For information on the response to Charles Phillips request for customer input on VMware, see Chad Sakac's blog. I heartily agree with Chad's comments. In addition, I will add the following point, which I think is key to the discussion.
Charles Phillips makes effectively the same statement that is contained in the metalink statement on support, i.e.:
The metalink support statement is very similar. It says:
In my opinion, both statements are slightly disingenuous. Certainly, they are misleading.
Other than RAC, Oracle simply does not certify things like this. There is no Oracle certification, so far as I can tell, for any hardware platform, other than RAC certified configurations. And we are not talking about RAC here.
As Chad points out, Oracle does not maintain a Hardware Compatibility Program for its software. For this reason, telling customers not to run VMware because it is not "certified" to run with Oracle software is simply meaningless. The same can be said of Dell servers, Intel CPUs, Emulex HBAs, Broadcom NICs and almost all of the rest of the stack on which Oracle software commonly runs.
Ask yourself this simple question: What is it that VMware provides? Folks think of VMware as a software company. In many respects this is wrong headed thinking. VMware is a platform vendor. What VMware provides is virtualized hardware. Thus, VMware provides a virtualized CPU, network connection, SAN connectivity, etc.
In that respect, VMware is far more similar to, say, Dell than it is to, say, Red Hat. Certainly, VMware does not provide an OS environment upon which the Oracle software runs directly. Rather, VMware provides a hardware (albeit virtualized hardware) stack upon which an OS environment like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) runs.
Oracle does provide certification of things like RHEL. But, as I have pointed out before, RHEL runs just fine on VMware, and is actually certified to do so by Red Hat.
Perhaps it would help if VMware behaved more like a platform vendor and less like a software developer. That is another conversation. Personally, I would welcome that. Such a change would require VMware to be more involved in solutions development for applications vendors like Oracle, which I think would be a very welcome development.
In the meantime, I respectfully disagree with the assertion by Charles Phillips that Oracle software should not be run on VMware because it is not "certified" by Oracle. That assertion is simply inaccurate and misleading in my view.
Your comments are welcome as usual.
Interesting! I guess you finally found your
place. I remember Moshe while at EMC, Linda Wright and many others
- Amjad Daoud
Posted by: amjad daoud | October 18, 2009 at 08:09 AM
Hi,
from my point of view VMWARE is a piece of software - a software stack which offers virtualization. It does this by emulating a complete hardware (cpu, disk, network and so on) stack.
This emulation is software based and is an additional layer between the hardware and the operating system. Without VMWARE the operating system directly access the hardware (yep - i know of para-virtualization and that stuff). But it is a fact vmware redirects / changes calls (from/to the cpu and other components).
From my perspective it is perfectly right to say VMWARE is a software layer - because it is. In the past i have seen errors coming from that virtualization which were not there without vmware.
On the other side oracle refuses to certify VMWARE solely because they want to sell/place their own virtualization technology.
So every time a customer tells me he wants to virtualize his database with vmware i tell him that this is actually not supported but works. And in case there are errors oracle might force him to reproduce the error on "real" hardware. Another odditiy is the licensing part: Oracle want you to license the hosting machine and not the cpus assigned to the virtual machine; but thats another pure marketing thing from my point of view.
Posted by: Ronny Egner | November 11, 2009 at 06:49 AM