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E-business suite & VMWare

Currently running most of the applications in our business in a virtual environment it's sad to see that even though Oracle is running their OnDemand on Vmware they don't support it for OEBS V12 (support text attached below).

To continue with the administrative befefits we have by using VmWare i'd like to have others feedback (Danish or English) on using VMWare servers in test and production environments.

Regards Frank

Support Status for VMware Virtualized Environments

--------------------------------------------------

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.

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.

If the problem is determined not to be a known Oracle issue, we will refer

the customer to VMware for support. When the customer can demonstrate

that the issue occurs when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume

support, including logging a bug with Oracle Development for investigation

if required.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John Piwowar on June 7, 2010 at 5:01pm

Hi Frank,

This is not the same as "Running Oracle on VMware is unsupported." Consider: VMware essentially provides a virtual hardware platform on which to run a guest OS. If you were running Oracle on HP or IBM hardware, and encountered a problem that seemed to be hardware related, Oracle would probably refer you to the hardware vendor for resolution. Same thing here. If your support issue cannot be addressed at the Oracle software or OS software level, Oracle gets to pass the ball to someone else. Similarly, if you have a problem that can be traced to Oracle VM (or Sun hardware, for that matter), you're going to be transferred to a different department. Still supported by Oracle in that case, but different people addressing your problem.

Granted, the language in the note may make some in IT management uncomfortable, and lead to the conclusion that running Oracle on VMware is unwise. I assume that Oracle Sales and Marketing view this as a positive side-effect. ;-)

Regards,

John P.
http://only4left.jpiwowar.com

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Permalink Reply by Frank Poulsen on June 7, 2010 at 11:52pm

Thank you for the feedback John. I like your angle on the issue which is fully in line with my mode of thought. Do you have experience with OEBS on VMWare? I'd like to hear some live experience of the set-up.

cheers.

Regards Frank Poulsen

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Permalink Reply by John Piwowar on June 8, 2010 at 12:28am

Hi Frank,

I do have some experience w/ EBS on VMware; I've run several test and development EBS instances in a VMware cluster. I was working in a DBA/Apps DBA role, however, and did not have regular administrative access to the VMware part of the stack. My Apps DBA work was not very different, except that when a new test system was needed, it was much easier to create a new clone of production in VMware than to find/requisition new hardware.

I've also run EBS in workstation-class VMware environments (VMware Server and VMware Fusion), but those are only really suitable for small-scale demos and tinkering. My laptop can only do so much. ;-)

In our case, the storage subsystem was our most frequent performance bottleneck. This is probably not surprising. Thoughtful layout of your NAS/SAN is required, just as it would be with a physical database server.

For more practical information, you may wish to contact J Weinshenker. I don't know for sure if he has contact information listed on his blog, but you could leave a comment there. He is a seasoned Apps DBA who has been working very closely with enterprise-class VMware solutions. One of his recent blog posts covers the potential license savings of running Oracle on VMware (http://weinshenker.net/blog/2010/05/28/oracle-licensing-under-vmwar...). Based on his description of his VMware cluster, he should have some recent, real-world advice about running production EBS systems in VMware.

Regards,

John P.
http://only4left.jpiwowar.com

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Permalink Reply by Frank Poulsen on June 8, 2010 at 5:05am

Thanks again John, it was really beneficial to get the facts right - now it's up to the business if they dare to trust VMWare to work together with Oracle to solve potential future issues.

Cheers,

Frank Poulsen