Virtualization

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Tue, 2011-08-02 at 21:54 -0400, Peter A wrote:

> 
> 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. 

The second paragraph is actually a little more revealing:
"If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the
appropriate solution on the native OS. If that solution does not work in
the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to
VMware for support. When the customer can demonstrate that the Oracle
solution does not work when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume
support, including logging a bug with Oracle Development for
investigation if required."

In other words, Oracle will support Oracle, but they expect VMware to
support VMware.

And, in practice, the number of issues directly attributed to VMware is
about as close to zero as you can reasonably get. That includes RAC.

> In practice, this happens very rarely and in my experience usually only in RAC 
> where there are latency and driver feature requirements...

...And for which there are known best practices. I have a white paper on
virtualizing RAC published that is part of the VMware Solution
Enablement Toolkit you might find useful. 
> 
> 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...

Do you work for Oracle? Only someone from there would flag licensing
issues in this way. Licensing Oracle isn't quite that cut and dry. In
reality, you can absolutely contain Oracle licensing requirements to a
single HA cluster - even by the most aggressive of Oracle standards.
There's also a clear argument going on about host group affinity as
being more than sufficient.

Even then, I have many clients seriously considering moving to other
competing database platforms (SQL Server, DB2, etc.) because their
licensing terms are much more favorable and their databases much easier
to virtualize without a lot of tuning. Oracle's licensing maneuver is
going to cost them sales in the end, and that will eventually drive them
to lighten up.

Chris

-- 

======================
"Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former."

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