best practice - online redo logs and virtualization
I have a 10.1.0.4 instance (soon to be migrated to 11gr2) running under Windows Server 2003.
We use a non-standard disk distribution scheme -
on the c: drive we have oracle_home as well as directories for control files and online redo logs.
on the d: drive we have datafiles
on the e: drive we have archive log files and another directory with online redo logs and another copy of control file
my question is this:
is it smart practice to have ANY online redo logs or control file on the same spindle with archive logs?
Our setup works fairly well but we are in the process of migrating the instance first to ESX server and SAN and then secondly to 11gtr2 64bit under server 2008 64 and when we bring up our instance on the VM for testing we find that benchmarking the ESX server (dual Xeon 3.4ghz with 48gb RAM running against FalconStor NSS SAN with 15k SAS disks over iSCSI) against the production physical server (dual Xeon 2.0ghz with 4gb RAM using direct attached SATA 7200rpm drives) we find that some processes run faster on the ESX box and some run 40-100% slower. Running Statspack seems to identify lots of physical read waits as well as some waits for redo and controlfiles.
Is it possible that in addition to any overhead introduced by ESX and iSCSI (we are running Jumbo Frames over 1gb) we may have contention because the archive logs are on the same "spindle" (virtual) as the online redo and control files?
We're looking at multiple avenues to bring the 2 servers in line from a performance standpoint - db configuration, memory allocation, possible move to 10gb network, possible move to SSD storage tray, possible application rewrites. But from the simplest low hanging fruit idea, if these files should not be on the same spindle thats an easy change to make and possibly eke out an improvement.
Ideas?
Mike