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.
