How to virtualise Oracle products

I've been asked quite repeatedly these last few weeks/months about using Oracle on top of VMware. Most sales peoples and even architects are so used to virtualise everything that they forgot that Oracle is always a special case.

There seems to be quite a lot of confusion yet as to licensing, support and certification of Oracle products on top of VMware specifically, and hypervisors in general. 

I’ll try in this article to provide you with an overview of the virtualisation technologies available for Oracle products as well as the issues/caveats/drawbacks of each.

Note: I am assuming you're familiar with some of the technologies mentioned here. Hypervisor, LPAR, Middleware, Oracle VM, ... If not, google is your friend !

VMware
Although VMware is today's market leader in the Hypervisor space as well as probably the best x86 virtualisation technology out there (feel free to contradict me), Oracle chose NOT to certify any of their products for VMware.

Did I forget to mention that Oracle’s plethora of products will run just fine on top of VMware. This is not a technical issue, it’s a commercial one.

-     Oracle do not certify their products on top of VMware. Oracle will help you up to point. If there is any issue/bug that Oracle is not already aware of, they’ll ask the customer to reproduce the issue on bare metal before helping.
-     Oracle do not recognise VMware as a Hard Partitioning Technology. Which means VMware cannot be used to limit the number of cores used by an Oracle product, and hence licenses. If you install Oracle in a VM, you hve to lincense the FULL PHYSICAL server. For instance, using a 2vCPU VM on a 12 cores server will require licensing 12 physical cores.

I’d definitely not recommend using VMware for any production environment at the moment.

Hyperv
License wise, HyperV and VMware are facing similar challenges. Oracle requires the physical server to be fully licensed for all cores, and not just the ones used by the VM hosting an oracle product.

However, there is no issue with support. Oracle fully certifies HyperV for running Oracle products (Database and Middleware at the moment). It was announced during right before and then again during Oracle Open World 2013 as part of a Microsoft/Oracle partnership to offer Oracle database and middleware in Azure, Microsoft's public cloud. As a side note Microsoft's presentation was much better than the Oracle keynotes.

Well, the main advantage here is the ability to consolidate different versions of the OS and the Database/Middleware on top of a server for instance, and licensing only that server.

The drawback is Windows. Most customers and IT department would rather run Oracle on top of Unix/Linux platforms.

OVM
Finally, Oracle own Hypervisor, OVM. It is totally certified to run all products and can be used as a way of limiting the number of licenses to be acquired. 

If I am to look at the experience I had with OVM, it is mostly positive, especially since version 3 was released. It works well, is stable and offer the major features you would expect from a hypervisor, although not yet on a par with VMware from a features/capability perspective. 

All this is good. Too good to be true? Well, yes and no. You CAN limit the licenses to acquire by pinning CPUs to a specific VM. However, the license will not allow you to use features like Failover or VM Migration. If you do want those features, you'll have to license the secondary VM Server.

Here you go, this is a first solution if you'd like to reduce your license costs, but with a few caveats.


Hardware Virtualisation - Unix World
IBM's LPAR technology is an old friend to most IT departments, and a great way of limiting the number of CPU's to license. Another option is Oracle's Solaris Containers. What are the drawbacks then? We all know no solution is perfect.  Well, a couple of things that need mentioning

- UNIX hardware is not cheap compared to x86 platforms.

- The license core factor of 1 on UNIX instead of 0.5 on x86. a 12 cores AIX server will require 12 Oracle licenses, where a 12 cores x86 server needs only 6 Oracle licenses.

- UNIX OSs in general has been losing market shares to Linux for quite some time.

- Unix skills are hard to find.

Hardware Virtualisation (LPAR) in x86 market ! Oh yeah !

Until recently, there was no equivalent to LPARs in the x86 space. Well, not anymore, Hitachi (HDS) just released a new platform called UCP for Unified Compute Platform that include Hitachi Blades, storage and compute.

The important part here is the blades, as they are shipped with an LPAR technology similar to IBM's. It is now possible to split a blade into LPARs (up to 14), each with its own OS and Oracle product.

However, even if the technology is the same as IBM's, Oracle chose NOT to recognise HDS LPARs as a Hardware Partitioning technology. You have to license the physical server.

Well, in which case, this is a great platform for consolidation, as you can license one blade, and run as many different Oracle products as you want (or can).


I hope that will give you a view of the available options out there.
Feel free to fire any question if you need clarification.