UPDATE: 9/23/2009, 12:07am EST – There’s another chapter in this saga here. If you haven’t read this, start by reading this, and then follow to the next chapter (the Oracle response).
Folks, you know that I’ve been on this fight for a while.
But today, the blogosphere is starting to light up – and I’m hoping it’s the beginning of the end.
The long and short is that Oracle senior execs are saying “no one is telling us that our support stance for VMware is a problem for them”. See posts at Yellow-Bricks here, OracleStorageGuy here, and NTPRO.NL (Eric Sloof) here.
Now, I’m not going to ask to flood that poor Oracle dude’s mailbox, but will ask you – dear reader – for action.
I’m not just an iSCSI-post-writing nerd (though am that guy too) – but for better or worse (sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse :-), the buck stops with me when it comes to VMware-related things at EMC, and for our larger customers, this is one of the pain points.
We’ve been working behind the scenes on something we think might help with this situation. If you are a large enterprise customer, and are serious (no crazies please), I would like to bounce our proposal off you. The question is “does it make you more willing to virtualize Oracle on VMware if….”
If you’re serious about Oracle, and you’re serious about VMware – I want to talk to you. You can find my email address, or just post a comment (I will anonymously see your email address).
I need to talk to you about this in the next 2 weeks.
Thanks – and let’s not just take it – either follow the advice on the two posts I linked to, or if you want a more formal approach please reach out to me.
Who’s running critical Oracle apps in a Virtual environment? -> Oracle wants to know if you are running your critical apps on Oracle in a Virtual environment.
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1272-Whos-running-critical-Oracle-apps-in-a-Virtual-environment.html
Posted by: twitter.com/esloof | September 21, 2009 at 03:31 PM
Eric - sorry I missed you in the original post, will add it...
Posted by: Chad Sakac | September 21, 2009 at 04:26 PM
I'm game to help. Internally we are a large Oracle shop and also have tons of customer with the same issue.
Posted by: Jason Campagna | September 21, 2009 at 05:08 PM
We've been bitten rather bad by Oracle wanting to license for every CPU in a VMware farm rather than the number of CPU's allocated to the VM. What makes this worse is that if you run Oracle products in a Solaris zone (I know its para-virtualisation) you only need to license for the number of CPU's allocated to that zone. If that's 0.5 of a CPU then that's fine. Oracle should give up the duplicity.
Posted by: Simon | September 21, 2009 at 05:19 PM
Ping!
We're already running Oracle for our 'test' instances in VMWare, but production is still langishing on rusting tin :-(
Posted by: Dave B | September 21, 2009 at 05:21 PM
Same story as everyone else. Running Oracle in a Lab environment with no problems. Pricing and lack of support is killing us in our Prod environments. If we wanted to virtualize one of their identity products, we'd need to license the farm. We're forced to run on physical. I suspect/hope there will be some announcements at Oracle World
Posted by: mike lorengo | September 22, 2009 at 12:32 AM
we would like to run oracle in vmware, but the costs and the missing support have stopped us from following that option, hopefully that might change....
Posted by: chris d | September 22, 2009 at 04:30 AM
We recently launched both a internal an external cloud platforms based on VMWare; not being allowed to run Oracle in our cloud is a big problem. I have many different Oracle databases and would run them in VMWare in a heartbeat. Further more explaining to our customers why they can't run Oracle is never easy.
Virtualization is no longer about consolidation but rather about flexibility, scalability, availability. Oracle is tying my hands and preventing me from realizing my data center vision.
I'd love to talk to understand what you have in mind.
Posted by: Paul Monaghan | September 22, 2009 at 09:48 AM
i'm interested. in fact, i've already emailed "that poor oracle dude" to explain that we've started rolling out postgres due to hardships imposed by the oracle license limitations. i of course received in response the same canned email you posted in the follow-up.
Posted by: dewey hylton | September 23, 2009 at 07:17 AM
Our situation is about the same. DBAs won't run Oracle in our Virtual Infrastructure because Oracle won't support it.
Posted by: Jason Jensen | September 23, 2009 at 05:34 PM
We are supposed to send an email to Oracle to tell them we want virtualization? That is the most stupid comment I have ever heard come from an Oracle president. The extent of their marketing direction comes from what a friend of a friend says?
If Oracle did the slightest bit of research they would see the demand. This, combined with the stupidity of the Pres' comments, makes it obvious they are just stonewalling. I would not be surprised if they go look at some of the accounts that respond for possible revenue enhancements.
We are moving away from Oracle in all their products because of this attitude. Fuhgetaboutit....
Posted by: smc | September 23, 2009 at 08:18 PM
We run our test and dev databases a lot on VM boxes but reluctant for production DB's for need of Oracle robust support.
Posted by: Rishi M | September 25, 2009 at 08:51 AM
Me too. Pissed off about the (sadly) growing list of apps 'not certified for virtual worlds'. This
Is totally true for our oracle rac instances, and let me tell you I'm veeeery angry with MSFT too, since a new OCS infrastructure we're designing should be made of 12 pservers, since none of the components are certified by MSFT to run on vmware (and not even on hyper-v :().
I'm definitely on the 'virtualize everything' bandwagon... Count me in
Pj
Posted by: PJ | September 25, 2009 at 02:11 PM
Hi Chad, sorry I am so late to get to this - your tweets yesterday reminded me I was negligent. Anyhow,
We've virtualized all of our Oracle database servers. That involves 6 instances including PROD of Oracle e-Business suite (11i w/11g), Oracle standby DBs for Discoverer reporting, Oracle enterprise manager, an Oracle instance for a tax package called sabrix, an Oracle instance for a tax package for taxstream, 2 environments for EquityEdge (stock tracking system), 2 environments of Oracle Hyperion (PROD and DEV), Oracle Email center (part of Oracle E-Biz), Oracle Wireless (part of Oracle E-biz)
Almost all of this stuff is tied into a CX3 and we do array based replication to our DR site and use recoverpoint and replication manager and are implementing SRM. A couple of the dev environments are using local storage on some stand alone ESX boxes.
2) No EMC NAS with Oracle.
Posted by: Jay Weinshenker | October 01, 2009 at 12:48 PM
Great article... Asking the people to think on it..
Posted by: Ayew | July 20, 2010 at 01:58 PM