Oracle and Virtualization

[Jade.Freeman]

Does anyone have experience running oracle on a virtualized os? Our IT department wants to start virtualizing servers to make it easy to back up, restore, disaster recovery etc.

Thanks!

[Chris.Tolken]

I havent seen any virtualization of Oracle yet, but i did come across the following two interesting articles:

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/v...cs/ovm-faq.pdf

http://www.computerworld.com/action/...leId=9046 579

[Jade.Freeman]

Our new PM system is up and running on an Oracle database installed on a VMWare virtual windows server.

So far so good...

[Gareth.van der Merwe]

Just on another note regarding Oracle and Virtualization. We have been using VMWare Workstation mainly for QA purposes and it seems to work really well.

We setup Virtual Machines with the Autodesk products installed with Oracle Instant Client. We have done this to avoid multiple instances of Oracle running using valuable resources and memory.

You can run Oracle on your host machine and then in the virtual machine with Oracle Instant Client installed you can connect to the host machine using the following syntax (Example - I'm using the Munsys Login screen from Munsys Applications):

User Name: MCITY10US
Password: MCITY10US
Schema: MCITY10US
Database: //MTGVDMERWENB:1521/ORCL11G

The format for the syntax for Oracle Instant client is:
//[host]:[port]/[service name]

[Jade.Freeman]

What is the difference between the instant client vs. the normal Oracle client? Are there performance impacts? Advantages? I'm not very familiar with the instant client. Would you suggest it mainly for testing the VM environment?

Thanks,

Jade

[Gareth.van der Merwe]

The best source of information is basically to look at the Oracle Instant Client site:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tec...ent/index.html

In summary it allows you to connect to an Oracle database without having to install Oracle client. Basically you can do that by doing the following:

1) Download the zip file from the Oracle Instant Client site (even the Basic package will work). The zip file basically consists of Oracle OCI etc.. DLLs
2) Unzip the file locally e.g. C:\instantclient_10_2
3) Add the C:\instantclient_10_2 path to your environment "PATH" variable. On XP, right-click on "My Computer", select Properties. Select the "Advanced" tab and click on the "Environment Variables" button. Under the "System variables" group box edit the "PATH" variable and add ";C:\instantclient_10_2" to the end of the string

That is all you need to do to connect to Oracle. Just use the connection string as described above

Cheers
Gareth

[Andy.McKoy]

for Info Gareth
Barwon Water have virtualized Oracle 10g2 in x86 hardware using solaris.
As yet unable to move to Ora 11 as not supported for this platform yet.
Further info available from our IT area. I should be able to provide contacts if required