Re: Oracle Linux/Virtualization Software

On 30 Nov., 14:53, hpuxrac <johnbhur..._at_sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On Nov 29, 9:01 pm, DA Morgan <damor..._at_psoug.org> wrote:
>
> snip
>
> > I'm not counseling blind acceptance. I'm not advising anyone to take
> > anything at face value. Isn't it Tom Kyte who has advised over and over
> > again the importance of not accepting claims made by self-anointed
> > experts?
>
> Well actually I think it starts back with the Greeks and Romans as far
> as indo-european history goes.
>
>
>
> > What is at issue here is the difference between scepticism (healthy) and
> > cynicism (attitude). I am not saying Oracle is correct and I'm not
> > saying Oracle is incorrect. Because I haven't tested the claim in my lab
> > and don't know of any reputable independent source that has.
>
> > What I object to is this cynical repudiation of a claim based solely
> > on the person's attitude of unblemished negativity. There isn't one
> > person here that has weighed in with a value judgment that any single
> > data point, even a poorly created one, that supports their statement.
>
> You know this blind advocacy of anything oracle is getting pretty old
> here in cdos from certain posters. As far as I know my original post
> in this thread concerning VM said this ...
>
> "Oracle claims their VM is 3 times as fast as anything else. Sounds
> pretty fishy to many of us."
>
> Maybe you should read a definition of "fishy"?
>
> All in all based on the hype from Larry and others in OOW 2007 without
> any benchmarks provided, tangible testing results ... fishy seems to
> be right on target to me. It might even be optimistic?

Things become a bit clearer when looking at the FAQ:

"How is Oracle VM three times more efficient than existing x86 server virtualization products?
Oracle ran many performance benchmarks comparing Oracle products running with Oracle VM against the existing leading server virtualization product and also with Oracle products on nonvirtualized  operating systems on x86 and x86-64. Oracle consistently saw much better resource
utilization with an average of three times less overhead using Oracle VM, and also saw significant
scalability with virtual SMP. In many cases, the comparison with real hardware was approximately
equal in performance."

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/virtualization/docs/ovm-faq.pdf

I interpret "three times more efficient" as meaning "the overhead of other VM products vs. real hardware was cut down to a quarter". So in cases of low overhead, the net gain is small and the claim sounds far less dramatic.

The crucial questions here are of course: what is X? What hardware was it tested on? What applications were benchmarked?

Kind regards

robert Received on Fri Nov 30 2007 - 09:38:28 CST