oracle and vmware ESX

Has anyone real-life experience using oracle products (database, application server suite, EBS) on vmware ESX for "production"?

I browsed through the documentation on the vmware site, which is poor (or non-existent one might say) from a technical point of view.

More specific:
-The memory 'balloon' driver.

I've gotten some virtual machines (with oracle application server on it) which turned to an unreachable state. My guess is the balloon driver interfering with some memory hungry processes (like java), which hung the machine. Anyone using the balloon driver along with db, app or EBS? (we have turned the balloon driver off)
-Priorisation and/or resource management.
AFAIK and have read across the internet (no thanks to vmware documentation), my conclusion is CPU and memory can be specifically allocated to a designated virtual machine. (is that correct?) But how about NIC usage? HBA usage? IO in general?
I've read about priorisation on a "fair share" basis. Can anybody explain what that means?
To my current understanding there is no "real" guarantee about anything other than CPU and memory.
If so, this means virtual machines who's performance are depended on anything other than CPU and memory can directly influence each other.
-IO.

I know disks can be used in the regular way, and directly from the virtual machine. Is that correct, and is there an advantage (probably IO speed?) disadvantages (non-managebility, no live migration for example?)

frits

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Sep 13 2007 - 03:18:37 CDT