We’re really excited about the buzz around Oracle in virtualized environments. One of the best kept secrets is just how well Oracle performs on VMware. This didn’t happen by accident - there are a number of features and performance optimizations in the VMware server architecture, specifically for databases.

There isn’t one quick hit to make databases work well for a wide range of real-world applications - good performance is something that is earned from the long term discipline of focusing the lessons learned from many customer-oriented real-world database workloads, and applying those lessons across the architecture of the hypervisor.

Here are a few of the performance highlights:

• Near Native Performance: Oracle databases run at performance similar to that of a physical system
• Extreme Database I/O Scalability: VMware Server’s thin hypervisor layer can drive over 63,000 database I/Os per second (fifty times the requirement of a typical database)
• Multi-core Scaling: Scale up using SMP virtual machines and multiple database instances
• Large Memory : Scalable memory - 64GB per database, 256GB per host

Database Performance Myths

There are a few common myths about virtualizing databases:

• Databases have a high overhead when virtualized : Virtualized Databases can perform at or near the speed of physical systems, in terms of latency and throughput. The virtualization overhead for typical real-world databases is minimal - for VMware Server, we measured CPU overhead to be less than 10%.

• Databases have too much I/O to be virtualized : Databases typically have a large number of small random  I/Os, and it is in theory possible to hit a scaling ceiling in the hypervisor layer. VMware’S thin hypervisor layer can drive over 63,000 database I/Os per second, which is equivalent to more than 600 disk spindles of I/O  throughput. This is sufficient I/O scaling for even the largest databases on x86 systems.

• Virtualization should only be used for smaller, non-critical applications : The VMWARE is very robust: many customers are seeing over two years of uptime from ESX based systems. In addition, the hypervisor remains stable, even if resources are overcomitted.

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