I just noticed the following article by “Oracle Storage Guy“:
Re: Need a favor – Oracle
You are not going to believe this. Some VMware folks met with Charles Phillips, the president or CEO of Oracle and he said no customers had ever mentioned to him that they wanted Oracle to support their products on VMware. Or modify the licensing scheme. He offered if anyone knew of customers who did want better or more support for Oracle on VMware, or virtualization friendly licensing, to email him directly. His email is [email protected] and he really needs to hear that customers run Oracle on VMware, and better support / licensing would be nice!
Apparently VMware provided Oracle a list of customers that wanted Oracle to support their Apps / Databases on VMware and even better change the licensing scheme to one that actually makes sense in 2009. Of course Charles Philips, Oracles President, responded that he never heard about this before. Charles apparently said that anyone who is looking for Oracle’s support or a licensing scheme based on vCPUs should drop him an email. Oracle customers can contact Charles.
Thanks Charles for taking this serious.
Vladan says
One of my clients is on Oracle, and he can’t virtulize the server because there is no support for that application in a virtual environement….
smudger says
Well – with an offer like that it’s hard to refuse! While I can’t disclose my company we are a large user of Oracle. ELA status and have regular run-ins with them re supportability and best practises.
Mr. Phillips has now been emailed with our background, list of issues we’ve experienced in a Dev & Production environment and also my “wish list” for full support and best practise guides when their products are hosted in a VMware infra.
Hopefully this somewhat out of touch board member will “get with the programme” 🙂
habibalby says
Good to hear this, I was fighting with my DBA’s to virtualize the non-critical Oracle Servers in our production environment, but they always refuse because of the support is not available from Oracle that runs under VMware Vi3.
But for our Dev environement, we do virtualize Oracle and other heavy load applications that relize on Oracle. And this Oracle Servers are VMs. I have seen when I run and Backup, or there is a new Application Release, when our Dev people test the application heavily, the Oracle Servers “VMs” gives great performance interms of I/O’s and Memory utilization, which is proved to the DBA’s that Oracle VMs runs better that Oracle on Physical in our Production 🙂
Karen Tillman says
There is a misperception out there so we would like to clarify for everyone.
First, we never said customers were not interested in virtualization and we already recognize customers want to run their applications in a virtualized environment and we encourage them to do so which is why we offer Oracle VM with no license charge. We do support, test, and certify aginst the Oracle VM environment. We agree that virtualization is important.
What we’ve said on other VMs is that we will respond to support issues as they arise but so far we’ve elected not to formally certify any third party VMs because virtualization is intricately linked to the rest of our stack. A lot of our customers run database grids and we support virtual clusters which requires our clusterware for internode communication interacting with our VM for HA features which is why people use RAC in the first place. We also use virtualization to provision RAC clusters and do live migrations.
But that requires an engineered product family that takes advantage of our shared storage, clustered file system, clusterware, and our shared everything environment. We are supporting a complete system of deployment for virtualized computing and not just a hypervisor. That’s what allows the advanced functionalty. e.g. availability that doesn’t rely on network pings to determine whether a guest is running or not. This reduces the chances for false positives/negatives when determining whether a VM has failed. It also assures that a VM is restarted correctly without any risk of shared data corruption. We of course built our business on protecting data at all costs and the VM interacts at such a low level with our stack that we’ve elected to certify the one we could fully engineer and test. We have to protect the data and reduce the risk.
We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for people to run our database in virtualized environments. We are providing additional add ons for free such as VM templates that are downloadable and already preconfigured e.g. Oracle Enterprise Linux and the Oracle database. Quicker ramp up town with a single configuration installation script. Our version of Linux distribution is paravirtualized and we get significant performance benefits as a result. We can also do live migrations as well as capacity and power management (turn machines off an on). Much like the mainframe where virtualization was created, its a complete system from end to end.
We do respond when customers call and work with VMware and other third parties if an issue arises but we are unable to replicate problems or pre engineer around them so we don’t certify formally. In all the discussions, it seems to get lost that there is a real engineering problem here that won’t go away magically. We are always open to revisiting issues but that’s where we are right now. Our VM is free so the only motivation is to provide a reliable and well tested environment for HA, clustering, and grid computing
As for licensing, most of our customers now have unlimited license agreements which means it doesn’t matter how many VMs, cores, or processors you decide to deploy. We think this is easier for both sides and encourages adoption of the technology.
For more details: link to our VM page on OTN
Aubrey says
What a joke! Oracle is not only very much aware of many enterprise customer desires to run their products on VmWare, but are actively engaged in discouraging the use of VmWare as the V platform of choice.
The licensing and support restrictions make it abundantly clear that if you choose to run Oracle on VmWare, you are on your own. The company I currently work for was very interested in running Oracle on VmWare but had to retreat is Oracle reps made it clear they would receive no support for running their product on any virtual environment other than Oracle VM.
MLaskowski says
I just emailed him hopefully it will help. Here is what I wrote.
Charles
I just read an article posted by Duncan regarding oracle support on VMware? Not sure if this is a joke but Oracle needs to wake up!!!! We run many oracle VM’s without any issues but we always try to avoid telling oracle that it’s a VM when we do have oracle issues. It would be nice for oracle to wake up and open their eyes. Microsoft was saying the same stuff about 6 years ago but changed their policy about 5 years ago. Just recently I had the pleasure to deal with Oracle support regarding issues with JDE and boy it fun!! Oracle offers “best effort support” for virtualization solutions. Please! What is the difference? Directly from the email I got from Oracle “We don’t verify nor certify any installation with JDEdwords on virtualized environments. VMware is not part of the MTR”? This is just one of many examples and I know this was JDE but I experience similar issues with other Oracle products. I use to be consultants vitalizing environments all over the country and it’s always been a pain to work with oracle support, and till this day it never has been a VMware issue but it’s always been a hassle to get help when running in a VM. That statement about support is very misleading. The reason why the statement is so misleading is that Oracle does not certify/support things like this. Let me explain what I mean. VMware virtualization simply provides virtualized hardware upon which an operating system runs. Oracle certifies operating systems, no question about that. But the operating systems running under VMware are typically Oracle supported versions. Do you run Oracle on a Dell PowerEdge server? Not certified. HP Proliant? Nope. IBM? You guessed it. Sun? Same.
I think you get the idea.
What Oracle does not certify is the underlying hardware
This has been an issue for way to long. Virtualization is not that new and the industry is moving to virtualization and so have millions of Oracle customers and other application providers.
Just read some of the comments!!
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/09/21/oracle-feels-that-not-many-people-want-to-run-their-apps-in-a-virtual-environment/#comments
THX!! Mike Laskowski
Fernando says
The justification the Oracle guy gave is just a cheap excuse. There’s no technical reason preventing Oracle to run fine under ESX, and being fully supported.
This is just an abuse of marketing power, using their dominance of the DB space, to force throat below their VM offering.
Would be similar if IBM supports DB2 only on IBM hardware to force HW sales. Simply as that.