Tag Archives: supported

Oracle listened, customers WIN! RAC supported on VMware

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As I was flying home last night and downloading tweets before takeoff, I found out some amazing news. Ugh, not the time to have intermittent internet access! But eventually I got home, did the reading and confirmed the news.

Oracle RAC 11gR2 (11.2.0.2) is now supported by Oracle under VMware.

You can read the updated My Oracle Support (MOS) announcement yourself in note 249212.1 which now states:

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.


(Remember:  Certified is different than Supported .  Oracle doesn't certify hardware that isn't Oracle's own )


This is simply fantastic news.  I talked to an petroleum company in Houston earlier this year who wanted to virtualize their Oracle EBS system and move platforms from Sun Solaris to x86 architecture.  Their big concern was that they were using 8 SPARC Processors and they knew that 8 x86 CPUs is the limit for a virtual machine under VMware vSphere 4.1.  We discussed various steps they could take to ensure their environment would thrive under this limitation, but now it's a non-issue. In the event they need more computing power, they can implement Oracle RAC under vSphere and start up another RAC instance as necessary. 

I do need to point out that as of this moment, 11.2.0.2 database is not certified or supported with Oracle Application (Oracle EBS) 11i or R12.  These certifications usually come out a few months after the initial database announcement (which was Sept 10th for 11.2.0.2).  If you check out the blog of Steven Chan (a Senior Director in Oracle's Applications Technology Group - the group responsible for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack) and specifically these comments , you'll see that Steven wrote:


We haven't certified 11.2.0.2 with Oracle E-Business Suite Release
11i yet.  This project is underway now.  11.2.0.1 is the latest
certified database release for the E-Business Suite.
Oracle's Revenue Recognition rules prohibit us from discussing
certification and release dates, but you're welcome to monitor or
subscribe to this blog for updates, which I'll post as soon as soon as
they're available.





So 11.2.0.2 database certification with EBS 11i and R12 is coming.My main client doesn't use RAC (our business can survive the downtime associated with a HA event and we aren't near the 8 CPU limitation of VMware vSphere 4.1), but knowing its an option can only give upper management even more confidence that virtualizing our entire Oracle environment under VMware vSphere was the right thing to do.






For those wanting more information on Oracle RAC under VMware vSphere, I'd suggest watching this Oracle virtualization webcast put on by Embarcadero and VMware a few weeks ago. I'd also highly recommend following VirtualTodd on Twitter.  Todd Muirhead was at Oracle OpenWorld in the VMware booth and presented some very interesting performance data from running RAC under VMware.  I can't find a link to the presentation, but you can follow Todd's postings and perhaps find his testing results at his blog on the VMware communities site .



Think of the possibilities of combined Oracle RAC and VMware vSphere:



o  Multiple RAC nodes on different vSphere hosts means no database downtime during a hardware failure.



o  Combining multiple RAC databases on same vSphere host to consolidate workloads but still segregate environments 



o  Much faster provisioning of new RAC nodes with vSphere virtual machine cloning and VMware VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array integration)

o ... and many more I still need to wrap my head around

a rant about FUD about Oracle on VMware

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You know those searchXXXXXXXXXXX.com websites (searchoracle.techtarget.com, searchvmware.techtarget.com, searchvirtualization.techtarget.com etc)? There are some good articles, but I keep seeing alot of plainly inaccurate articles about virtualized Oracle, especially Oracle under VMware.

I keep seeing these FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) articles on searchXXXXXXXXXX.com that just bug the hell out of me.

Take this article about Oracle RAC on VMware . They start out with something reasonable and accurate

Oracle will not support customers running Oracle RAC on VMware, for reasons that many say are political and technically outdated.

and then say things that are just completely not true:

“In short, Oracle won’t support it unless the customer can prove that the problem wasn’t related to the virtual machine.

