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Re: Oracle now supports RAC on VMWare [message #482804 is a reply to message #482790] |
Mon, 15 November 2010 23:18 |
Frank Naude
Messages: 4580 Registered: April 1998
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Just for the record:
1. The blog post referenced doesn't belong to me.
2. The same info is available in several articles over the Internet. So, it is wasn't in the public domain before, it is now.
3. If I understand this correctly, Oracle did not support RAC on VMWare in the past (although it apparently work perfectly OK) and would not even have accepted calls related to it.
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Re: Oracle now supports RAC on VMWare [message #482809 is a reply to message #482804] |
Mon, 15 November 2010 23:34 |
mkounalis
Messages: 147 Registered: October 2009 Location: Dallas, TX
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My apologies - I thought you referenced your blog.
It is a major violation of the terms of use of metaling to post articles from metalink anywhere - but as you say it's out there.
RAC did NOT run OK on vmware because of a bug in the real-time-clock of the vm being able to go backwards on it's own. This was always due to a vmware issue (as I understand it) and not an oracle issue - but my understanding could be flawed. I can tell you that I have personally tried to regression test rac on vmware several times and was never able to get it to pass. I also know that some shops attempting to run rac on vmware had to migrate off due to numerous false node evictions - seemingly caused by the real-time clock issue.
I never knew oracle to not take calls on rac running on vmware as I personally opened up several sr's related to this kind of configuration. When the troubleshooting pointed to a hardware issue is when oracle support asked the customer to contact their hardware/os vendor.
I do think it is fairly major for oracle to state that they would support rac running on vmware up to the point that an issue might be caused by the vm itself - that is new as far as making that statement in print. However, I personally don't see this as any kind of change in the way oracle supports rac. It is interesting to see that the support statement states 11gR2 and above.
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Re: Oracle now supports RAC on VMWare [message #482811 is a reply to message #482809] |
Mon, 15 November 2010 23:55 |
Frank Naude
Messages: 4580 Registered: April 1998
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Senior Member |
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Yea, you are probably right. It's not really such a big issue, but it somehow turned into a huge media circus.
PS: I've seen reports indicating that Oracle may want to buy a virtualization product/company like EMC (for VMWare) or Citrix.
The story behind the story may be that Oracle is readying their products for a possible future take-over.
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Re: Oracle now supports RAC on VMWare [message #482909 is a reply to message #482811] |
Tue, 16 November 2010 14:23 |
mkounalis
Messages: 147 Registered: October 2009 Location: Dallas, TX
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Senior Member |
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I called some of my peeps today and what you are hearing is what they are hearing . In the end, I believe it is a step (I argue a small step) in the right direction. Still - RAC is something that in reality is hard to justify in a VM - RAC is usually deployed not only in HA environments, but high transaction environments as well. In a high OLTP environment, what do you gain by virtualizing? You need horsepower and resources - the ability to move the resources from node to node is something that just doesn't (to me) make sense for RAC. If you need to do maintenance, you shut down one node/blade/server at a time, upgrade, rinse, repeat, etc. Seems to me that virtualizing your dev environments makes sense - but then for your QA environment it should probably be the same exact environment that your production system is on (which in my humble opinion should be bare metal) - and I also know that is something almost no-one does. I think the basic virtualization mantra of virtualize everything doesn't make sense in a real world environment - still I see lots of shops doing this - and then asking themselves, why? Oracle's support (or lack thereof) on VMWare isn't in my mind, a big deal one way or the other . Thanks for your comments Frank!!
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