The public transport company needs new buses

Bart Sjerps Innovation, Oracle, Performance 2 Comments

Future-British-Bus-1A 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.

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Getting the most out of your server resources

Bart Sjerps Oracle, Performance, Virtualization 12 Comments

hearseespeak

As an advocate on database virtualization, I often challenge customers to consider if they are using their resources in an optimal way.

And so I usually claim, often in front of a skeptical audience, that physically deployed servers hardly ever reach an average utilization of more than 20 per cent (thereby wasting over 80% of the expensive database licenses, maintenance and options).

Magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum of the senses. Humans have cut themselves off from their senses. Now they see only a tiny portion of the visible spectrum, hear only the loudest of sounds, their sense of smell is shockingly poor and they can only distinguish the sweetest and sourest of tastes.

– Michael Scott, The Alchemyst

About one in three times, someone in the audience objects and says that they achieve much better utilization than my stake-in-the-ground 20 percent number, and so use it as a reason (valid or not) for not having to virtualize their databases, for example, with VMware.

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Announcing my Openworld 2013 presentation material

Bart Sjerps Oracle, Performance 1 Comment

oow2013flashLast Tuesday I had the privilege to present at Oracle Openworld 2013 together with Sam Marraccini (the guy with the big smile here in the pic) from EMC’s Flash products division. Sam introduced the various EMC Flash offerings we have, and I discussed some experiences and best practices from the field. We really got lots of interaction with the audience, and many questions (at one point I was looking at about 5 hands raised simultaneously) which caused me to run out of time finishing some of the best practices I planned to discuss at the end. But interaction is always better than just us talking so I got the feeling the session was successful – although I’d like to hear from people in the audience what their thoughts are (feel free to comment!)

When people started to make snapshots of the slides with their iPhones, we promised the audience to make the slides available ASAP. So here they are. They will probably also be available via Oracle’s OOW pages within time. (more…)

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Starting an Oracle database on physical server using VMware VMDK volumes

Bart Sjerps Oracle, Virtualization 3 Comments

By now, we all know Oracle is fully supported on VMware. Anyone telling you it’s not supported is either lying to you, or doesn’t know what he is talking about (I keep wondering what’s worse).

VMware support includes Oracle RAC (if it’s version 11.2.0.2.0 or above).  However, Oracle may request to reproduce problems on physically deployed systems in case they suspect the problem is related to the hypervisor. The support note says:

Oracle will only 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.

In case that happens, I recommend to contact VMWare support first because they might be familiar with the issue or can escalate the problem quickly. VMware support will take full ownership of the problem. Still, I have met numerous customers who are afraid of having to reproduce issues quickly and reliably on physical in case the escalation policy does not help. We need to get out of the virtual world, into reality, without making any other changes.  How do we do that?

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