New from VMware's performance team:
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2007/11/ten-reasons-why.html
Ten Reasons Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware
We're really excited about the buzz around Oracle in virtualized environments. One of the best kept secrets is just how well Oracle performs on VMware ESX. This didn't happen by accident - there are a number of features and performance optimizations in the VMware ESX server architecture, specifically for databases.
In this blog, I'll walk through the top ten most important features for getting the best database performance. Here are a few of the performance highlights:
Near Native Performance: Oracle databases run at performance similar to that of a physical system
Extreme Database I/O Scalability: VMware ESX Server's thin hypervisor layer can drive over 63,000 database I/Os per second (fifty times the requirement of a typical database)
Multi-core Scaling: Scale up using SMP virtual machines and multiple database instances
Large Memory: Scalable memory - 64GB per database, 256GB per host
We've continued to invest a great deal of work towards optimizing Oracle performance on VMware, because it's already one of the most commonly virtualized applications. The imminent ESX 3.5 release is our best database platform to date, with several new advanced optimizations.
In this blog article we'd like to explain the unique and demanding nature of database applications such as Oracle produces and show the performance capabilities of ESX Server on this type of workload.