When it comes to choosing a hypervisor for your environment, VMware vSphere seems a smart choice. It’s popular, pervasive and very well supported – but it may also be a poor option in the long run.
Here’s why any business running Oracle applications should consider Oracle Linux KVM instead.
Performance
As a type 1 hypervisor running on bare metal, KVM outperforms other types of 2 technologies (like Microsoft Hyper-V). Admittedly vSphere is also a type 1 hypervisor, but the lightweight, low-code architecture of KVM makes it much faster to boot – and therefore much higher performing too.
Scalability
KVM is a hugely scalable platform for virtualisation. Where vSphere is capable of supporting 64 hosts per cluster, KVM can sustain 128. Similarly, vSphere can manage 128 virtual CPUs per virtual machine – KVM does 256. If you want to build a hugely scalable, powerful virtualised environment, KVM offers the greatest potential.
Open-Source Licensing
KVM is bundled as part of many Linux distributions – and is therefore distributed under Open-Source licensing. This means that your business can tweak and adjust the source code according to the specific needs of your business.
vSphere is entirely proprietary, closed-source technology. This creates vendor lock-in which means that if you ever want to move to alternative virtualisation technology, you’ll need to completely re-engineer your environment at a significant additional cost.
The total cost of ownership
The Open-Source licensing model means that there are no additional licensing costs for using KVM. You can deploy as many hypervisors as you want for no additional cost, helping to keep your running costs as low as possible.
vSphere requires additional add-on licenses for many of its most important features. As well as paying enterprise maintenance fees for the core product, you will also need to spend big for VSAN (virtualised storage) and NSX (virtualised switching). And you’ll need to keep paying for as long as you use these products.
Oracle licensing benefits
Perhaps the killer feature of Oracle Linux KVM is hard partitioning, allowing you to ‘pin’ virtual CPUs to physical CPU cores. Why does this matter? Under Oracle licensing rules, you must pay license fees for every CPU in your virtual environment, whether they are used or not.
However, the hard partitioning feature of KVM is recognised by Oracle, allowing you to only pay licenses for the virtual CPUs that are being used. This helps to reduce the total cost of ownership for key applications like Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware because you no longer have to license all of your CPUs. This recognition is not available for any other hypervisor – including vSphere.
Oracle Linux KVM is a no-brainer
vSphere helped to drive the virtual server revolution, but it is no longer the hypervisor of choice – particularly not if your business uses Oracle applications. The long-term benefits of KVM far outstrip the familiarity of VMware – particularly once you consider the potential long-term cost savings available
To learn more about Oracle Linux KVM and how it will help your business achieve more for less, please give the team a call.