Today we're starting a brand new blog series. For your Friday afternoon reading, we'll be posting a technical tip or question and answer on a technical topic. We'll start by introducing ideas on our own, but we'd really like it if you were involved and asked us questions via Twitter! Tag your tweet with #AskOracleVirtualization and we'll consider your question for the blog.

Today's tip is on Storage and Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure:

Question: I run Oracle Virtual Desktop 3.4.1 on Solaris and use a local ZFS storage pool.  How should I configure my ZFS ARC cache? 

Answer by John Renko, Consulting Developer, Oracle:

Oracle recommends about 5G of ARC cache per template in use to achieve up to a 90% disk read offload. Set your ARC min=max to reserve the maximum amount of your remaining memory for your running VMs. In /etc/system:

set zfs:zfs_arc_min = 5368709120
set zfs:zfs_arc_max = 5368709120

The amount you need to reserve will depend on your template but this has proven to be a great start for a typical windows 7 VM running productivity applications.