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Oracle on vSphere Best Practices

Filip Verloy, Sr. SE

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Agenda

Benefits of running Oracle on VMware

Best practices for running Oracle on VMware

• ESXi host guidelines

• Storage guidelines

• Networking guidelines

Troubleshooting performance issues

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Benefits of running Oracle on VMware

Manageability and Agility

• vMotion without downtime to the Oracle database (HW maintenance/upgrades)

Consolidation

• Maximum use of physical resources

Provisioning

• VM can be rapidly moved or duplicated

High Availability

• Protection against unplanned downtime by restarting the VM on another host

Fault Tolerance

• Continues availability (*1 vCPU only)

Dynamic Resource Scheduling

• vSphere/Storage DRS provides load balancing across a cluster (meet SLA’s)

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Benefits of running Oracle on VMware cont'd

Power Management

• Dynamic Power Management (DPM) allows for conservation of power

Rapid Refresh

• Virtual environment can be rapidly refreshed for test/dev, training, and QA/UAT.

Network I/O Control

• Allows assignment of bandwidth or relative weighing between VM’s

Storage I/O Control

• Allows a level of storage predictability and fairness to ensure Oracle databases get what they are entitled too. (based on ‘fair’ access)

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Best practices for running Oracle on VMware

Careful sizing and capacity planning for a given workload is still highly recommended – same rules as the physical world still apply

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ESXi host guidelines

The VMware ESXi host BIOS settings can be specifically adjusted to maximize compute resources (such as disabling unnecessary processes and peripherals) to Oracle databases

Allow vSphere to choose the best VMM based on the CPU and guest OS combination (Automatic CPU/MMU Virtualization)

Use Hardware-Assisted Memory Management (EPT/RVI)

Set memory reservations equal to the size of the Oracle SGA + 2 times Aggregate PGA Target + 500MB for the OS (assuming Linux)

Use Large Memory Pages (linux hugepages)

Do not use Oracle Automatic Memory Management (AMM)

Do not disable balloon driver

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ESXI host guidelines cont’d

Use as few virtual CPUs as possible

• Match the number of vCPU’s to the number of active foreground sessions in the database.

Use CPU reservations when over allocation resources

Enable hyperthreading (Intel Core i7 processors and above)

Disable NUMA at the virtual machine layer BUT leave enabled at the physical host BIOS and guest OS levels

Use Virtual SMP (with moderation)

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Guest OS guidelines

Optimize the OS (patches, kernel settings)

• If possible use Oracle pre-install packages

• Oracle-validated RPM for OEL or Red Hat 5.x

• Oracle pre-install RPM for OEL or Red Hat 6.x

Disable unnecessary foreground and background processes

Install VMware Tools on all virtual machines

Time keeping by using NTP

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Storage guidelines

Enable jumbo frames for IP-based storage (iSCSI/NFS)

Create dedicated datastores to service database workloads

Leverage SSD for indexes, redo logs, and frequently used data

Use VMFS for single instance Oracle database deployments

Align VMFS properly

RDM is recommended for large partitions and heavy I/O use databases

Use Oracle automatic storage management (ASM)

• ASM disk groups need to be created with equal disk types (performance of an ASM disk group is as fast as it’s slowest member)

• Create ASM disk groups based on I/O behavior characteristics (random, sequential, log files, …)

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Storage guidelines cont’d

Use your storage vendor’s best practices documentation when laying out the Oracle database

Avoid silos when designing the storage architecture

Use Paravirtualized SCSI adapters for Oracle data files with demanding workloads

Use multiple virtual SCSI controllers to increase parallelism for I/O traffic inside the guest OS (separate redo log from data files)

vSphere 5.5 vFRC (mainly read I/O benefits)

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Example layout

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Networking guidelines

Use the VMXNET family of Paravirtualized network adapters

Separate infrastructure traffic from virtual machine traffic for security and isolation (performance)

Use NIC teaming for availability and load balancing (passive failover)

Take advantage of NIOC to converge network and storage traffic onto 10GbE

RAC interconnects, NAS, Oracle Data Guard jumbo frames

Turn off Dynamic Coalescing on RAC interconnects

Increase the interrupt rate (slight increase in CPU consumption)

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Troubleshooting performance issues