Re: Hello some idea to include a contract clause to protect against virtual machines

There is an old saying that, "As soon as lawyers become involved, the relationship is over", and this is certainly true in a vendor-customer relationship. A lawyer will be glad to be paid to pursue such a case, but I suspect it would only irritate your customer and it is messy and expensive to amend contracts after the fact. Far easier to simply address the technical problem, for that is what it is. That is how "trusted advisors" are born.

Virtual machines are usually allocated so as to "play nice" in a cluster, which means that resources such as vCPU and vRAM are shared back and forth, since each VM cannot always be allocated their configured amount at all times. It is intended for the total resource allocated in a virtualization cluster to exceed the physical capacity, at least in non-production environments.

But over-subscribing virtual resources in a production environment is neither a good idea nor recommended, and that seems to be what has happened here, perhaps? So, it is not that virtualization is inherently "bad" for production, but badly administered.

Think about it: demand for resources by the Oracle environment are peaking when demand for resources by the other VMs are also peaking, if they are supporting the same application. Unless otherwise configured, the hyper-visor has no choice but to *reduce* resource allocation across the board, due to the peak in demand by all. If the virtualization admins likely have graphs and reports showing this happening already.

It might be a good idea to work with the virtualization admin(s) to diagnose whether this is happening or not, and decide whether to increase resource capacity in the cluster (i.e. buy more hardware) or set reservations on a minimal amount of vCPU or vRAM for the Oracle environment? This will permit the issue to be escalated as the simple technical issue of resource sharing that it is.

At this point, IT management can be presented with the choices of A) increasing the capacity of the cluster and solving the problem or B) imposing reservations on certain VMs and micro-managing resource allocation.

There is a further option "C" of tuning each of the critical virtual machines to dampen the peaks in demand of course, and this list can help with that.

Hope this helps...

-Tim

On 11/24/14 6:46, Juan Carlos Reyes Pacheco wrote:
> Hello, please
> does anybody includes in the contract something against the use of
> virtual machines to install Oracle.
> One of our customer has a virtual machine that degrades the
> performance, and is necessary to restart the server periodically.
> They expect we solve something we can't solve, because the problem is
> in the virtual machine, other customer with the same software doesn't
> have that problem.
>
> I was asking myself if there is a "standard" clause in the contracts
> for the customer to free from problem related to virtual machines.
> In example I read there is no support from oracle for vmware machines,
> if you have a bug you have to demostrate this same bug happens in a
> physical installation too.
>
> Thank you :)
>
>

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