Virtualization

[Peter A]

On Tuesday, August 02, 2011 09:40:57 PM Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-08-02 at 17:43 -0400, Jorge Fábregas wrote: 
> > To this day, as far as I know, Oracle doesn't certify their database on
> > any virtualization platform other than theirs.  That said,  I know many
> > people run Oracle over VMware and I also haven't heard any stories of
> > Oracle not wanting to support a customer because they were running a
> > non-certified virtualization platform.  However, I still think the OP
> > needs to be aware of this just in case.
> 
> This is misleading at best and untrue from a practical matter. The key
> is support as opposed to certification, and Oracle DOES support their
> database systems on VMware. There is an official support statement from
> Oracle to that effect.
> 
> The reality is that Oracle only *certifies* to the Operating system
> layer, and VMware vSphere (ESX/ESXi) is considered hardware in that
> regard. Ask Oracle if they certify their database on IBM vs. HP vs. Dell
> hardware and you'll find that they don't certify any of them.

Hrm... Oracle ID 249212.1:
Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized 
environments. Oracle Support will assist customers running Oracle products 
on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide 
support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or 
can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware. 


There is more to the document but this is essentially it. If you have any 
issue that Oracle has not seen before and they have any reason to believe it 
may be related to virtualization, they'll ask you to install it on the native 
OS and show the issue still occurs. 
In practice, this happens very rarely and in my experience usually only in RAC 
where there are latency and driver feature requirements...

However, the bigger thing is licensing. According to the official rules, you 
will have to license all processors that could potentially run Oracle. Since 
VMWare (or anything other than oracle VM) is not recognized, this means that 
you will have to license every single processor in your datacenter if you run 
only a single VM. After all, you could vmotion (or shutdown and move) your VM 
to any of the ESX servers...


Peter.

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