[TriLUG] Need opinions for specs of a VM box

[Ron Joffe]

On Thursday 26 July 2007 17:49, David McDowell wrote:
> Your Oracle performs OK in a VM?  what VM host are you using and what
> size is your DB and how do you measure that performance?  I ask b/c
> there are a bunch of LUG'ers who are swearing no to DB's in a VM, but
> with our small MSSQL implementation, I'm not so sure it's gonna be a
> big deal.
>
> David

David,

Our tests have shown the following:

Take a given server (similar spec to what I posted in my previous note, but 
with more drives), Install Oracle on it.

Take an identical server, install vmware, and then install oracle in that vm.

Compare the processing time utilizing an internally developed test (basically 
running a relatively CPU and Disk intensive data conversion job). We have 
seen on the order of 15% performance degradation in the VM versus the real 
host. 

A few items to note. Our test only stresses one cpu at a time (i.e. is not 
utilizing oracle parallel operations (threading). And make sure you create 
the same virtual disks to mirror physical disk sets. Base and VM OS is SLES.

In summary, in our environment, we see a 15% loss of performance for moving 
oracle from the base OS to a VM. In our environments, we will typically put 
production Oracle instances on the base OS, and put test and training Oracle 
instances on VM's.

Ron