Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

Steven,

You reference Metalink Note 794016.1 which used to state 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 The link to the note in your blog, though, is no longer active as Oracle's support policy was changed to no longer include software-based virtualization technologies.

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.

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 this post 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

Note: A more complete version of this response is posted as an "Open letter to Steven Chan" on http://roidude.typepad.com/my_weblog/

Hi, Steve,

I just returned from a multiweek vacation and am working through my backlog.

My blog's first priority remains the needs of the Oracle community. I am a generalist, so this blog spans my broad areas of responsibility and interest.

There are, however, topics that I'm required to defer to specialists, either due to the lack of my own expertise or authority. Oracle's stance on virtualization technologies has turned out to be one of those topics.

Our Linux Engineering team and our Applications Platform Group have spent a fair bit of time going over Note 794016.1 after its initial publication. Its content has been updated. I can't comment on the internal discussions leading up to those changes.

Wim Coekarts is Oracle's Vice President of Linux Engineering and is better-able to comment on Oracle's policies on virtualization technologies. You're welcome to post a comment on Wim Coekarts blog if you'd like to engage in a deeper discussion about Oracle's positioning of virtualization technologies. Wim's blog is here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/wim/

Thanks for drawing my attention to your open letter on your blog. I appreciate your ongoing contributions to our Oracle community. Good looking blog! I've added it to my RSS feeds.

Regards,
Steven

Hi Steven,

I have been checking your note: 465915.1 Using Oracle VM with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i or Release 12 periodically for updates on advanced configuration (DMZ, RAC, and Shared $APPL_TOP)...

For about a year now, We have been using 8 physical servers with VMWare sessions in a test environment to mimic the production of 19 servers (14 AS10g servers + 5 EBS servers). The process of refreshing this test environment is fast and simple (1 - 1, OS TAR/UNTar plus RMAN restore/recovery). We are planning to build a Disaster Recovery site with a similar process but smaller footprint server-wise. Because the DR site is a production environment, we would prefer to implement an Oracle-certified configuration. Is this something that you would explicitely certify? Something like your AS10g/EBS certification, but an Oracle VM version? If yes, is there a chance that this might be one of your near-term priorities?

Best Regards,
Jennifer.

Hi, Jennifer,

Thanks for the update on your plans.

We have no plans to conduct formal testing with VMWare. OracleVM is the only virtualization solution that is explicitly certified with the E-Business Suite.

We're currently reviewing the various disaster-recovery and business continuity documents published for the E-Business Suite. We're actively debating how many of those configurations need to be refreshed or revisited, and whether new DR-related architectures need to be formally investigated and documented.

Adding OracleVM to that mix may be a bit ambitious at this point. I suspect that this won't be something that we'd be able to address in the near term. I'll definitely let our architects know that you've raised this as a requirement.

Regards,
Steven

Hi Steven,

I agree with you that putting all the pieces together is a bit ambitious at this point. We can be creative on the test site and keep up with the latest in terms of everything that you certified, but don’t want to move ahead of Oracle in production …

I met an Oracle employee in the RAC workshop in Reston last year who told me that there was a group within Oracle that was testing DR using vendor solutions and planned to publish a white paper at the end of last year (AS10g Guard is going away and they were only testing 1 physical server from the primary site to 1 physical server on the DR site to simplify the process). I was excited because at that time, we already built our mimic production environment using OS copy and VMWare to make it 1 server to 1 server replication in order to simplify the process. There was no Rapid clone or AS10g guard in the process. For the 11i DB part, we used RMAN instead of Dataguard because there was no network connection between prod and test and no real time update requirement. But the concept was the same…

I sent the guy a follow-up email, but didn't hear back. By any chance, would you happen to know if such a white paper was published or which Oracle group was testing DR solutions? Or which group is responsible for certifying this piece? We really want to build explicit certified architecture in production, but only if Oracle certifies it. If Oracle only tests or certifies 1 physical server to 1 physical server scenario, in our case, we would have to have 19 servers sitting idle on the DR site…

Would you agree that building a small footprint server-wise on the DR site is a perfect scenario using Oracle VM?

Thank you very much for your time and response.
Jennifer.

Hi, Jennifer,

I'm not familiar with the RAC workshop last year, so I can't comment on what might have been communicated there. If you drop me a private email with your contact's particulars, I could try and chase this internally.

Our OracleVM team agrees that there would be advantages to using that technology in a DR architecture. This would be useful in allowing the ability to use DR hardware for development and test purposes during normal operation and yet be able to quickly and cleanly switch to production usage during a disaster.

There's been some discussion of investigating these options internally. There would likely be few EBS-specific considerations, but we don't have any immediate plans to explore formal certification and documentation of these options yet.

Regards,
Steven

Hi Steven,

Thank you for offering help.

From your response, you gave us a great idea: Oracle software binaries installed in a virtualization product session can be easily captured in snapshots. We can apply the production logs nightly or weekly in batches on the DR site and switch to a test environment during normal business hours using the same hardware. We have been using similar creative ideas to deal with high demands in DEV environments where it has 8 sites’ hardware, but 10 development efforts in parallel, e.g. but didn’t think the same practice can be used on the DR site…

Your insight and information provided to us are very helpful. As always, thanks for your help and follow-through.

Best Regards,
Jennifer.