Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Support Position for Oracle Products Running on VMWare Virtualized Environments

Today on Oracle website I discovered this interesting announcement on Oracle support status for VMware environments.
On my company we have a VMWare support and already several VMWare virtualized environments, but we never thought to use those envs to virtualize some Oracle databases. We already need to virtualize Oracle databases, especially those for development and pre-production platforms, but we were waiting for just a IBM blade order.
In my opinion I think to still suggest and implement the Oracle VM solution to my CTO because there are some issues not clear on the document and, at this moment, this VMware support position doesn't fit at all to our requirements because we would like to implement a RAC virtualized environment formed by 10gR2 nodes.

This is the position of Oracle at 8 november 2010 (see doc id 249212.1 on metalink for more details and news). In bold I have highlighted my doubts.
What's your opinion ?

Regards.



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 only
accept Service Requests as described in this note on Oracle RAC 11.2.0.2 and later
releases.