Oracle Workloads – Where Eagles Dare !!!

Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLAs.

This blog is an attempt to investigate Nutanix Volume Groups (VG), understand how it is fundamentally different & inherently simple when compared to VMware virtual disk (vmdk) sharing with multi-writer attribute between VM’s for Guest Clustering Applications e.g. Oracle Real Applications Clusters etc. and how Nutanix Volume Groups (VG) overcomes all the challenges that currently plagues VMware virtual disk sharing with multi-writer attribute that has been well documented in KB 1034165 for VMFS and KB 2121191 for vSAN.

Disclaimer – This is not an official Nutanix blog – just my private investigation in my lab environment, to get a better understanding how Nutanix platform works under the covers, having worked in the VMware space for 12+ years as the Global Oracle Practice Lead and in the Nutanix space as an Sr OEM System Engineer for the past couple months.

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End to End (E2E) 4kn support with VMware vSphere 9.0 – What does that mean for Oracle Workloads

VMware finally released End to End (E2E) 4kn support for VM vmdk’s with the VMware vSphere 9.0 release , announced June 19, 2025.

Business Critical Oracle databases would extremely benefit from using 4k redo blocksize to drive IO intensive workloads as opposed to using 512byte redo blocksize for all the obvious reasons , yes , it comes at the cost of redo wastage but there are pros and cons to everything.

The previous blog Oracle Workloads and Redo Log Blocksize – 512 bytes or 4k blocksize for redo log addressed the advantages of using Oracle Redo Log with 4k blocksize (default is 512 bytes with blocksize choices  512bytes, 1k and 4k) on VMware platforms and current challenges associated with that with roadmap guidance. The testing was done using 512e RDM’s to prove the theory.

This blog attempts to demonstrates the advantages of using Oracle Redo Log with 4k blocksize on vmdk’s using VMware vSphere 9.0 platform.

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Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLAs.

This blog is an attempt to investigate the relationship between Nutanix vDisks, Volume Groups (VG) & SCSI Controllers and how is fundamentally different when compared to VMware vmdk’s & PVSCSI Controllers.

Disclaimer – This is not an official Nutanix blog – just my private investigation in my lab environment, to get a better understanding how Nutanix platform works under the covers, having worked in the VMware space for 12+ years as the Global Oracle Practice Lead and in the Nutanix space as an Sr OEM System Engineer for the past couple months.

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Scratching my proverbial technical itch  – That’s what led me to poke under the Nutanix platform covers to see how Nutanix platform is different than VMware vSphere from a Storage perspective.

Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLAs.

This blog is an attempt to investigate my lab setup of Nutanix AHV/CVM & understand how storage is presented to & consumed by Oracle workload VM’s and why features like Data Locality, iSCSI redirects on CVM failure, PCI Pass through to CVM etc. are critical to Business Critical Oracle Workloads.

Disclaimer – This is not an official Nutanix blog – just my private investigation in my lab environment, to get a better understanding how Nutanix platform works under the covers, having worked in the VMware space for 12+ years as the Global Oracle Practice Lead and now currently working for Nutanix as an Sr OEM System Engineer.

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Business Critical Oracle Workloads have stringent IO requirements and enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLAs on VMware Cloud Foundations (VCF).

VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) has been the primary focus of VMware storage engineering for the last few releases, and with vSphere 8.0, it is no different. 

The biggest announcement in vSphere 8.0 core storage is adding vVols support in NVMeoF.

The reason for adding vVols support to NVMeoF is many of the array vendors, and the industry, are moving towards using or at least adding NVMeoF support for better performance and throughput. Subsequently, VMware is making sure vVols remains current with the latest storage technologies.

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Storage is one of the most important aspect of any IO intensive workloads, Oracle workloads typically fit this bill and we all know how a Tier2 Storage often leads to database performance issues, irrespective of any architecture where the database is hosted on.

Enabling, sustaining, and ensuring the highest possible performance along with continued application availability is a major goal for all mission critical Oracle applications to meet the demanding business SLA’s which can be easily achieved on vSAN Max Storage offering for Business-Critical workloads.

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