Steven Chan is a senior Director in the Oracle Applications Technology Integration group.
Steven,
Your April 10, 2009 blog discusses Oracle's support policies on virtualization products such as VMware and Citrix, referencing Metalink Note 794016.1, which said that Oracle E-business applications are "not explicitly certified, but supported" on "both software and hardware based" virtualization technologies. The link to the note in your blog, though, is no longer active.
In his May 14th blog, EMC's Jeff Browning reveals why. He says that as of May 8, Oracle changed its support policy to no longer cover software based virtualization techologies. Given Oracle's pending acquisition of Virtual Iron, Jeff concludes, "It appears that Oracle is carefully and intentionally excluding VMware from its support statement". Jeff poses some questions for Oracle including:
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Given that there is abundant evidence from extensive testing (including at EMC) that VMware virtualization of Oracle databases is both viable and compelling, what is your real issue here?
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...when will you extend official best-efforts support to VMware which you have already done to other equivalent virtualization products?
Many of our clients run Oracle on VMware today, and we anticipate that number to rapidly escalate now that Oracle 11G and even large Oracle OLTB applications run faster as virtual machines on vSphere 4 than they do on physical servers. The ability of vSphere's Fault Tolerance to enable real-time fail-over of Oracle applicatioins will be another compelling driver to virtualize Oracle on top of VMware.
You make a point of emphasizing your "Blogging Code of Ethics" which specifies that, "This blog's "first priority is the needs of the Oracle community." Given that your April 10 Blog is no longer accurate, and on behalf of the 18,000 VMware partners, I'd appreciate you clarifying Oracle's support stance so that we in turn can report back to our enormous base of Oracle customers who deserve to know your intentions.
Respectfully,
Steve Kaplan
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