Comments on: Oracle listened, customers WIN! RAC supported on VMware

By: J

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:47:28 +0000

I think you’re referring to the comments on the post at http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2010/04/ebs_64_bit_linux.html ? I am actually working on this (finally!) in a test environment today. For the first go round I’m just building a new 64-bit box and laying down the R12 rapid install there, without copying anything over from my old R11 32-bit app node. I’ll keep you up to date on what I figure out.

Note that the DB is already 64-bit and so only the application tier is going through a platform migration.

By: Pieter

Pieter — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:58:45 +0000

Hi J
Sorry to highjack this post for another topic
Did you had any success in upgrading 11i 32-bit to R12 64-bit in one go. I saw your post on an oracle forum, but could not find details on the process.
Thanks

By: J

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:24:38 +0000

Honestly, I think we’re in agreement on almost every point. I’m very happy that Oracle has changed it’s support policy regarding RAC with VMware, but its not enough. Oracle needs to (continue to) listen to its customers and consider VMware hard partitioning. Do I think it’ll happen soon? No, I don’t.

As far as licensing, yes the licensing policy is unchanged – if your VM is using one virtual CPU but the hardware has 8 CPUs, for Oracle Enterprise Edition you need to buy 8 licenses. However, VMware is a viable solution for server consolidation of Oracle products like database. It’s rare in my experience (where I generally come to clients because of my Oracle E-Business Suite expertise) for a customer to only have one Oracle database. Heck, just for my current main client’s EBS system they have multiple Oracle databases (one for the ERP, one for Email Center, one for Wireless, one for a tax product that ties into the apps, two for a regulatory EBS bolt on) – and that’s not counting development environments, reporting environments or any other Oracle products they run. In a non virtualized world, just to run their EBS system, I’d be buying 4 servers worth of Oracle Enterprise Edition and 2 servers worth of standard edition. Compare that to running all these instances along with many others all on two physical servers currently. It’s quite the cost savings. Same goes for the App server licensing.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:43:49 +0000

Hi.

OK. So now they will accept SRs relating to RAC on VMware, but the support position is the same as before. If you have a problem, you may well get sent to VMware support to “prove” it is also a problem on the real hardware. That’s not exactly reassuring for most people.

Also, as far as I’m aware the licensing policy is unchanged. If you run a VM using 1 virtual CPU on a box with 8 physical cores, you are liable for a licensing the 8 cores. So VMware is only a viable solution for server consolidation of Oracle products if you are only using the same product on all VMs on that box. No mix and match DB and App server unless you want to pay lots of extra cash (named users caveat accepted ) for cores you are not using.

Oracle VM is still the only x86 software virtualization environment where you can license for the cores used, rather than all cores on the server (assuming you have set the CPU affinity properly).

If Oracle solved these two issues I would feel a lot happier about the situation.

Cheers

Tim…