Oracle VM: Your Enterprise Deserves More…
Recently, Oracle has been flooding the airwaves with claims that Oracle VM templates are a better way to deploy the many products in their sprawling software portfolio. We’ve taken a look at those template capabilities and have some comments below, but there are other issues we’ve found with Oracle VM you should be aware of before considering it for a production deployment.
Oracle VM lacks a number of important features and tools that are required to run applications in the enterprise. Absence of these features in any virtualization solution makes for an enterprise environment that may not be able to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement) obligations to the customers as well as an administrative headache to deploy and maintain.
Here are some of the Oracle VM shortcomings we’ve encountered after trying it out:
- Oracle VM has no built-in capability to integrate with naming services such as Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP. We all know the shortcut that leads to – just have everyone share the same login.
- Oracle VM has limited RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) capability so you can’t control user permissions with fine-grained customizable access to various objects in OVM.
- Limited guest OS support (OEL, Red Hat, Windows) rules out Oracle VM if your applications run on other OSs like Novell NetWare, SUSE Linux or Solaris.
- Oracle VM has no real workload balancing tool like VMware DRS. You’ll need to run your servers at lower utilization and keep a closer eye on VMs with spiking loads.
- Oracle VM’s reliance on Xen as its virtualization engine means lower VM density per host as Xen 3.1 has no memory overcommit feature like that of VMware ESX. Overcommit lowers TCO and add great flexibility to VM management.
- Oracle VM pools are only server pools and not resource pools. This prevents memory and CPU resources from being better managed and shared by VMs in the pool. You can’t carve out resource pools for your business and let them operate autonomously as you can with VMware.
- Oracle VM has no built-in fault tolerance features and VMs must rely on third party tools for zero-downtime fault tolerance. The new VMware vSphere FT feature brings continuous availability to any OS, any app, any hardware.
- Oracle VM has no snapshot features. That means developers and administrators are handicapped as they are unable to make instant point-in-time copies of VMs to use to roll back development and administrative activities.
- No patch management utility in Oracle VM means manual intervention or extensive scripting is required to administer patching of hosts and VMs. VMware Update Manager automates host and guest patching – typically the most time-consuming task for virtualization sysadmins.
- Oracle VM also has no backup utility for VMs and relies on LAN-based backup agents that run in each VM. It is also limited in its capability to take advantage of Storage Array based backup for VMs. Without a snapshot-based backup proxy feature like VMware Consolidated Backup or the new vSphere Data Recovery, backups that run in the guests tie up your network and burn host CPU cycles.
- NIC teaming or bonding support is also missing in Oracle VM and it relies on NIC vendors for support or extensive scripting to provide network redundancy. NIC teaming and bonding is built into VMware ESX and dead simple to use.
- Performance monitoring in Oracle VM is limited in the statistics gathered and the time frames that can be viewed. That makes it insufficient for capacity planning or long-term resource utilization monitoring.
Finally, let me say a word or two about Oracle VM Templates.
Virtual appliances like Oracle VM templates are a good way to distribute software in standardized and portable container. The virtual appliance concept is even better when customers can choose the applications, operating systems and hypervisors to use with those appliances. However, Oracle has taken the virtual appliance concept and twisted it into another way to lock its customers into a 100% Oracle world. The point of virtual appliances is simplicity and flexibility, but Oracle templates take away the flexibility benefit entirely. No prudent DBA, system administrator or IT Manager that I know of would deploy these locked-down templates as gold image in their production enterprise datacenter. Those users need appliances that can be adapted to their own requirements Those customizations can be choice of OS, file system layout, performance tuning kernel parameters or security requirements for package deployments. The restricted Oracle VM templates at best can only serve for preliminary validation of Oracle’s products. Their templates have a fixed configuration and they only support Oracle’s own OEL operating system and they can run only on the Oracle VM hypervisor platform. It sounds like the perfect strategy for a top-to-bottom lock-in. Not many CIOs will want to accept that degree of control by a single vendor.
It will be interesting to see what impact the purchase of Sun Microsystems will have on Oracle VM’s roadmap. Sun brings their own Xen-based hypervisor to the party with xVM and it’s supposedly a pretty good implementation, however, I have yet to see a copy of Sun xVM in the wild. Will Oracle keep both Xen products alive or is one headed for the dustbin?
Michael Hong
ehorschman
kmontakhab
tstephan
Alberto
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What is missing Oracle VM to be enterprise grade type of hypervisor! « DeinosCloud
May 5, 2009 at 1:40 am
Hi,
Could you ellaborate on the following line as mentioned in your article :- ‘Oracle VM pools are only server pools and not resource pools. This prevents memory and CPU resources from being better managed and shared by VMs in the pool. You can’t carve out resource pools for your business and let them operate autonomously as you can with VMware.’
Sumit Singh
May 23, 2009 at 11:26 am
I think your assessment is targeted toward organizations whose administrative staff of the virtualized environment are more “point-and-click” focused.
Being based on Xen, I actually find Oracle VM to be far superior to VMware ESX as a solution, simply because of the back-engine of Xen and the opportunities afforded by distinction being paravirtualization and hypervisor-based virtualization.