…

While getting support for single-instance Oracle on VMware is difficult…”

I run multiple Oracle databases and various Oracle products (Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Hyperion, Oracle Universal Content Manager, Oracle Hyperion, Oracle Agile, etc) and It is no different to get support for Oracle virtualized under VMware unless troubleshooting leads Oracle Support to suspect your issue is with VMware itself.

The rest of the article I pretty much agree with. I’ve met Dave Welch numerous times and find his outlook on Oracle on VMware similar to mine. Oracle’s stated “we do not support Oracle RAC on VMware” appears to be nothing more than Oracle’s whim with no current technical issues to back it up. As much as I don’t like it, that’s their choice. If / when VMware starts getting Fault Tolerance working with multiple CPUs in a VM, that’s going to mute the argument about needing to run Oracle RAC solely for uptime requirements. Sure, you’ll still have VMs that aren’t good candidates for virtualization (Oracle VM or VMware) but that’s not the bulk of installations out there.

Oracle uses VMware in its training classes – I attended an Oracle Hyperion installation and configuration class last year that utilized VMware Workstation running 3 or 4 VMs on each student’s machine. I’ve worked issues with Oracle Hyperion with Oracle Support and had the analyst not only notice my environment was under VMware, but state that roughly half their customers run Hyperion virtualized under VMware. With Oracle now having Oracle VM and Oracle Virtualbox, you’d think at least Oracle’s own training partners would be using Oracle products in their lab and you’d think if this support was such a big deal that I’d have Oracle’s support telling me about the benefits of Oracle VM when they noticed I was running VMware.

Here’s another article that bugged me, this time about how Oracle VM is not half bad . First line of the article:

“Oracle’s continued refusal to support its applications virtualized on something other than the Oracle VM hypervisor has forced the hands of some users, pushing them to try the Xen-based virtualization offering.”

Did you see what I did? ” Oracle’s continued refusal to support its applications virtualized on something other than the Oracle VM hypervisor..”. That’s simply and plainly wrong.

I’ll end this article quoting from the official stance of Oracle Support with regards to VMware, My Oracle Support (aka Metalink) note 249212.1

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.


---

Oracle Support on VMware – your Cisco switches and DELL servers aren’t certified with Oracle

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So I came across this article last week on Oracle VM and how companies are trying it and how it’s, and I’m quoting here “not half bad”

If I ever come out with my own Enterprise level software and have a couple of public releases under my belt and the best thing I can get in the press is “not half bad”, shoot me.  Seriously.  That’s embarrassing.  Even if you do offer it for free.

So let’s look past the headline and see what the article has to say, shall we?

First sentence “Oracle’s continued refusal to support its applications virtualized on something other than the Oracle VM hypervisor has forced the hands of some users, pushing them to try the Xen-based virtualization offering.”

It’s this sort of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) spreading that’s one of the things I dislike about our industry.  Let me be completely clear ORACLE FULLY SUPPORTS ITS APPLICATIONS VIRTUALIZED ON SOMETHING OTHER THAN ORACLE VM HYPERVISOR.  Don’t believe me?  Check out Metalink My Oracle Support note 249212.1 – Support Position for Oracle Products Running on VMWare Virtualized Environments. Here’s the first paragraph

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.

Did you know your Cisco switches aren’t certified by Oracle?  Your DELL servers aren’t certified by Oracle either.

Very very rarely does Oracle certify another vendor’s hardware products.  Certify != support.  Oracle support’s your installation of Oracle productions on VMware just fine.  They take the very reasonable point of view that they’ll help you until they come to believe the issue is VMware at which point they’ll refer you to VMware support.  Seems completely rational to me.

I’ve been an Oracle Apps DBA running Oracle products under VMware for about 4 years.  I have never had Oracle not help me because I run many of my environments under VMware. I’ve spoken with numerous other Oracle DBAs running Oracle products under VMware.  None of us have ever had an issue where Oracle wouldn’t support our environments because we were running under VMware.

I’ll address the rest of the article in another blog post shortly, but seeing this FUD still slung about makes me too annoyed to write coherently.