Virtualize Oracle

With VMworld 2009 San Francisco upon us, I thought I would raise awareness of Oracle-related sessions this week for those interested in attending. You can also reference these presentations after VMworld with website access:

I mentioned in my last post that I would address support for VMware by Oracle. It’s clearly a hot topic, and it is something that comes up daily with our customers, regardless of size or locale.

Oracle has support policies in place for essentially all Oracle products running on VMware, with the exception of a few like RAC & JD Edwards. For up-to-date status, you can refer to Oracle Metalink and other official Oracle sources for policies specific to the Oracle products you want to virtualize. Bear in mind that there are a few inaccurate articles and marketing docs floating around that imply (or outright state) that VMware is not supported-- ignore those as they're not official.

Customers who’ve virtualized Oracle products with VMware tell us that Oracle Support abides by the guidelines laid out by Oracle's official support policies. To that end, VMware highlights customer success stories on its webpages for your reference; these represent customers who have found a way to make Oracle’s support policies work for them.

Most customers report that Oracle Support simply accepts their SRs. Some report that Oracle Support restates the VMware policy noted above, and then accepts their SRs. Finally, some do report to me that they’ve been asked to physically reproduce issues, but none of those have ever been escalated to VMware, and in over 2 years of tracking this, we’ve yet to see any support issues related to VMware ESX.

Customers around the world who have actually deployed Oracle on VMware tell us they are satisfied with both the performance of Oracle products on VMware, as well as Oracle's commitment to the policies they have in place with regard to VMware. This comes as no surprise to us – VMware is also an Oracle customer (we run both E-Business Suite and Siebel) and our experience with Oracle Support has been regarded as “excellent” by the IT team members with whom I’ve spoken.

While Oracle may not make the support situation entirely transparent, I can vouch for the number of customers who have had success deploying Oracle on VMware, and getting support once they've done so. I welcome your feedback, and encourage you to have a similar dialogue with your Oracle account team to get everyone beyond the notion that "VMware is not supported" as is so often reported. Once you dig into it, I bet you'll find the situation is quite significantly better than that for your specific deployment scenario.

It's been two months since Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco, and we're finally getting caught up here with the backlog of customer interest in virtualizing Oracle products of all types. With over 1400 scanned visitors and dozens of in-booth presentations, there was great visibility to both the interest customers have in this space, as well as to the degree to which some customers have succeeded both with Oracle and VMware.

Measured against the same time last year, we saw with DBAs with a substantially different take this year: "how do I virtualize" was the theme, and we have been responding with customer engagements all fall.

We just delivered a webinar on the performance of Oracle databases on VMware. If you're interested in watching this one-hour overview, hosted by VMware's lead performance engineer and myself, have a look: http://vmware.com/a/webcasts/details/161

Finally, the list of customers deploying the full range of Oracle products grows. If you want a look at a short list of those who have gone public about it, take a look at our page highlighting some of these successes: http://vmware.com/partners/alliances/technology/oracle-database-customers.html

I promised some comments in the last blog regarding Oracle support -- I'll dedicate the next post to pointing out the facts as we see them, and see what others have to say in response. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing from more customers as they succeed in making Oracle virtual!

My name is Chris Rimer and I’m a director in the VMware Alliances organization, responsible for our Oracle relationship. This new Oracle blog is a place where we can share with you – Oracle and VMware customers, partners, and other interested parties – what we’ve learned about virtualizing Oracle environments on VMware Infrastructure.

We’d like this blog to be an interactive space too. We’re starting off with a series of posts that give you our take on why now is the time to virtualize your Oracle environments, and we want you to tell us your experiences and concerns. So, without further ado:

Applications, middleware and even databases make excellent candidates for virtualization, particularly as customers see the time-to-value and risk/reward benefits for virtualizing mission-critical applications. Pre-production is a no-brainer, and even production deployments make sense given the degree to which risks are mitigated by present virtualization solutions from VMware. Frankly speaking: the technology works, customers know it, and they're starting to take advantage now -- word is spreading among CIOs who must justify why they're not virtualizing infrastructure to their CFOs and shareholders.

At VMware we see customers around the world virtualizing the full array of Oracle's family of developed and acquired products with VMware, and we expect that trend to accelerate. Some application administrators and DBAs still take a conservative view on virtualizing, and we hope to address those concerns in this blog. In the next post, I’ll address Oracle support for VMware.

Christopher Rimer