The Oracle stance on virtualization is that it is not officially supported. As a someone with large Oracle installations, you have the option to heed these warnings or attempt to virtualize Oracle yourself. The reality is that many organizations already have, and Wikibon.org provided an enlightening look into the minds of 15 CIOs who had already talked with Oracle about virtualization and reaped its benefits.

After careful analysis, the conclusion is clear. If you want to virtualize Oracle, there is no need to wait for Oracle to give an official green light with official support. You can do it now.

Benefits of Virtualization

In general virtualization provides many benefits beyond the traditional, one OS (or even one application/database) to one server model. Among those benefits are:

• the need for fewer physical servers resulting in lower monthly power and cooling costs in a data center
• fewer physical servers means less networking equipment, fewer racks and ultimately more data center space
• the ability to create test lab environments quickly and easily
• elastic capacity for rapid server provisioning and deployment
• a lower risk of hardware vendor lock-in
• storage migration, live migration, high availability, fault tolerance, and distrusted resource scheduling – all of which leads to higher uptime
• the ability to isolate applications that would not be compatible with others. This means fewer physical servers required to run a diverse set of applications that used to require dedicated servers all to themselves

Benefits of Oracle Virtualization

The Wikibon.org research found that Oracle Clusterware and VMware were able to reduce the number of required cores from 192 to 120, 10 servers with 2 sockets and 6 cores per socket verses 12 servers with 2 sockets and 8 cores per socket. This translates into a savings of $2 million over a three-year period.

Moreover, virtualization also reduced IO wait times considerably, which is an added performance bonus included with the expected cost savings.

The main challenge that you might want to consider when deciding whether to proceed with Oracle virtualization is “aligning budget responsibilities for virtualized Oracle Database Services,” David Floyer explains. That involves setting a budget for licensing, local and remote infrastructure, and the total administration costs.

Oracle Virutalization Recommendations

Wikibon.org recommends three service approaches for virtualization of Oracle. It is possible to use only one, two, or even all three approaches in one installation. Wikibon recommends the use of all three for larger organizations looking to offer them as Oracle services.

1. Hypervisor-only Service: For recovery of an Oracle instance on another VM – suitable for test/development and production with 99.9% availability
2. Hypervisor with Oracle Clusterware or other cluster software: For business-critical production applications with high availability of 99.95%
3. Hypervisor with full Oracle RAC: For mission-critical production applications, offering 99.99+% availability.

The CIO’s final decision to go with Oracle virtualization will depend on the technical expertise of the IT staff that must implement the changes and maintain the virtual machines, the budgeting and licensing changes that must take place, and the overall benefits versus the disadvantages of virtualization. The complete Wikibon report is available free of charge at Wikibon.org.