Oracle on vSphere
This is a whole page dedicated to running Oracle on VMware. You can run all of the Oracle products on VMware, and might even make it cheaper for you because you might not need all the Oracle features (RAC and DataGuard).
But still the boys @Oracle are hiding in the hut (metalink) for their last final stand.. or is it one last tennis game?
Licensing
IF you license an ORA database against the physical sockets of a host (there are other methods, like site-wide): it doesn’t matter how many virtual machines you run with ORA in it. Oracle does not see VMware has a “hard partitioning” virtualization soltuion (!). The good news is that this means you can run as many ORA VMs on a licensed host, or cluster of hosts, as you like. So envisage an ORA cluster of hosts, with as few as two hosts in the cluster, with a great SLA and delegated administration to the ORA DBAs. This gives the DBAs more granular control of different services: imagine that on one VM they can provide quick refresh capabilities with snapshots, say for testing, but on another VM they can ensure 100% uptime with DRS (zero downtime for planed maintenance of hardware) – it’s win:win for the Oracle team!
Articles / Blogs
- The Oracle Storage Guy (Jeff Browning) has a great article on What the Oracle/VMware Support statement means.
- The Register has a great article on Oracle faster/cheaper/better on VMware.
- Chad Sakac / virtualgeek rolls the drum for an Oracle Manifesto.
- Steven Chan of Oracle, writes about the Support Policies for Virtualization Technologies and Oracle E-Business Suite
- Steven Chan of Oracle also writes about Virtualization and the E-Business Suite, Redux
- Steven Chan of Oracle also writes about Virtualization and E-Business Suite
- Steve Kaplan writes an Open Letter to Steven Chan of Oracle
- Chris Wolf from Burton Group has posted Oracle Changes its Position on x86 Hypervisor Support (Unfair Licensing Remains)
- Allessandro Perelli who runs virtualization.info posted EMC attacks Oracle on its VMware support policy
- Chuck Hollis of EMC talks about Why Oracle Doesn’t Like VMware
VIOPS has several Oracle documents:
- VMware on VMware: Virtualizing Oracle e-Business ERP Application Suite
- Oracle 11g Release 1 RAC On RHEL5 Linux Using VMware ESX Server and NFS
- Oracle 10g Release 2 RAC On RHEL4 Linux Using VMware ESX Server and NFS
VMware has a terrific set of resources at http://www.vmware.com/go/oracle:
Do VMware provide any collateral on licensing requirements for Oracle on the core DB product and other products within the Oracle suite namely Weblogic….?
Yo Dan, it’s not “proper” for VMware to comment on other organization’s licensing policy in a public forum
We do have collateral @ vmware.com/go/oracle, but I think that you need to talk to your VMW rep for more help. Chris Rimer is our alliance manager for Oracle and does a lot of good stuff in this space, I’ll ask him to pop along. Cheers! Steve
Hey Dan, agree wtih Steve, we can’t publicly comment on any third-party licensing, or I’ll have to fear the wrath of my otherwise-great legal counsel inside VMware. With that noted, I can simply say this — Oracle makes virtualization very easy. Typically, as you likely know, you can license by machine or by user. If you’re going to license by machine, you have to license the ENTIRE machine, but once you’ve taken care of that, you are free to put as many VMs on the licensed physical host(s) as you like.
WebLogic is a bit trickier becuase prior to Oracle acquisition, some WebLogic customers had less-than-full machine pricing. That may have changed for you. Again, your best bet is to work with your VMW rep in conjunction with your Oracle rep to get the accurate perspectives. Best to you with virtualized WebLogic — it’s one of the strongest enterprise cases where VMW can show real increased performance benefits from scale-out virtual deployments. Enjoy!
@Chris Rimer So, Chris, if I have an ESX Host with two sockets with four cores each (eight cores in total), then I just license Oracle DB for that and run AS MANY ORA VMs AS I LIKE ON THAT HOST? So in effect, I could create a two-host cluster especially for Oracle DBs and I license Oracale against the hosts, then run as many VMs on that two node cluster as I like. Thanks!
Thanks guys, I thought I was playing devils advocate….I will speak to my SE/AM at VMware and get moving on this one.
@Steve Chambers You are spot-on Steve. That’s the deal. And Oracle’s fine with this. Nothing to hide here. Totally legitimate approach to optimizing a great Oracle environment, with HA to boot.
@Steve Chambers Steve, The licensing policy is a complete lifesaver in the SMB domain, where we are now able to transition small departmental databases from single-node standalones onto VMware architectures. We are seeing improved performance (SAN, better hardware, etc) as well as massively reduced costs by bundling a good number of these small DBs onto a given ESX node. We Oracle guys usually focus on the 5% of DB’s that might suffer with a transition to a virtual architecture, where we have to wring every last drop from the host hardware. Instead I am gunning for the 95% of the other DB’s we support, and I am surprised myself at the results!