-NFS, not Fibre Channel (as in the EMC case study).

Cisco’s tests showed performance up to more than 2000 TPS and over 74K IOPS from relatively small CPU and Memory footprint 4 node Oracle RAC 11g cluster using D-NFS. Performance of standalone systems was also good at 33K IOPS using D-NFS. One of the interesting takeaways I got from the Cisco article is that their testing showed near native performance when their databases were virtualized.

For all the details you should read the full study by Cisco – Virtualized Oracle Database on UCS. A PDF version of the whitepaper is linked from their article.

Final Word

Projects such as the ones I have written about from EMC, Cisco and others are good evidence that you can successfully virtualize all types of Oracle databases on VMware vSphere. It does take a careful, disciplined and methodical approach that considers all the requirements, constraints, risks and assumptions. But this is no different than if you were deploying these types of critical systems non-virtualized. The business benefits that can be achieved, based on the Cisco and EMC case studies (and my own direct personal experience on these projects with my customers), are compelling. If you’d like to look at some more resources to help you to get started on the journey to virtualizing your Oracle databases you might like to check out the rest of the articles on my Oracle Page.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.