Leave The Dark Ages Behind - Big Oracle RAC is Ready For The Light

Remember way back, a long time ago, when people were afraid to run Oracle RAC virtualized and Oracle didn't want to support it?  It's been supported now for almost 2 years and I have talked to lots of customers that are doing it without issue or support concerns.

We are out of the dark ages and into the light.  Oracle RAC administrators can get the same awesome features and benefits as their other IT brethren.

I think that the question of performance for really really BIG Oracle RAC databases on VMware vSphere might still be lingering for some.  They might be thinking that their Oracle RAC database is too big for vSphere.....

I was fortunate to work with some really great Oracle experts at EMC IT over the past year.  They run one of the largest Oracle RAC instances in the world and they wanted to know how it would perform as a set of VMs. We embarked on a test that used a copy of their production database and Load Runner scripts to simulate their environment.  We used big 32 vCPU Monster VMs for the RAC nodes and compared the performance against their existing physical Oracle RAC cluster.

We found that on average the performance was within 10% - check the whitepaper for details (cool graph included).

The doubts should now be completely gone.  It is possible for your Oracle RAC database (yes, the one that you think is too large / too important) to leave the dark ages too.