FAQs - Oracle on Azure VMs

What are the recommended Azure VM types for Oracle on Azure?

• M Series: high memory requirements, CPU performance, Lower IO limits, host level caching is low, accelerated networking options.
• E series - Availability in all regions, allows for Premium SSD for OS Disk, ephemeral storage to be used for swap.

What is the role of an Oracle Data Guard on Azure?
Data Guard (DG) is more focused on disaster recovery (DR) in an on-premises Oracle solution in Azure. It’s central to high availability and disaster recovery. It applies mainly to Fast-Start Failover and the DG Broker & Observer. Data Guard provides a high-availability-based Architecture.

Does having an Oracle Data Guard setup on Azure VM between Availability Set/Zones or regions subject to ingress/egress cost? 
Yes. There's US$0.02/GB charge for the Data Guard redo transport for a remote standby database in another region. There's no cost for the Data Guard redo transport to a local standby database in another availability zone in the same region.

What are the different design options for Oracle migration to Azure?

• Good & Fast: You can choose a solution involving Data Guard or Golden Gate, but that's not cost effective.
• Good & Cost effective: You can choose this option with non-Oracle solutions like Azure VM backup cross-region restore, or the Azure NetApp Files cross-region replication but it won't be fast, and you need to give some slack in their RPO/RTO requirements. Both the Azure NetApp Files cross-region replication has cross-region transport of data included in the product cost.

What is the simple bare minimal Oracle reference architecture on Azure?
Two (2) Azure availability Zone architecture with VM.