Oracle VM 3.4.x & PVM vs HVM PV

Initially when we started to use Oracle VM we did lot of performance testing and at that point we went with Paravirtualized VM’s (PVM) due to better performance we saw with them. Now with our recent upgrade to Oracle VM 3.4.2 if you are using hugepages (we do!) then hugepages are not supported anymore with…

Optimizing performance for Oracle VM when using iSCSI storage

We implemented Oracle VM 3.3.2 around two years ago and biggest issue we had was using iSCSI storage having sub-optimal latency and throughput with parallel sessions and high load in our performance tests. In the end this was resolved by linux disk partition alignment and few iSCSI optimizations. Problem After doing the initial Oracle VM installation we started…

Oracle OVS, Broadcom Netextreme II and 10G network

We recently upgraded our LAN network from 1G to 10G but the Oracle OVS servers network cards showed only 1G link even though the advertised link was 10G. [root@ovs1 ~]# ethtool em1 Settings for em1: Supported ports: [ FIBRE ] Supported link modes: 1000baseT/Full Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link…

Upgrading Oracle VM 3.3.3 to 3.4.2

Now when we have used demo 3.4.2 for some time without issues I decided to upgrade our sandbox Oracle VM setup from 3.3.3 to 3.4.2 to get experience for the actual production upgrade coming later. We have two installations of Oracle VM. One is sandbox which has some old blade servers acting as OVS and…

Installing Oracle VM 3.4.2 (Part 1)

Moi! We currently use Oracle VM 3.3.3 quite heavily and look to improve our setup. So for that I decided to install latest Oracle VM 3.4.2. to see what improvements it brings. Oracle Virtualization blog has good summary on 3.4.2: https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/oracle_vm_3_4_2 To install I had to download two files. One for OVM Manager and one…