We used the following design principles to create the VMs:
- SCSI controllers—We created multiple SCSI controllers to optimize and balance the input/output (I/O) for the different database disks, as shown in the following table. We chose the controller type VMware Paravirtual for optimal performance.
Table 5. SCSI controller properties in the database VMs
SCSI 0 |
Guest operating system disk |
None |
VMware Paravirtual |
SCSI 1 |
Oracle DATA disks |
Physical |
VMware Paravirtual |
SCSI 2 |
Oracle REDO disks |
Physical |
VMware Paravirtual |
SCSI 3 |
Oracle OCR, FRA, TEMP disks |
Physical |
VMware Paravirtual |
- Hard disk drives—We assigned the following properties to all database-related virtual disks (such as DATA, REDO, FRA, OCR, and TEMP):
- Raw Device Mapping (RDM)—All Oracle-related disks that are presented to the ESXi host from the PowerStore T storage array are mapped directly as raw devices to the database VM.
- Virtual Device Node—For load balancing and optimal performance, the SCSI controllers are assigned as described in Table 5.
- VM vCPU and vMem—We assigned virtual CPU (vCPU) and virtual memory (vMem) amounts to the PROD and snapshot database VMs, as shown in the following table:
Table 6. VM configuration vCPU and vMem details
Number of vCPUs |
Reservation (GB) |
Total (GB) |
Limit (MB) |
Production |
8 |
256 |
256 |
Unlimited |
Snapshot |
8 |
256 |
256 |
Unlimited |