
Techopedia – “While scaling out involves adding more discrete units to a system in order to add capacity, scaling up involves building existing units by integrating resources into them”
Business-critical production Oracle workload are very resource intensive and large memory sizes are characteristics of production databases to ensure that the working set of the database fits into DRAM for fast access to data.
Let us look at the different options we have currently with the demand for memory increase for Oracle workloads –
- Increased Cost with buying more DRAM ($$$) – cost to adding additional DRAM to beef up the system for large memory allocations
- Memory Latency with sizing workloads across multiple NUMA nodes to take advantage of remote memory to fulfill memory needs – With NUMA servers, one has an option of accessing memory from remote NUMA nodes across QPI/UPI interconnects but …. there is memory latency that one would encounter with remote memory accesses.
Ok, let’s look at our choices – Increased cost ($$$) OR Memory Latency for critical workloads ?

Enter VMware vSphere platform with Intel DC Optane PMM in Memory Mode.
VMware vSphere usage of Intel Optane PMem in Memory Mode can offer increased memory capacity and TCO improvements for large memory bound workloads without having to buy expensive DRAM’s or size workloads across NUMA modes for added memory needs.
This blog demonstrates how one can achieve similar performance running Oracle workloads on VMware vSphere with Intel Optane PMEM in Memory Mode as compared to running the same workloads on VMware platform by spreading memory across NUMA nodes (or adding expensive DRAM – this blog focused on comparing Memory Mode v/s NUMA access) to satisfy the memory demand – with the advantage of not needing to buy expensive DRAM or going across NUMA nodes for added memory increase.
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