Oracle and VMware – a major milestone

What a crazy day – first, spent all day working on something that will either be colossally awesome, or ridiculously stupid – no middle ground :-)   You’ve got to love days like that – and yes, it will all be public soon enough…

But – the big news of the day crossed my path in the morning – a major, substantial change in Oracle’s support stance on VMware.

This has been something I’ve been yapping about for the last couple of years (see here, here, here, and finally here).

I’d love to claim that it was a “victory for VMware, EMC, and I played a part” – but that wouldn’t be accurate.   What is accurate is:

1. It’s a great move on Oracle’s part.
2. It’s a huge victory for customers.
3. It’s an outcome of customers using their leverage

In the end, the customer is always right.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true.

For more details (including the facts in the change), read on….

Ok – so first of all, what’s changed, and where’s the official word?

What’s changed? Oracle has moved to a more positive support stance on Oracle 11g RAC on VMware.   There are still many caveats, but they seem much more reasonable to me.  

I’ve been sitting on this news until the Metalink article got posted, because that’s where it becomes real.

So – it got posted.

The key is that previously Oracle explicitly excluded support for Oracle RAC – which is no longer the case.

Metalink article = 249212.1, accessible here to any Oracle customer.   Since not everyone has access, I wanted to pull doc, and it notes that there is no limitation on use or distribution.

 

Support Position for Oracle Products Running on VMWare Virtualized Environments [ID 249212.1]
	Modified 08-NOV-2010     Type ANNOUNCEMENT     Status PUBLISHED

Purpose

---------

Explain to customers how Oracle supports our products when running on VMware

Scope & Application

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

For Customers running Oracle products on VMware virtualized environments.

No limitation on use or distribution.

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.

NOTE:  Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware.  For Oracle RAC, Oracle will onlyaccept Service Requests as described in this note on Oracle RAC 11.2.0.2 and later releases.

This may seem like a minor change – but IMO it’s material, and a change in a very positive direction. 

BTW – for people who have concerns over the section that refers to “can be demonstrated to not be as a result of running on VMware”, there are GREAT solutions which make instant, easy V-to-P to prove physical reproducibility of issues easy.   Please check out the work on how to do that here.

Thank you Oracle for doing the right thing for the customers.

Comments

[Jason Boche]

I'm getting drunk to this blog post.

[Craig]

when will oracle turn around and make the official certified platform for vmware to virtualize their Oracle RAC solution?

[Avram Woroch]

I work at a company that's been looking at Oracle on VMware for a while now. There was an older document that said pretty much the same thing. What is the part that is new?

[Gabrie van Zanten]

Great news!!! Next step: Oracle licensing for soft partitioning virtualization! Two customers with big VMware clusters running Free ESXi just to run an Oracle VM on :-(

[iwan 'e1' Rahabok]

Thanks! Great news. I was just advising partner that "Oracle does not support RAC" less than 2 hours ago! So now we can come back and revise the solution :-)

[DK]

Thanks for the good info. Maybe one day Oracle will even join this decade and update their anti-virtualization enterprise licensing model so we can look for ways to increase our Oracle footprint instead of decrease...

[Paul V (sysxperts)]

Thanks Chad, but I have to disagree that this is good news; although it may seem Oracle is making progress in giving customers what they want by handing out little bread crumbs, they are consistently engaging in monopolistic and closed philosophies. See http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/apache-foundation-to-vote-down-java-7-protesting-oracle-abuses.ars regarding Oracle's field-of-use restrictions in violation of JCP governance policy. They are virtually threatening the openness of Java so I say nay to anything Oracle does and fully recommend a boycott of their products and membership of JCP as Java stewards.

[Jay Weinshenker]

Great news. I'm just glad to see Oracle is listening to their customers requests. I think the next great hurdle will be to get Oracle to recognize the DRS Virtual Machine Host Affinity Rules in vSphere 4.1 as hard partitioning.

Thanks for any work EMC did to influence Oracle.

[tgs]

Its only a matter of time before Oracle wises up and realizes that no one want their rebranded Xen virtualization and want to standardize on a real Virtualization platform.

[Dave]

I fail to see what's new about this document. I agree with Avram Woroch's post above that this is not new but has been the support stance Oracle has had for quite some time now.

[twitter.com/that1guynick]

"Maybe one day Oracle will even join this decade and update their anti-virtualization enterprise licensing model so we can look for ways to increase our Oracle footprint instead of decrease..."

^THIS!

Huge victory, however, for those of us that took a giant Leap of Faith in VMware and our virtualization talents to go ahead and do it anyway!

[TB303]

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf
It can be done.

[Rick_vmwaretips]

@Avram - Biggest difference is that the Metalink note was originally only for single instance Oracle. The note has now been updated to include RAC -- which is H U G E

[RD]

When will EMC and VMWare advertise this. We know Oracle will not.

[Chad Sakac]

@craig - I doubt that they will, Craig :-) They of course own OVM :-)

@Avram @Dave - as Rick points out, the main thing is that RAC now has the same support model - which I paraphrase as "not certified (but then again, Oracle only "certifies" it's own stuff) but supported, they reserve right to point out if it's VMware (and ask you to repro on a physical". The repro on a physical is easy if you design right (and those EMC/VMware docs I point to show you how to do that).

That's a big change.

@RD - funny enough you ask - we are working on the EMC ad campaign now.

@Paul - I kinda agree (and this move, while good, is still one move). I just think it's more productive to provide both positive AND negative feedback. The carrot and the stick work better rather than just one....

[Craig]

Just curious if happen the Oracle RAC running on VMware, oracle will only support on the DB and RAC level. In that case, it did not solve the concerns of the users who will not want to take risk on the production system. I hope they will make VMware certified to run Oracle RAC officially :)

[Earl]

We must not forget this, back in 2007:

In this transcript Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, answers John DiFucci, analyst at Bear Stearns, about support policy for VMware customers:

John DiFucci: Okay. And, the second question one. Your one stack message, although it does resonate well, I think. But, some of the exclusivity that it implies or, not only implies, but with the Oracle VM message that you only support Oracle products on Oracle VM and not on VMware.

Larry Ellison: Oh, no, no, we aren’t — we clearly support — we only support –. Lots of people are running Oracle products on VMware.

JDF: Exactly. So…

LE: That’s cool. And, it’s great. Our strategy is to be as… is to be open, and to support as many different product as we have… and platforms as we can.

JFD: So, if a customer has a problem running on VMware and — with the Oracle database, then call for support, the support will be given in that kind of configuration?

LE: Yes, essentially, yes.

Source: http://virtualization.info/en/news/2007/11/oracle-further-clarifies-its-support.html

[Shruti Bhat]

Chad, Great post. Just blogged about this topic on the VMware apps blog and referenced this post (as well as EMC's Oracle virtualization campaign)

http://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2011/04/yes-oracle-is-supported-on-vmware-.html

[http://vgrigorian.com]

This is an excellent article.
Still, if you want something more hands-on, try these:
http://vgrigorian.com/11gsimulator/1_rac11gr2.htm
http://vgrigorian.com/11gsimulator/2_rac11gr2rdbms1.htm
http://vgrigorian.com/11gsimulator/3_rac11gasm.htm
http://vgrigorian.com/11gsimulator/4_11gr2dbcreate.htm

You can find more demos (including dataguard, goldengate, streams) there at http://vgrigorian.com/

Thanks.
Vladimir Grigorian

[Srinivas Vasa]

Hi,

Do any one have template for auto installation Oracle11g in 10 VMware RedHat linux 5 machines in one click.
Regards
Vasa