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July 28, 2011

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Scott Aisenstat

Excellent article, especially so in the distinction made between certified and supported solutions. Licensing and support are the main, and oftentimes misinterpreted, factors for adopting Oracle virtualization. These two components can frequently kill a deployment before any discussions of performance or virtualization benefits even hit the table.

Massimo Re Ferre'

Excellent post Chad... as usual.

Agreed on support. No one ever asked Oracle to debug VMware issues. The discriminator is really at which point they hang off the phone. If they do it the moment you report the problem that isn't very good and fair to be honest. If they do as part of the (advanced) troubleshooting in order to rule out the possibility that the hypervisor is the problem .. well I guess that is fair.

Massimo.

Michael

Nice to see more customers doing this. We've been doing this for our customers for years. I'm in the process of migrating some monster Oracle DB's from Sun E25K systems to Linux on vSphere 4.1 and we're aiming at a 2x jump in performance at least (which is the minimum we've seen in the past). Average VM size 3 vCPu and 32GB RAM, With a bunch in the 6 vCPU 94GB RAM range. Will use 1.1TB of RAM for 56VM's on 6 vSphere hosts. Whole cost of the project, including hardware, services and licenses is less than 50% of the annual maintenance of the old systems. How's that for ROI!

Nathan Biggs

Chad, great post, and thanks for the mention of House of Brick. For any of you that will be at VMworld, plan on attending the Oracle on VMware superstar panel (BCA1548 Oracle on VMware Panel Discussion) Wednesday at 12:30 PM. Dave Welch, House of Brick's CTO and Chief Evangelist will be on the panel.

Nathan

Duane

We are beginning our migration from sparc to vsphere for oracle. The biggest problem right now has to do with DR. The DBAs like to have log devices recovered at a different point in time with recoverpoint. SRM wont let us do this. We are thinking about taking all our Oracle DB VMs out of SRM but that defeats a lot of goodness we get by virtualizing Oracle. Anybody cracked this nut?

Chad Sakac

@Duane - there is no solution (that I'm aware of) that's super-clean) to have your cake and eat it too on that topic.

Near term choices (well proven):
- use in-guest mechanisms (iSCSI, NFS).
- use SRM for everything else, and use the callout/script mechanism (improved in SRM5) for the Oracle DBA where it's important for more sophisitcated recovery.

Longer term, we're working hard to crack that nut in a better architectural way (see VMworld session VSP3205 - working to get a blog post on the topic.

Let me know if we can help architect the solution...

Srajarat

When we use SRM for DR, do we have to have the DR site fully licensed from Oracle's perspective (all DB and App server licenses)? Oracle folks are saying, the customer should be fully licensed on the DR site even if is passive but if the Oracle DB or App code is installed. As far as SRM, there is nothing that is installed on the DR site and the whole VM images will be migrated as part of the failover. Does it still warrant a full license on the DR site?

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