Oracle on VMware – The Final Frontier

A question I tend to ask my customers almost always is what their current state is regarding IT transformation and journey to the cloud. Of course such a strategy does not work very well on bare metal and some kind of isolation between services and physical hardware is required – which naturally includes virtualization, as well as the use of some kind of container technology, as-a-Service paradigms, changes in IT administration and operations etc.

Nearly always the answer includes “We already virtualized everything! … Well, ehm, except Oracle….”

TL;DR: There are no more roadblocks for virtualizing Oracle, including license issues. See the last section “Mythbusting” of this post for a summary on myths and truths.

Five reasons to choose VMware vs Oracle Multitenant

While busy preparing another blogpost on my dedupe analyzer tool, I was triggered to write a quick hotlist of reasons why one would strategically choose VMware virtualization over Oracle multitenant option if the goal is to achieve operational and cost benefits. There may be other good reasons to go for Oracle Multitenant but cost savings is not one of them.

On twitter I claimed I could give 5 reasons why, so here we go…

WARNING: Controversial topic – further reading at own risk ;-)

Baking a cake: trading CPU for IO?

Sometimes I hear people claim that by using faster storage, you can save on database licenses. True or false?

The idea is that many database servers are suffering from IO wait – which actually means that the processors are waiting for data to be transferred to or from storage – and in the meantime, no useful work can be done. Given the expensive licenses that are needed for running commercial database software, usually licensed per CPU core, this then leads to loss of efficiency.

Let’s see if we can visualise the problem here with a common world example – Baking a cake.
 
 

The public transport company needs new buses

A public transport company in a city called Galactic City, needs to replace its aging city buses with new ones. It asks three bus vendors what they have to offer and if they can do a live test to see if their claims about performance and efficiency holds up.

The transport company uses the city buses to move people between different locations in the city. The average trip distance is about 2 km. The vendors all prepare their buses for the test. The buses are the latest and greatest, with the most efficient and powerful engines and state of the art technology.

VMware is really expensive

A while ago somebody forwarded me a research paper from an “independent” research firm in which the cost of VMware and Oracle VM were compared. Interesting!

Now you might wonder why, as someone working for EMC, I would care about such comparisons. Why would I be bothered by VMware in the first place?

Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) for (storage) dummies

Although EMC and Oracle have been long-time partners, the Exadata Database Machine is the exception to the rule and competes with EMC products directly. So I find myself more and more in situations where EMC offerings are compared directly with Exadata features and functions. Note that Oracle offers more competing products, including some storage offerings such as the ZFS storage appliance and the Axiom storage systems, but so far I haven’t seen a lot of pressure from those (except when these are bundled with Exadata).
Recently I have visited customers who asked me questions on how EMC technology for databases compares with, in particular, Oracle’s Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) on Exadata. And some of my colleagues, being storage aliens and typically not database experts, have been asking me what this Hybrid Compression thing is in the first place.

Save money by virtualizing Oracle

I wrote an internal EMC memo on licensing issues with Oracle on VMware as I get a lot of questions on this topic. But I’d like to expand the question a bit. After all, my blog is named “Dirty Cache” which could also be substituted with “Dirty Cash” – and as said, my mission is to lower cost and drive up service levels for my customers…

Here my internal memo (slightly edited for the blog and updated with a few corrections). Again, I want to make it clear that these are my own opinions based on (limited) customer experiences, I might be completely wrong and that’s why my blog has a disclaimer ;-)

Use this information at your own risk – don’t shoot the messenger.

Original question:

How should we license Oracle database on VMware?

Beefed up question:

How can we save money on licensing and other expenses by virtualizing Oracle?

Thin Provisioning

Some customers ask us – not surprisingly – how they can reduce their total cost of ownership in their information infrastructure even more. In response, I sometimes ask them what the utilization is of their storage systems.

Their answer: often something like 70% – you need of course some spare capacity for sudden application growth, so close to 100% is probably not a good idea.

Overallocating storage

If you really measure the utilization you often find other numbers. And I don’t mean the overhead of RAID, replication, spare drives, backup copies etc. because I consider these as required technology – invisible from the applications but needed for protection and so on. So the question is – of each net gigabyte of storage, how much is actually used by all applications?