Oh glorious day!
A big victory was won today in the Oracle on VMware battle front. Most of the resistance has been around excluding RAC from any support stance, and overall [lack of] any official support stance. Before they just blanket didn’t support it. They’ve now changed that stance, and updated their stuff to show that they DO support all of their products, including RAC (*11.2.0.2 only*), running on VMware.
The highlight is they don’t CERTIFY. They DO support all products, but do not CERTIFY VMware as a hardware platform. And if a problem is found, they request you work with VMware on it, which is exactly what we’ve always wanted anyway! (i.e. We would call Sun for the v880’s hardware, not Oracle, etc.)
The last obstacle is updating the Enterprise Licensing model to promote soft-provisioning technologies other than their own, so that customers can actually increase their Oracle footprint, rather than being fear-mongered into decreasing it by licensing models that don't make sense in a virtual world.
Here’s the actual updated metalink article, released on Tuesday and announced today:
Support Position for Oracle Products Running on VMWare Virtualized Environments [ID 249212.1] | ||
Modified 08-NOV-2010 Type ANNOUNCEMENT Status PUBLISHED | ||
Purpose
---------
Explain to customers how Oracle supports our products when running on VMware
Scope & Application
----------------------
For Customers running Oracle products on VMware virtualized environments.
No limitation on use or distribution.
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.
If the problem is determined not to be a known Oracle issue, we will refer the customer to VMware for support. When the customer can demonstrate that the issue occurs when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support, including logging a bug with Oracle Development for investigation if required.
NOTE: Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware. For Oracle RAC, Oracle will onlyaccept Service Requests as described in this note on Oracle RAC 11.2.0.2 and later releases.
Thanks for digging up this info Nick. I think one also needs to consider one of the fundamental reasons why RAC was not originally supported and the change in position. As an early adopter with RAC on VMware ESX 3.i back in 2007, I surmise that both the improvements with regards to clock skew on Linux kernels and the 11.2.0.2 changes have factored in the support changes.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note: I'm not sure if you can actually post the contents of the MOS note publicly.
Leighton,
ReplyDeleteYes, the clock skew was a big deal. With the newer kernels, pretty much a non-issue.
I looked into re-posting these, and as long as I reference the actual article number and published date, and do not modify any of the wording (i.e. reposted Verbatim), everything should be fine.