RE: Virtualization

Brandon - I'm curious what issue you ran into with a 32-bit OEL4 guest on ESX was - mind sharing?

Bort - I run a number of Oracle 9, 10, and 11 databases on RHEL 4 and 5 (32-bit) and at the end of the year I should be done virtualizing every one of them (VMWare ESX for all of them). There are some basic changes / parameters to verify but otherwise I haven't seen any issues with VMWare under I/O stress - I'm run some of these DBs on standalone ESX servers and some connected to a EMC CX3 array. In no case have I had an issue where the VM "just dies".

Using ESX 3.0.2 or 3.5 Upd 1.

As far as the basic changes / parameters to verify

grub.conf - elevator=deadline, divider = 10 init.ora - filesystemio_options=SetAll (note that you may need to verify aio rpm if using RHEL/OEL 4)
cache as much in the DB - i.e. make SGA as large as your VM memory allows - leave little to no memory to guest OS to cache the usual RAID 10/5 for data, RAID 1 for logs VMFS works fine
hugepages

That's all that comes to mind at the moment. Feel free to email me backchannel with any specific questions.

J

-- 
  Jay Weinshenker
  jweinshe_at_concentric.net

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