Paul Maritz Keynote at EMCWorld Mentions Oracle Performance on VMWare

As you all know, EMCWorld was this week, and I attended. One of the most interesting aspects of the event was the Paul Maritz keynote. Paul Maritz is the new President and CEO of VMware as most of you undoubtedly know as well.

During the keynote, Mr. Maritz said the "o" word, i.e. Oracle. In fact, Oracle was a very prominent feature of his discussion. He presented the results of an OLTP performance benchmark that VMware has done recently. The basic results are as follows:

Metric	Native	VM
Throughput in business transactions per minute (1,000s)	293	250
Disk IOPS (1,000s)	71	60
Disk bandwidth (MB/s)	305	258
Network packet rate receive (1,000s)	12	10
Network packet rate send  (1,000s)	19	17
Network bandwidth receive (MB/s)	25	21
Network bandwidth send (MB/s)	66	56

Overall, this indicates that VMware virtualization has no more than a 15% performance penalty over physically booted, which I consider to be actually very good. Certainly, given the other benefits of virtualization with VMware, this would be acceptable for many customers for many of their Oracle database environments.

Now, to deal with the obvious question which I expect to be raised: Why did VMware not see the performance advantage of virtualization that I did in my previous post on comparing physically booted performance to virtualized performance?

The answer will becomes apparent when you review the VMware performance study, linked above. My peformance comparison was between the following:

1. Oracle RAC 10g (i.e. clustered)
2. VMware ESX 3.5 with HA Cluster (i.e. clustered)

Their study is between:

1. Oracle Database 11g (i.e. not clustered)
2. VMware ESX 4.0 (also not clustered)

The most important consideration is the issue of clustering. Their study shows a single 8-way Intel white box being used as a server for both physically booted and virtualized. (Similar to our study, they used identical hardware for both configurations.) Our study shows a cluster of 4 8-way Dell PE2900 servers being used for both configurations.

Closely reading the VMware study, they used a single database server with identical memory and CPU settings for both physically booted and virtualized database servers. Thus, in the VMware study, everything was done within a single instance database server with a single database image.

Another issue is that we federated the databases on the virtualized side. Thus we had 4 clustered instances and 1 database on the physically booted side, and 8 independent database servers (consisting of a non-clustered instance and a database image) on the virtualized side. As I said in my previous post (linked above), creating a larger number of database images had a performance advantage, especially compared to RAC, where cache fusion and lock management add significant overhead.

I have received many comments that this makes the results from the EMC study non-comparable. I somewhat agree, and I will deal with that issue at length in a future post. The VMware performance result is certainly more apples-to-apples than mine.

However, in my defense, I will say (as I will explain at length in my up-coming post) that the configuration I used is identical to that used by Microsoft SQL Server in their clustered product. No one seriously contends that Microsoft SQL Server with MSCS is not competitive to Oracle RAC. Certainly, Oracle considers it to be competitive, as the abundant technical literature on their own website demonstrates.

Thus, the study performed by the Oracle CSV group at EMC is a natural and obvious step: We need to understand the performance differences (as well as cost and manageability differences) between Oracle RAC and Oracle Database with VMware HA Cluster. And when we do that study, we need to configure the databases in the most natural and logical way, taking full advantage of the features of each environment. This necessarily leads you down the path of a federated environment on the virtualized side, and a single image on the RAC / physically booted side.

The VMware study is undoubtedly very valuable and important: It demonstrates that VMware can provide world-class performance for Oracle production OLTP database environments. It shows that the performance penalty of VMware in this context is modest and manageable.

More on this later.

Comments

[Suzanne]

I've read most of your recent posts with interest. You haven't covered my particular situation but you seem to be the only person I have found who might have the combination of skills to address my questions. We are running Oracle Linux on IBM x86-64 hardware, a NetApp NAS, Oracle 11.1.0.7, Direct NFS and a Data Domain 690 for our backup location/FRA. The Data Domain and Direct NFS appear to have some communications issues. Have you seen a setup similar to this? If so has it worked without complaint?

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Response by TOSG:

I have not touched the DD device yet. We are planning on working with it in the near future. Sorry.

[Cheap Computer Canada]

Our computer data is as important as our bank lockers.