Let's not forget potential licensing issues... Where Oracle Corp is concerned, VMware is a "soft partitioning" technology (or was the last time I checked, about 3 years ago). This means that you need to Licence your Oracle software for the entire machine, not just for the VMs in which you run Oracle. This can be a bit painful for sites who plan to take a 16-way i86 box, run HTTP servers on VMs consuming 14 CPUs, and run Oracle on the "remaining" 2 CPUs. You have to licence Oracle EE for all 16 CPUs ($640,000), versus potentially licensing Oracle SE-1 for a 2-way physical server ($10,000; $5,000 if it uses multi-core processors). Sites planning to run Oracle in all VMs will be less affected, except for being compelled to use EE where SE (SE-1) may have otherwise been permitted. This information might be out of date. I encourage people to double check. Preferrable with at least 3 independent sources within Oracle -- I have historically found it to be extremely difficult to get correct answers to questions like this. On 7/19/07, Peter McLarty <p.mclarty@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > There is now bug fixes for time issues with vmware, clocks running away > with themselves. > > ... > > My 0.02c > > Peter > > -----Original Message----- > From: QuijadaReina, Julio C [mailto:QuijadJC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Friday, 20 July 2007 10:50 AM > To: Sean.oneill@xxxxxxxxxx; List, Oracle-l Freelists > Subject: RE: vmware & Oracle > > Sean, > > I used to have a Linux VM as a node on development RAC enviroment. On a > regular basis - about twice a week - the node was evicted, fenced which > would panic the kernel and cause a reboot. I did not dig to deep on the > cause - I took the VM out of the cluster. But as far as I remember the > reason was that the guest OS (RedHat 4) would continually miss the VM host's > clock ticks. That really messed up the time on the guest - making it lag > behind up to 3 hours every week. I did not have this problem with the other > 2 physical nodes in the cluster. > > Julio > ________________________________ > > From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of O'Neill, S. (Sean) > Sent: Thu 7/19/2007 9:18 AM > To: List, Oracle-l Freelists > Subject: vmware & Oracle > > > > Hi Folks, > > Has anyone had much experience (good or bad) with running their Oracle > DB's on the "vmware" product from VMware Inc. Speaking to local re-sellers > there appears to be a division of opinon as to whether or not there are > performance hits when doing so. We've a mixed bag of Oracle versions ( > 8.1.7 to 10.1.0.4), underpinning various applications on our site all > running on Windows Server 2000 or 2003. Any feedback, pointers, or links to > useful papers would be appreciated, though I'm really interested in "real > life" experiences with the product. > > Regards, > Seán O'Neill, > > > ________________________________ > > This message, including attachments, is confidential and may be > privileged. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender > then delete and destroy the original message and all copies. You should not > copy, forward and/or disclose this message, in whole or in part, without > permission of the sender. > ________________________________ > > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > > -- Cheers, -- Mark Brinsmead Senior DBA, The Pythian Group http://www.pythian.com/blogs