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TOP FIVE REASONS WHY CUSTOMERS
USE EMC AND VMWARE TO VIRTUALIZE
ORACLE ENVIRONMENTS
Get 44 percent more performance and lower
management costs by virtualizing your Oracle
environment
Removing the physical 1:1 relationship between Oracle database instances and server hardware unlocks several vital enhancements to improve the effectiveness of DBAs and storage
administrators in Oracle environments. Combining VMware® with EMC® storage hardware
and software enables faster provisioning of Oracle instances, scaling and protecting Oracle
without application impact, and higher utilization at reduced cost. Today, with the latest
generation of EMC Symmetrix® VMAX™, EMC and VMware can deliver these virtualization
benefits while also dramatically increasing performance and improving Oracle licensing
return on investment (ROI).
1. MAXIMIZE PERFORMANCE WHILE MEETING SLAs
The nature of Oracle Database 11g OLTP environments is that application workloads will
change over time, often requiring Oracle users to constantly monitor and tune the database
to maintain SLAs. EMC developed FAST VP technology as a means to deliver more efficient
storage management.
EMC FAST VP identifies highly-active Oracle data and moves it to high-performing Enterprise
Flash drives (EFDs), while inactive or less active data is moved to a storage tier more suited
to its performance requirements. EMC FAST VP uses EMC Virtual Provisioning™ thin pools
(virtual pools) to provision storage. These virtual pools allow tiering of Oracle database
workloads at a sub-LUN level, allowing a finer granularity of storage tiering for significantly
more efficient storage provisioning in virtualized environments.
These features enable the underlying storage resources to alleviate the DBA’s management
burden and maintain maximized performance, over time as workloads change, with minimal
tuning required.
EMC and VMware have jointly tested and documented a series of solutions that demonstrate
how to combine the benefits of EMC FAST VP with VMware for Oracle Database 11g RAC environments in order to provision more Oracle instances and storage resources, while delivering more Oracle performance in a virtual machine environment.
The combination of EMC FAST VP with VMware provides the following performance
advantages:
•Applications can extract 44 percent more performance (TPM) with negligible change in
response times
•System performance scales more efficiently as workloads increase (single instance or RAC)
•VMware and EMC FAST VP reduce SLA performance tuning required by DBAs from hours to
minutes
(*Measured transactions per minute in a complex OLTP workload)
Software: VMware vSphere™ 4.1; EMC VMAX, EMC Enginuity™ 5875; Oracle 11g R2 11.2.0.2
2. DEPLOY MORE ORACLE IN LESS TIME
Every Oracle environment requires the constant setup and management of test and development and maintenance environments, in support of production environments, which can be
very time consuming. VMware and EMC replication software allow more of these Oracle environments to be set up and managed in less time and with less effort. With virtualization,
new capabilities include the ability to set up and deploy more instances of Oracle on the
same hardware in less time. Virtualization also improves the mobility of databases by allowing Oracle to be moved quickly and seamlessly across servers and storage infrastructure,
enabling the setup of new instances of Oracle without application impact.
EMC and VMware developed a solution that can deploy new Oracle instances in a matter of
minutes as opposed to days that would be required to acquire and set up an additional
application server. By combining VMware virtual machine templates with Oracle Rapid Cloning methodologies and EMC replication software, the solution enables DBAs to deploy up to
10 virtual machines in 10 minutes, recreating a full Oracle database, middleware, and
applications environment.
3. SCALE AND PROTECT APPLICATIONS WITHOUT IMPACT
Complementing the value to test and development, EMC and VMware solutions greatly
enhance the ability to increase database server and storage capacity on demand, while
improving overall system availability.
Instead of setting up and mounting the database along with the other steps necessary in a
physical environment, DBAs can provision a new VM, instantly creating additional server and
storage capacity faster and more efficiently.
In addition, EMC storage offerings and VMware offer improved high availability through
accelerated failover between virtual machines while applications remain online. In the event
of a server failure, the entire load of virtual machines will fail over to a backup server in a
matter of minutes.
4. IMPROVED LICENSING ROI WITH FULL ORACLE SUPPORT
Many Oracle customers deploying Oracle on x86 must fully license their servers for Oracle
database software use. In this model, being able to deploy as many instances of Oracle as
possible on that server is imperative to maximizing ROI on their Oracle software investments.
A virtualized environment preserves DBAs’ skills: 98 percent of
Oracle database physical optimization and tuning is directly applicable in the virtual environment. In addition, VMware virtual machines
enable DBAs to leverage more Oracle instances on the same hardware and deploy virtual machines in a variety of ways depending
on the Oracle application use.
A top customer concern regarding private cloud computing is ensuring tight integration and support. Today, Oracle supports the use of
VMware in both Oracle RAC and single-instance environments. All
Oracle technologies supported for use with VMware are documented
on Oracle MetaLink* and EMC.com. In addition, EMC engages regularly with both VMware and Oracle support organizations with
defined escalation paths ensuring customers the strongest levels of
joint support among the three companies.
5. INCREASE SERVER UTILIZATION AND REDUCE COST
THROUGH CONSOLIDATION
Given the time and complexity of provisioning new Oracle instances in a physical environment today, many Oracle environments will typically run their Oracle servers at less than 20
percent utilization to allow for spikes in performance and headroom for growth. Utilizing virtual machines for Oracle environments allows for more Oracle instances on the same server
hardware and enables instances to be deployed and/or removed quickly and efficiently with
far less configuration steps required than in physical environments. Oracle customers utilizing VMware can typically increase utilization rates from approximately 20 percent to as much
as 80 percent, allowing for server consolidation savings.
Through deploying VMware in a range of environments**, EMC IT, one of Oracle’s largest customers, has reduced its data centers’ server count by over 90 percent, while increasing overall server utilization and productivity. By reducing servers from 210 physical application
servers to 20 VMware ESX® virtual servers, EMC IT determined that virtualization has
reduced costs by 82 percent due to decreased server expenditures, power and cooling costs,
and rack and overall data center space.
*Refer to Oracle Support Statement Metalink/MyOracleSupport Document ID #249212.1.
**Production, Test, Development, Patch, and Reporting
CONTACT US
See EMC Solutions in action. Visit either
EMC Solution Centers or schedule a visit to
EMC’s Executive Briefing Centers to see for
yourself how the combination of EMC,
VMware, and Oracle provides a strong
foundation for all your business needs.
Contact your EMC representative for more
information.
EMC2, EMC, Enginuity, Symmetrix, Virtual Provisioning, VMAX, the EMC logo, and where information lives are registered trademarks or
trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware, ESX, and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks
or trademarks of VMware, Inc., in the U.S. and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective
owners. © Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 02/11 Handout H7494.2
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