A Model for Oracle on vSphere

I've been working with some of the guys at EMC's IT group on testing Oracle RAC on vSphere 5 over the past year.  They recently published a comprehensive white paper on their deployment model for Oracle on vSphere, which was one of the results of the work that we did together.  The performance testing that we did was part of the evaluation that EMC used for Oracle on vSphere as they continue to move towards having more and more of their data centers virtualized.

The deployment model provides some great thoughts on how to evaluate which combination of components should be used for each deployment.  It takes into consideration the scalability, high availability, and relevant clustering options from both VMware and Oracle.  Good stuff.

In addition to the deployment model for Oracle on vSphere, the paper also includes some key parameters for tuning and running Oracle RAC on vSphere 5.  These were found as part of the testing we did using large 32 vCPU based VMs running a four node Oracle RAC cluster.  More good stuff.

A couple of quick things that I conclude from the white paper:

1. The deployment model clearly illustrates how Oracle RAC is becoming more and more of a corner case, that is only needed by a small percentage of databases.

2. EMC clearly believes that Oracle software is supported on VMware vSphere, and is already running a large percentage of their environment on it today.

Todd