Uncategorized

Support Statements for Running Business Critical Applications on vSphere

As the industry standard for virtualization, vSphere has received strong ISV support from 18,000 ISVs, including support statements from the four largest ISVs: Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle (Source: VMware customer surveys, Jan 2010 and June 2011.)

Microsoft Support

Support statements for Microsoft products can be found at these links:
Windows Microsoft software
Microsoft server
Exchange
SQL
SharePoint

Oracle Support

Although some Oracle marketing documents may imply that Oracle does not support VMware, and Oracle sales might tell you that VMware is not supported, we are pleased to clarify that Oracle does have a support statement in place for VMware. Oracle’s Metalink note 249212.1, published on MyOracleSupport, defines Oracle’s policy for supporting applications on VMware. Here is the support statement:

The second to last paragraph states that Oracle may ask a customer to replicate the issue on non-virtual hardware if an issue hasn’t been previously seen by Oracle. This occurs only once for each issue (the first time), and when it occurs VMware has a Total Ownership Policy to take accountability of that issue and resolve it for the customer. Here is the VMware support statement to that effect: “VMware will accept accountability for any Oracle-related issue reported by a customer. By being accountable, VMware Support will drive the issue to resolution regardless of which vendor (VMware, Oracle, or others) is responsible for the resolution. In most cases, reported issues can be resolved via configuration changes, bug fixes, or feature enhancements by one of the involved vendors.” This statement is available here.

SAP Support

VMware and SAP have been working closely for over five years. In 2007, SAP granted full support to run SAP on VMware. In 2012, SAP went even further and gave support for SAP Sybase ASE. In 2012, VMware engineers are working with SAP to gain support of HANA, SAP’s new in-memory database. Support statements for SAP can be found at the SAP Community Network.

Support from Other Vendors

Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]