Performance Analysis of Oracle Database in Virtual Environments

The prevalence of server consolidation to capitalize on performance gains has seen various vendors presenting their virtual solution as the best option. This therefore highlights the importance of an independent and unbiased academic research in facilitating informed decisions. In this paper we examine the correctness of the marketing claim currently available at the Oracle's website that the Oracle VM server virtualization is four times more scalable than the VMware' virtualization solution. Therefore, we present results of tests and quantitative analysis of the effects of workload and configuration options on the Oracle database performance. The scalability tests were conducted in a non virtualized environment and compared with results of the tests in two virtualized server environments on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 platform: (1) VMware ESXi 4.1 and (2) Oracle VM 2.2. The results of our tests confirm that the Oracle VM offers more scalability for Oracle 11g database applications than the VMware ESXi on a number of performance benchmarks. However, the experimental results for Oracle database applications do not show a clearly superior scalability of the Oracle VM server virtualization compared to the VMware ESXi virtualization solution. It is expected that the presented results will contribute to the awareness on the importance of an independent research for server virtualization informed decisions.