It must be noted that, with regard to TCO, one can reliably run a MySQL DB, 3 Apache 2 webservers, 2 JVM servers, a Perforce server, a Subversion server, and a bastion host on a single Xen server which costs $300 to build from parts from Fry’s.
That kind of functionality and flexibility, when implemented on enterprise-class hardware affords great headroom and from this flexibility comes the value proposition.
Let us bear in mind that Amazon S3/EC2 is based on Xen. And so is Oracle VM.
Therefore, I think it more fair to say that Oracle VM is a poor replacement for the user-friendly richness of VMware.
But as a solution stack, administered by intermediate to senior-level Linux/Unix/Solaris administrators; it can be tailored and configured to suit an environment and deliver great value.
Again, the idea of Xen (and therefore Oracle VM) is that the solution does not subsume the rest of the stack. Shadow-imaging is a back-end technology, so let the SAN do it. This is not Xen’s job or forte. Bonding and bridging is done at the OS level, therefore Xen doesn’t do it for you. LACP or PaGP models are configurable by the installer, there is no VLAN trunking interface on the web gui. Fault-tolerance can be designed via various servers in a server pool.
VMware is friendlier. But I believe Xen is more flexible and dynamic. The burden is upon the system architect to design how the solution is implemented. Which, I think, is how it should be.
The learning curve is far steeper, however.
Alvin Cura
July 28, 2009 at 3:01 pm
How has anyone overcome the reluctance to offer a Oracle supported platform using VMWare? I hear your ideas, the pros and cons. If I have to call Oracle because of my feature rich friendly gui vmware installation has died, who can I look to for support?
Kyle
August 18, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Kyle,
Oracle will support customers running its products on a VMware platform, but with some restrictions. If you have access to the Oracle support site, take a look at Metalink article 249212.1 for the details. In short, it says that Oracle does not certify its products in a VMware environment, but they will provide support, “for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware.”
I’m not aware of any Oracle customers who have been denied support by Oracle because they were running on VMware. However, Oracle sales reps will frequently (and usually, unsuccessfully) bring up their lack of certification for VMware as FUD to drive customers to their own Oracle VM Xen hypervisor.
Eric
Eric Horschman
August 19, 2009 at 2:21 pm
I’m not sure which version of Oracle VM you had a go at, but trunking and bonding works just fine on 2.1 and 2.2. It must be configured from the command line, but there is no scripting involved.
It might be worth mentioning that Oracle VM, whatever shortcomings it otherwise has, far outperforms VMware for Oracle databases.
Roy
November 13, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Roy,
Could you provide some references to test results showing that Oracle VM “far outperforms” VMware ESX with Oracle databaseses? VMware has published test results of vSphere 4 running Oracle using a TPC-C based workload (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_ESX40_Oracle-TPC-C-eval.pdf). Those results show vSphere VMs delivering close to native performance with results scaling all the way up to 8-way VMs. Our report provides figures for DB transactions per second and IOPS in vSphere VMs that are far in excess of requirements for typical Oracle DBs.
I’m aware of the Tolly Group study Oracle commissioned that shows only Oracle VM results compared to native (no absolute TPS or IOPS figures) and only 2-way VMs. There’s nothing there backing up claims that Oracle VM outperforms vSphere.
Has Oracle published other test results?
Eric Horschman
November 13, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Eric,
Your link is broken, but I typically don’t find those reports very usefull so it doesn’t matter. I believe the Tolly Group report is what Oracle bases their claim on but I’m more concerned with real world experience.
Just today an AS3AP insert test I ran with 50 users showed 2806,09 tps on Oracle VM 2.2 and 1812,52 on ESXi 3.5.
Granted this is out of the box performance on lab hardware, and the differences tend to be a little less when you involve production hardware and some real storage, but it illustrates what I experience myself and hear from others.
It’s almost certainly possible to get better perfomance from both solutions, but most customers seem unwilling to spend much time fiddeling with a low cost platform.
Roy
November 14, 2009 at 7:37 am
The parenthesis broke the link to the vSphere 4 Oracle performance paper in my comment above. Try this:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_ESX40_Oracle-TPC-C-eval.pdf
I still contend that published and documented benchmark reports with absolute scores are what matters. VMware has published ours as above and Oracle has not.
Eric
Eric Horschman
November 16, 2009 at 9:33 am
Moving my companies server to Virtual Iron rather than VMWare was the WORST move I have ever made in my career. I went with Virtual Iron due to their personal service which was extraordinary, now I have to deal with the worst support in the industry!!! Oracle could care less if they lose a customer due to poor support. The expect us all to just take what they try to shove down our throat. I originally was told I would get perpetual support on Virtual Iron until we moved to Oracle VM at which time I would have to purchase support for Oracle VM. Now I have received a bill for Virtual Iron support which took over two weeks to respond to a system critical error! They are the worst, its well worth your time to move to VMWare rather than to upgrade to OracleVM. Stay FAR FAR AWAY!!!!
matt
December 21, 2009 at 1:45 pm