This was a session on Oracle and vSphere entitled “Creating a Private Oracle Database Cloud Using vSphere”, delivered by Jeff Browning, part of EMC’s solutions org. Jeff’s been doing Oracle forever, and Oracle on VMware for many years.
He co-presented with Steve Tout, Sr. Security Engineer at VMware who shared how VMware leverage vSphere and EMC technologies to automate and accelerate their Oracle refresh/new instance process – thank you Steve!
The session covered the why (why Oracle on VMware), what (customer use cases), and the how (reference architectures and use cases).
BTW – EMC and VMware have a unique support model around Oracle that means several key things.
- If you deploy Oracle Single Instance (and RAC with an EMC process called an RPQ) on vSphere 4.x and EMC storage (any server model that is on the VMware HCL)..THEN…
- Your configuration is on the EMC support matrix, which means EMC cannot close the case until you are satisfied, and we will work on your behalf…AND..
- Leveraging the joint Oracle/EMC support model and decades of experience we have supporting 75,000 enterprise level Oracle customers…AND…
- By deploying the joint reference architecture, we have shown how you can repro on a physical in seconds with the press of a button (on VMFS or NFS), representing the fact that we REMOVE ALL RISK.
Note – this isn’t perfect. Customers push back and say “That’s great, I want direct Oracle support”, but of course that’s not up to us. Every day I find more and more customers who are frustrated as they know there is ZERO technical reason why Oracle on vSphere doesn’t work, and furthermore that the source of Oracle’s position re: licensing and support is to continue to fund Larry’s next America’s Cup battle.
STAY TUNED. This will continue to heat up, trust me. I met one customer at the VMworld EMC Customer appreciation party who was clear (and I paraphrase, but not much): “I got f___ing sick of the excuses, and told them I was going not sign their new license proposal and in fact swap them out. They caved and now support us fully and gave us licensing that worked for our virtual environment”. MORAL: CUSTOMERS ARE IN CONTROL – DON’T LET ANY VENDOR (INCLUDING EMC) MESS WITH YOU.
While this effort by EMC and VMware is not perfect, it is a big step up, a big improvement, a big commitment. Large enterprises have experience where EMC has stepped up and filled support gaps (like with IBM taking similar positions historically on mainframe).
You can read more about that here http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2010/04/oracle-x86-vmware-and-update-on-support.html.
The presentation from EA7061 can be downloaded here:
Damm straight the customer should be in control, I think people forget this too often, and just figure it isnt there money and the company they work for can just pay more for something that they dont need.
We recently had a vendor say they support VMware, which was great, but it had to be its own independent VMware, that they would setup and deilver (and charge us a packet for). They wouldnt support any other guests running on the same host. This was crazy as we already had a 6 server VMware cluster that was only 10% utilised.
I think people are slowly understanding VMware and becoming less scared of it.
Posted by: David | September 13, 2010 at 02:22 AM