RE: Oracle products on vmware
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 08:17:52 +0400 (GST)
Message-ID: <28763895.1091242277868586.JavaMail.seven_at_aomfe4p1>
Few years back, my ex-co tried moving to vmware with proper understanding with oracle - issues on vmware should be simulated on non-virtual environment to get support from oracle. This was ok as we thought that It will be clean. But then, we actually hit a bug on older version that we could not simulate on standalone, and then comes the ownership problem where vmware says it is not ours and oracle says it is not oracle fault either. This was a minor issue but it made us realize that this may not be the right time to go for hardware consolidation for databases. Sorry don't have details on the problem we had that time. We then moved all middletier and other DBs to vmware. Then oracle bought in their own VM with complete support. Vmware also came out with ESX that was much better than previous releases and we hardly found any issues in test environment, yes except the performance factor that required ongoing attention.
And then there was also the argument of making use of Virtualization on production specially as the co was investing in blade servers that itself provided the division of environment and consolidation and optimal utilization of hardware (this was the main motive). So do we really needed one big black box with Visualized OS or we are ok with lot of blade servers replacing the huge boxes in data center. And then the move to Linux started where we got rid of other environments to standardize on Linux that further fumed the debate. DBAs also argued the advantage of running two DBs on two different virtual os on the same box, as compared to having the two DBs in different oracle homes on the same os and box. Yes lot of confrontation was put on the VM team, this was good for clarifying the facts. I moved out before I could contribute more on this debate.
The final conclusion was both vmware and oracle VM did a good job at Virtualization, it is matter of standard to choose one. The most critical question here is do you really need Virtualization in production and what benefit will it give? The marketing guys will give you figures such as save upto 70% in data center with Virtualization and as per survey 60% of all your hardware is underutilized, but this may or may not be applicable for you. Don't go by the hype, go figure it out for your co. And there is no guarantee about future, as oracle may still have hanging threads for supporting vmware especially when its own product is also competing.
At present, I know few co who are hosting production sites on Virtual environment with no major problems. There are many others who have bought in Virtualization for test servers only while production continue to run in standalones. I personally use and recommend visualized testing environment as it saves lot of time and effort, I don't have the same opinion for production at this time though.
Sorry if I confused you further. Let the list know what stand your co took in this regard.
Thanks!
Amar
Www.amar-Padhi.com
Pushed fro E71
-original message-
Oracle products on vmware
From: "Hameed, Amir" <Amir.Hameed_at_xerox.com>
Date: 13-05-2009 20:14
Hi folks,
Based on Oracle's ML note 249212.1, it seems that Oracle does not
officially certify any of its product for VMWARE, but it does certify
its products for the Oracle VM (464754.1). Having stated that, I am
interested to know if folks in this DL are running mission critical
Oracle software on vmware, particularly Oracle e-Business and fusion
middle-ware SOA suites, and what is their take on Oracle's support
statement?
Thanks
Amir
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Received on Wed May 13 2009 - 23:17:52 CDT