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The following table lists the software components that were integrated in our VxBlock 1000 test system:
Table 4. Software components of the tested VxBlock 1000
Component | Details |
Hypervisor operating system | VMware vSphere 6.7 virtualization |
Guest operating systems
|
|
Oracle Grid and Oracle Database on Linux |
|
Microsoft SQL Server database on Linux | SQL Server 2019 CTP 3.2 |
Dell EMC Unisphere for PowerMax 8000 (including embedded CloudIQ statistics collector and Database Storage Analyzer) | 9.0.2.7 |
The Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 Architecture Overview provides an extensive list of VMware components that are installed in VxBlock 1000. Virtualization enables you to pool compute and storage resources to drive greater hardware efficiencies. In this mixed workload solution, we used vSphere to virtualize both the SQL Server and Oracle databases and to assign CPU and memory resources.
In our testing, the CPU and memory resources allocated to SQL Server and Oracle were not the same, nor were the number of databases. Our goal was not to compare SQL Server to Oracle, but to place mixed databases and database workloads on the VxBlock 1000 CI to show how this single-infrastructure solution accelerates consolidated databases. The following table shows the Oracle and SQL Server VM configurations:
Table 5. VM configurations for databases
Workload type | Database type | Database size (TB) | Virtual machine number | vCPU allocation | vMem allocation (GB) | Database memory reservation (GB) |
OLTP
| Oracle | 1.5 | VM 1 | 10 | 150 | 56 (48 SGA + 8 PGA) |
SQL Server | 1 | VM 1 | 6 | 64 | 8 | |
SQL Server | 1 | VM 2 | 6 | 64 | 8 | |
OLAP
| Oracle | 3 | VM 1 | 8 | 256 | 96 (32 SGA + 64 PGA) |
SQL Server | 1 | VM 1 | 8 | 256 | 32 | |
SQL Server | 1 | VM 2 | 8 | 256 | 32 | |
Snapshot OLTP
| Oracle | 1.5 | VM 1 | 6 | 150 | 36 (28 SGA + 8 PGA) |
SQL Server | 1 | VM 1 | 4 | 64 | 8 |
The read/write mix for OLTP workloads is 60 percent reads and 40 percent writes. For OLAP workloads it is 100 percent reads with a block size of 8k. Effectively, the combined size of eight databases is 11 TB. Each virtualized database used a subset of the available compute cores on the Cisco servers. We assigned 24 compute cores to Oracle VMs, leaving 136 cores for additional database consolidation on the Cisco UCS B480 M5 blade server that was dedicated to Oracle. Similarly, we assigned 32 compute cores to the SQL Server VMs, leaving 128 cores available for other databases.
We used memory reservations to dedicate memory to each virtualized database. We set low memory reservations for each database to generate activity on the PowerMax 8000 storage array. For customer production databases, we recommend reserving more memory, because in-memory operations are faster than storage operations. Like the CPU configurations, the memory configurations used a subset of the available memory on the server. Across all the Oracle virtualized databases, the amount of used memory was 188 GB, and the total available memory on the Cisco UCS B480 M5 blade server was 1.5 TB. For all the SQL Server virtualized databases, the amount of used memory was 88 GB, and the total available memory on the Cisco UCS B480 M5 blade server was 1.5 TB.
You can limit compute cores at the database layer by using Oracle CPU caging or SQL Server resource governor, or at the Linux operating system layer with groups. However, vSphere virtualization simplifies resource management, making it the best choice for assigning compute cores and memory.