Running Oracle EBS on a Virtual Machine

I’d love to hear any comments on your experiences with running Oracle EBS on a VM, read below for our plans!

We maintain quite a few Oracle EBS systems in house in order to support the development our software. At last count we have 5 R12 instances, 3 11i10 instances, 3 11i9 instances and one instance each of 11.5.8, 11.5.7 and 11.5.4. Believe it or not, we even have a 11.0 machine from way back! All of these instances are running the Vision Demo Database on various flavors of Redhat and Oracle Enterprise Linux. These machines are locked down for sales demos, development, support and training.

The good news is that we don’t run all of these instances on individual machines as we had the foresight to buy beefy machines and partition them off accordingly. So, luckily for IT, the machine to instance count is not one to one! Having all of these systems in house gives us a lot of flexibility to validate/certify our software against what our customers are running and to provide demonstrations and internal training. What we’ve found to be lacking in using physical hardware is that we often step on each other’s feet when tinkering or have to schedule around each other to get time on a machine for development and training or occasionally have to spend a lot of time undoing mistakes made when tinkering… not to mention downtime for patching.

We have been a adopting virtualization software for use in other areas of the company and have standardized on VMWare as a platform for the time being. So over the past couple weeks we have been evaluating how we can leverage VMWare for creating fresh instances of various versions of EBS that we can bring up and take down or even blow away at will without worrying about leaving behind a mess for the next person or spending a lot of time rebuilding from scratch. In this model we would have template versions of EBS running on Linux that would provide us with the following benefits:

• A developer could make a copy of the template, develop against it and then blow it away without disrupting anyone needing a similar system. This is great because the system is always CLEAN!
• A support person could bring a copy online quickly to try and reproduce a customer issue.
• An internal trainer could bring a copy online for an employee and have everything be setup and clean for the student to learn.
• A way to apply patches without taking a critical server based machine offline. Once patches are installed, this VM becomes a new clean template.
• Quality Assurance can test software against completely clean instances of Oracle EBS
• If priorities shift, a Developer can save off the work they have done and come back to it later without having to worry about someone else coming in and clobbering it.
• Backup of critical development/demo machines.
• Potentially start migrating off of our physical servers and repurposing them for different needs throughout the company.

So after a fair amount of research it came down to a number of factors with VMWare.

• Storage/Disk Space (as you know, EBS is no slouch when it comes to disk space)
• Speed at which we could copy clean instances to scratch instances
• Most importantly, how well did EBS perform under VMWare.
  In the end we’ve decided that we are going to go with VMWare Server and pump up the RAM in a couple machines that will become our VM hosts. Doing some quick benchmarks we found the speed to be acceptable (if not the same or better than what we’re currently used to).I’ll admit, I did not take a look at Oracle’s VM product, mostly because we have already been using VMWare in house and time constraints. Oracle’s VM offering is interesting though and will likely be a rainy weekend project to setup and tinker with.

  How about anyone else out there, what have you used for virtualizing your dev/test instances of Oracle EBS? Like I said above, leave me a comment, I’d love to hear any experiences good or bad.