Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere

Book excerpt: The start-to-finish guide to virtualizing business-critical Oracle Software and Databases on VMware vSphere Virtualizing large-scale Oracle software and databases on vSphere can deliver powerful scalability, availability, and performance benefits. Recognizing this opportunity, thousands of organizations are moving to virtualize Oracle. However, reliable best practices have been difficult to find, and database and virtualization professionals often bring incompatible perspectives to the challenge. Virtualizing Oracle® Databases on vSphere® is the first authoritative, comprehensive, and best-practice guide to running Oracle on VMware platforms. Reflecting a deep understanding of both Oracle and vSphere, this guide is supported by extensive in-the-field experience with the full spectrum of database applications and environments. Both a detailed reference and a practical cookbook, it combines theory and practice, and offers up-to-date insights for the entire lifecycle, supported by case studies. Kannan Mani and Don Sullivan fully address architecture, performance, design, sizing, and high availability. Focusing on current versions of Oracle and vSphere, they highlight the differences between ESX/ESXi 4.x and 5.x wherever relevant. To deliver even more value, they provide extensive online resources, including easy-to-adapt scripts and expert how-to videos. Coverage includes: Understanding the DBA’s expanded role in virtualized environments, and the emergence of the vDBA, vRACDBA, and Cloud DBA Identifying your best opportunities to drive value from virtualizing Oracle Anticipating challenges associated with virtualizing Oracle-based Business Critical Applications on vSphere Using VMware to overcome ongoing database deployment and management problems Protecting your virtualized database environment with vSphere’s high-availability capabilities Designing databases to achieve scalability on demand, maximize availability, consolidate servers, and improve compliance Implementing best practices for memory, storage, and database layout Demystifying the impact of virtualization on Oracle support and licensing Using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to accelerate disaster recovery by seamlessly integrating VM and storage failover Streamlining provisioning and taking advantage of opportunities to automate