Re: vmware & Oracle

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This information might be out of date.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,
>
>
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-- 
Cheers,
-- Mark Brinsmead
   Senior DBA,
   The Pythian Group
   http://www.pythian.com/blogs

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