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What is actual Oracle statement concerning running database in virtual environments
Hi,
What is actual Oracle offcial statement concerning running its databases in virtual environment?
Previously Oracle stated that it will supports it but if the problem occurs he will work on solving them if they can be reproduced in phisical environment. Is that still true?
Or mayby now „As of Oracle 11g, SAP and Oracle now officially support a virtualized Oracle database running on VMware”?
Can anybody attached actual statement as pdf so it can be shared with customers?
slucido
109 Posts
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October 27th, 2011 04:00
Absolutely, Oracle reserves the right to insist you reproduce a unknown issue they believe to be caused by virtualization in a physical environment. The features, flexibility and high availability that comes with virtualization, in my opinion, far out weights the remote possibility that Oracle will insist on reproducing an issue in physical. For example, many patches can’t be rolled back if they don’t fix a issue which means having to refresh from production. With VMware the DBA can take a snapshot of the database or applications or both then apply the patch and ROLLBACK to the pre-snapshot state saving many hours of work.
Cheers
reseach
225 Posts
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October 26th, 2011 03:00
Pawl, Oracle on VMware is supported, Oracle has a support statement in place for VMware on Metalink (MyOracleSupport) 249212.1 since November of last year Oracle supports RAC 11.2.02 and greater on vSphere Thanks, Eddy
slucido
109 Posts
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October 26th, 2011 07:00
Pawel,
Great question! Oracle like other companies reserves the right to have you reproduce an issue in a physical environment if they believe the cause of the problem is virtualization. There are several ways to architect your Oracle Virtual infrastructure to account for this possibility.
Considering RAC?
RAC and Virtualization provides some strong synergies. In particular, RDM and dNFS enable the capability to have mixed, both physical and virtual, nodes within a RAC cluster. Using the mixed node approach eliminates the Oracle support issue because you can point to the physical nodes when opening the ticket with support. Because I’m a big VMFS fanI would also like the architecture with a physical Oracle Data Guard instance in the case Oracle support demands reproduction of an issue in a physical environment. Here is a list of some of the EMC presentations at VMworld this year: http://goo.gl/sk8Ae
Consider looking at BCA2320 “vSphere 5: Best Practices for Oracle RAC virtualization” as it goes over many of the points discussed. I do want to leave you with this thoughts:
Finally, VMware is going to partner with you to quickly resolve Oracle virtualization issues. Checkout this URL: http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/oracle-support.html
Quote from VMware:
“VMware Oracle Support provides customers the following new advantages as part of the existing Support and Subscription contract at no additional charge:
Hope that helps but, please ask for any clarifications!
PawelO1
7 Posts
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October 26th, 2011 21:00
Thanks Sam, this is a great answer
Saying the above, you confirm that Oracle still requires that in case of unknown problem they will want to reproduce it on a phisical machine, don't you?
DarrylBSmith
28 Posts
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October 27th, 2011 05:00
Keep in mind, it is only if they believe the problem is caused by vSphere. The same policy is true if they believe the problem is caused by any other hardware vendor. Incidently, as I understand it, VMware has had only 12 cases of this scenario, and in only 4 of them, did Oracle request that it be reproduced on a physical environment.
jeff_browning
256 Posts
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October 27th, 2011 12:00
As I said some time ago on my blog, the MOS statement on VMware is disingenuous. While the statement:
Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized environments.
May be literally true, Oracle does not certify things like that. Oracle certifies one thing, and one thing only: Operating system distributions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified to run Oracle. RHEL is certified to run under vSphere. I think you see the point.
Having said that, the rhetoric from Oracle sales and the behavior of Oracle support are very different. Oracle sales loves to bash vSphere and threaten all manner of dire consequences if you employ vSphere to virtualize Oracle. Actual customer experience with Oracle support is far different. I have heard very, very few incidents where Oracle asked a customer to duplicate an issue on physical hardware, and all of those issues were eventually resolved. Also, the actual question being asked by the customer cried out for such a response from Oracle: The question was obviously related to the underlying virtualized hardware. On questions which do not relate to the virtulized hardware (such as questions regarding query parsing and execution, for example), Oracle has not asked any customers to duplicate the issue on physical hardware from what I have heard (and I have talked to many, many customers on this).
DarrylBSmith
28 Posts
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November 10th, 2011 10:00
There have been a lot of great comments on this thread and this is a topic I speak about frequently. I just posted my position on Oracle support for VMware virtualized environents.