Improve Storage Efficiency on Deploying Oracle Databases for Dev/Test in a Virtualized Environment Over NFS

Server virtualization technologies provided by VMware vSphere 4 allows you to virtualize database environments and create a base virtual machine that runs an Oracle Database 11g R2 properly installed and tested. This base virtual machine, which can be a golden copy of a real production Oracle database system, is stored as a set of files in a shared storage system, e.g. NetApp FAS. It is self-contained, including a guest operating system(Linux), Oracle home, and all the data and log partitions. So using RCU(rapid Cloning utility) to clone the virtual machine using NetApp’s storage efficient thin cloning technologies gives you all you need for application development, QA testing, and report generation in a Dev/test Oracle database 11g R2 setup. This eliminates the challenges of extended system downtime, degrade system performance during the cloning process and also eliminates the use up a large storage space to store each cloned virtual machine.

Learning Objectives

Best practices of running Oracle single Instance in a VSphere 4.0 environment
Ease of cloning the Oracle VMs using RCU in a Dev/Test environment is instantaneous and saves a lot of storage space.
Eliminates the need for developers to have physical hosts on which the database clones need to be mounted and also can be automated using RCU from VMware vCenter server.
To take consistent backup and restore oracle database volumes or files using SnapManager for Oracle
Ways to migrate Oracle DB from existing storage environment to NetApp