Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

Operating system vendors such as Hewlett Packard, IBM and Sun are increasingly promoting the use of their own virtualization solutions for reasons primarily related to the need for IT consolidation and better hardware utilization.

For instance, Solaris Containers is a feature of Solaris 10 that allows partitioning of an existing operating system into separate virtual hosts:


IBM promotes the use of its Dynamic Logical Partitioning (LPAR) technology that enables the virtualization of hardware resources which can be shared by multiple operating systems:
 

HP's virtualization solution -- Virtual Server Environment -- includes various technologies such as nPartitions, vPars and Integrity VM that allow running multiple instances of HP-UX on the same server:


Additionally other vendor-neutral solutions such as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Citrix allow different operating systems to run as guest operating systems on a single physical machine.  I've briefly discussed our support for these types of virtualization solutions in a previous article, with a special case for E-Business Suite client/server modules which make direct connections to the E-Business Suite database.

The use of operating system vendors' virtualization technologies to host E-Business Suite falls under the same 'not explicitly certified, but supported' category. These technologies are covered by Oracle's standard policy for third-party product support: 

• Oracle will triage and attempt to diagnose issues reported for these configurations. 
  
• Specific
  problems isolated to virtualization software that cannot be reproduced
  in standard Oracle environments -- i.e. environments without
  virtualization software -- may need to be referred to the third-party
  vendor for advanced debugging and resolution.

Use in Production Environments

If you
plan to use virtualization software for your application and database
servers in a production environment, the usual advice applies:  conduct
thorough functional tests, perform peak load-testing, and have detailed
fallback plans in case of issues with production environments.

References

• Virtualization & E-Business Suite
  
• Running Oracle Database in Solaris 10 Containers - Best Practices (MetaLink Note 317257.1).  This Note is applicable for E-Business Suite Releases 11i and 12 environments.
  
• Support Status for VMWare (MetaLink Note 249212.1)