Running Oracle in Vmware.
One area where I am constantly beat up is my Oracle practices. When I refer back to the Oracle config documents I always call them recommendations. Over the last three years this has been a major point of contention between me and my DBA's. I have built multi-tenant Oracle Rac implementations leveraging infiniband and I have built small three node Rac clusters for data availability. I have recently moved my Oracle experiences into the VM-World. Different Rulesets apply and through performance testing I have proved or disproved several theories of my own and my peers. For those who don't know, Oracle scales Excellent vertically, well, but not quite as well horizontally. Previous world record benchmarks were all set on Big Sun Iron, now the world records are all on multinode Rac clusters.
A good starting point Document is https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:rbFmvCq0CxoJ:www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Oracle_Databases_on_vSphere_Deployment_Tips.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShEbhUk5I76OpN_S7SBmuu0TnW_FFBO60DjpJ4gLZKAXb2TmbHlwQVyo00dxS9RKdHSZLDJhLkv4oFe4pwI7Y9YnylgTS9K-2lX2MSfnWL2kFAoz3bAKbCl4ycbU3hmSBnDOCav&sig=AHIEtbSK4GOjlyrMTBhTHH90Kov_jStbWw&pli=1
I start to deviate on Page 6. Leave IPtables on, duh, every box must run a systems level firewall. Also the doc doesn't tell you to shut off enough services. Next pay particular attention to tip 12 on page 13. Never ever use RDM's. If in doubt read my previous top ten rules of vmware. Tune your OS, based on the install guide, many of the OS variables change depending on the final amount of Memory you add to the system, so start with a reasonable baseline and move from there.
The biggest performance gains are made by right sizing your VM's. Using the performance suite of your choice, I like the combination of Toad, dyna trace, esxtop and GKrellM. When you run a performance test against your database server, if you hit more than 80% for a sustained period bump up your vcpu count. Make sure you do not cross boundaries. Don't use 6 vcpu's if you have 4 core procs. Most of the time barring oddities, your best Oracle performance will be had at 4 vcpus. Next play with you Memory. Always set a reservation on Memory used by Oracle virtuals. Other apps are very tolerent of memory being swapped in and out, but Oracle takes a steep performance penalty when it swaps. Dependign on dataset the final numbers will end up aroung 16-24Gb of system mem. Next set your SGA, make sure to leave enough space for your operating system. On most SGA max should be set to 14G with 16G of system memory. Next, tune your SGA, this is also a point of contention between me and DBA's, I think you should set your sga targets and watch it over time and then lock it down. Next set your sessions and your processes. This is also a tuning issue, if your performance test replicates your production load this should be easy, increase the count until performance falls off then back off.
The final outcome of all these tuning options will be your little 4vcpu VMware box will run almost as as good as physical hardware with similar core counts.
One area where I am constantly beat up is my Oracle practices. When I refer back to the Oracle config documents I always call them recommendations. Over the last three years this has been a major point of contention between me and my DBA's. I have built multi-tenant Oracle Rac implementations leveraging infiniband and I have built small three node Rac clusters for data availability. I have recently moved my Oracle experiences into the VM-World. Different Rulesets apply and through performance testing I have proved or disproved several theories of my own and my peers. For those who don't know, Oracle scales Excellent vertically, well, but not quite as well horizontally. Previous world record benchmarks were all set on Big Sun Iron, now the world records are all on multinode Rac clusters.
A good starting point Document is https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:rbFmvCq0CxoJ:www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Oracle_Databases_on_vSphere_Deployment_Tips.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShEbhUk5I76OpN_S7SBmuu0TnW_FFBO60DjpJ4gLZKAXb2TmbHlwQVyo00dxS9RKdHSZLDJhLkv4oFe4pwI7Y9YnylgTS9K-2lX2MSfnWL2kFAoz3bAKbCl4ycbU3hmSBnDOCav&sig=AHIEtbSK4GOjlyrMTBhTHH90Kov_jStbWw&pli=1
I start to deviate on Page 6. Leave IPtables on, duh, every box must run a systems level firewall. Also the doc doesn't tell you to shut off enough services. Next pay particular attention to tip 12 on page 13. Never ever use RDM's. If in doubt read my previous top ten rules of vmware. Tune your OS, based on the install guide, many of the OS variables change depending on the final amount of Memory you add to the system, so start with a reasonable baseline and move from there.
The biggest performance gains are made by right sizing your VM's. Using the performance suite of your choice, I like the combination of Toad, dyna trace, esxtop and GKrellM. When you run a performance test against your database server, if you hit more than 80% for a sustained period bump up your vcpu count. Make sure you do not cross boundaries. Don't use 6 vcpu's if you have 4 core procs. Most of the time barring oddities, your best Oracle performance will be had at 4 vcpus. Next play with you Memory. Always set a reservation on Memory used by Oracle virtuals. Other apps are very tolerent of memory being swapped in and out, but Oracle takes a steep performance penalty when it swaps. Dependign on dataset the final numbers will end up aroung 16-24Gb of system mem. Next set your SGA, make sure to leave enough space for your operating system. On most SGA max should be set to 14G with 16G of system memory. Next, tune your SGA, this is also a point of contention between me and DBA's, I think you should set your sga targets and watch it over time and then lock it down. Next set your sessions and your processes. This is also a tuning issue, if your performance test replicates your production load this should be easy, increase the count until performance falls off then back off.
The final outcome of all these tuning options will be your little 4vcpu VMware box will run almost as as good as physical hardware with similar core counts.
posted by Jerry Gallagher at 6:25 PM
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