If I told you that I could do something to make your most mission critical app:
- Perform better.
- Cost less.
- Have higher overall availaiblity.
…you would either: A) assume I’m a vendor trying to sell you something and write it off as such; b) assume I’ve made an error – and ignore my advice; c) investigate, and if you agree, you would consider that deployment model for the app.
Or, you’d be a person who likes “just keep it the way it is” SO much that you are willing to pay more, for less performance, and suffer more downtime. Ergo, there’s something wrong with you.
Well – here you have it: If you virtualize your Oracle environment on vSphere on EMC, it can perform better, cost less, and have higher overall availability. Oh – I’ll throw in better agility through the test/dev/UAT/QA/Prod process while I’m at it. This is what today’s news is about.
Caveat: Now, admittedly, I do work for a vendor, which by definition I work for someone who is in the business of trying to sell you something. Our ongoing growth and success at EMC and at VMware (see Q2 results for EMC “EMC Reports Record Second-Quarter Revenue and Profit” and VMware “VMware Reports Second Quarter 2011 Results”) means that we’re doing it and providing value to our customers (thank you customers!).
But, on the topic of mission critical apps being moved to commodity hardware and virtualized, I feel particularly passionate (and have posted on it here, here, and many other places) – and think the reasons people don’t move forward aren’t technical. So – forget me as a vendor. Go ahead and ignore what I say. Here’s the voice of the customer:
“In a physical server model, cloning our production Oracle database configuration for test and development was time consuming, complex and expensive, leading to an inappropriate environment that was unacceptable. Virtualizing our Oracle database servers with VMware vSphere® on EMC VMAX and EMC VNX storage system allows us to quickly create as many test and development environments as we need using the same virtual infrastructure in just minutes. In addition, virtualizing our Oracle servers has allowed us to leverage more Oracle instances per physical core with the possibility to run different OS and Oracle software versions on the same host, improving the return on investment in our Oracle software. After the virtualization of Oracle with VMware, our staff was quite surprised to find that Oracle performed even faster as a virtualized application than it did before. I believe that Oracle runs 10 percent faster within a virtual environment. Our ability to virtualize Oracle has saved the bank hundreds of thousands of euro.” - Andrei Maier, System Architect of Swedbank.
Here’s another:
“Through virtualization of our mission-critical application environments, including Oracle, we have been able to consolidate from fifty physical servers to four VMware vSphere® servers, a nearly fifteen to one consolidation. I can now deploy an Oracle test database in under an hour and have it ready to test the latest release of our banking application. Through the use of EMC DataDomain, we have achieved a de-dupe ratio of 20:1 during backups allowing us to scale our virtual environment cost effectively,”…“With our EMC and VMware cloud, IT has become an enabler of growth and services. Accommodating this growth used to be a time consuming and expensive process. Now, we’re able to have server and storage resources ready in a few hours and with no additional cost, when in the past it took weeks. Our agility and responsiveness have improved dramatically.”…
On top of that, they also use VMware Site Recovery Manager and EMC RecoverPoint to support their virtualized Oracle environment – resulting in a much improved recovery time objective (RTO) protects the bank from downtime, taking minutes, instead of hours or longer, to switch over to the recovery location in the event of a disaster. Remember – Oracle Dataguard is fantastic – but doesn’t provide end-to-end DR for the full app – and you need to protect more than just the database.
…“RecoverPoint with VMware SRM is a lifesaver,” Smithey states. “If I have a recovery situation, we just press a couple buttons and RecoverPoint and SRM do the job. And our IT people are the heroes.” Mark A. Smithey, Vice President, technology services at The Washington Trust Company.
I’ll give you one more:
“Before virtualizing, utilization rates were typically in the range of 15-20% for our Oracle database servers. Since deploying VMware vSphere® on EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage platform we have almost doubled our server utilization rates through leveraging more Oracle instances on the same infrastructure, increasing our return on investment. In addition, migrating our Oracle database servers to the VMware platform and Linux has led to increased database performance and we can now leverage the functionality of VMware vSphere for faster server failover and high availability,” - Haim Inger, Chief Technology Officer, CLAL.
So there you have it. Note – each of the customers – in their own words – after virtualizing Oracle on vSphere (even before vSphere 5!) on EMC, they experienced:
- Higher performance
- Lowered costs
- Improved availability
All these customer stories, plus new reference architectures validating these results and de-risking implementations, all pulled together with standardized services to help you in making a custom case for your environment is the news of the day.
Read on for more performance, best practices, details on licensing, and where to go for help…
Continue reading "Even MORE reasons to run Oracle on VMware" »

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