Chad Sakac of EMC received a canned response from emailing in support of Oracle support for Virtualization on VMware.

VirtualGeek blog post

Mr. Sakac has certainly taken some time to review and share his thoughts.  Many of which I had myself as I read the response, most notably, “Do people at Oracle really think like this!?”  From everything I read in that response, they must, which gave me a headache.

To me it seems foolhardy, this late in the game, to believe that your Oracle VM will in any way compete with VMware solutions or is even a viable solution to customers.  Yes, Oracle RAC is great and does have functionality that VMware does not have because it is built at the application layer.  However, HA/DRS/vMotion offer extra incentives, but really the win with VMware over Oracle VM comes at the management level.  Oracle VM has absolutely nothing for managing hundreds and thousands of VMs, and ensuring you get proper resource delivery to meet SLA, ensuring uptime, and managing all of it across multiple sites and networks compared to VMware Infrastructure and vSphere.  It is also possible to run RAC within a VMware virtualized environment to get the best of both worlds!

Oracle, please stop and take a look around.  You have no business being in the Virtualization market, look at Virtual Iron.  Work to continue to evolve what you are already so very good at and people crave with Oracle Databases and Applications.  They are top of the heap solutions, and have been for a long time.  Microsoft SQL Server is pushing hard to gain acceptance at your level, and fiddling around with one off solutions for Virtualization will only eat up time and resources better spent in other endeavors.  Do away with Oracle VM, and simply support VMware as if it was another *nix OS, Windows OS, or even Hardware vendor.

As a VMware and Oracle customer, I would very much like to see this simple level of support adopted by Oracle.

I know, that for me, we have run Oracle in Virtual Machines for years now and full support would break down the last barrier anyone has for fighting against Oracle in a VM.  We have asked our Oracle reps many times about this.

Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com has information on this revelation, including an email address to the Charles Phillips President or CEO of Oracle who want to hear from you if you would like to see support increased for Oracle in a Virtual Environment.

See the Yellow-Bricks post here.