Re: Oracle + VMWare

On Dec 28, 3:42 am, "Matthias Hoys" <a..._at_spam.com> wrote:
> "John K. Hinsdale" <h..._at_alma.com> wrote in messagenews:c012e370-a0f3-4503-a76c-7c86c061eb3d_at_i72g2000hsd.googlegroups.com...
> On Dec 21, 10:30 am, "Matthias Hoys" <a..._at_spam.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for the feedback. I forgot to say that we don't use Oracle on
> > Windows
> > :-) We currently have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS. Some of our other
> > servers do have Windows.
>
> Hi Matthias -
> Sounds like your Oracle is running on Red Hat Linux, and you are going
> to have those system(s) as the "guest" VM O/S, but you didn't mention
> what the "host" (physical) O/S was. All I can say is things worked
> well
> for me w/ VMWare's "VM Server" product to run Windows virtually hosted
> on a Linux box, but didn't work to well to run Linux virtually on a
> Windows
> physical box -- it was really slow. I ran Oracle on neither of these
> virtual machines.
>
> But if you're going to host your Linux O/S, including an Oracle
> installation
> running under it, and put all that on a Windows box, I'd be ready for
> problems.
>
> Just my $0.02 and limited experience.
>
> John Hinsdale
>
> Thanks for the feedback. We are planning to use VMWare ESX, which doesn't
> need a "host" OS. It runs directly on the hardware of the VMWare box.
> Anyhow, I don't think we would have choosen Windows as a host OS, more the
> other way around.
>
> Matthias

The official line from Oracle regarding VMware is: if you run Oracle in VMware, we won't support you except for problems which are known to occur *outside* of a virtualisation environment. In short, we'll support you to the extent that you're not really very virtual.

I love VMware and have been a keen advocate of it in a learning environment since 2000 -but you wouldn't get me to install Oracle on a virtualised platform in *production* unless I'd had a frontal lobotomy that morning. EMC do a very good line advocating the use of virtualised Oracle with their SANs, but then they would say that, wouldn't they?! Frankly, it's just a bit of a no-no because of the support issues. Of course, Oracle have their own Xen-based virtualisation offering now, and it will be interesting to see to what extent they will support that and how far into other virtualisation environments that support level spills. But right now, I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Not because it runs badly or flakes out (it generally doesn't) but simply because if anything at all goes wrong, Oracle Support will be blaming everything they can on the virtualisation and you'll get no resolution of anything meaningful this side of the average human lifespan.

Regards
HJR Received on Thu Dec 27 2007 - 19:20:12 CST