By David Marshall published: Thursday, December 06 2007
Believe it or not, people are still asking whether or not Oracle is going to support their database software in a virtualization environment. Why don't we first take a quick step back?
For years now, software support in a virtual machine has been a touchy subject. Vendors usually slipped into the support conversation, "just reproduce it on a physical machine, and we'll look into the problem." Come on! This isn't Y2K any longer - virtualization platforms aren't in beta, they aren't being implemented in the enterprise for the first time - this isn't virtualization's first time at the rodeo.
In fact, I would argue to software vendors that virtualization and virtual machines make it EASIER for you to support your customers. Think about it. You now have a known hardware platform that your support team can work with. Asking someone to reproduce the problem from a virtual machine to a fully configured server with more hardware components than you know what to do with is just plain asking for trouble. Again, does your support team have that EXACT piece of physical hardware in house? Is it configured the same? Does it have all the same hardware components installed? Wouldn't it be easier to have the customer send you the affected virtual machine and then have your support person actually debug and troubleshoot a replica of the customer's problematic machine? Does it get any easier than this? Unless your customer happens to be in the next cubical over from you, I doubt it.
So why does it seem as though Oracle is being so strict on its virtualization support policy?
When the company announced its own virtualization platform, Oracle VM, at Oracle OpenWorld, they added support for their database software in a virtual environment but stopped short by announcing that it would only support its software products within its own Oracle VM virtualization platform.
Within the text of the Oracle VM FAQ, the company states:
Q: Will Oracle support customers who are using Oracle products on other x86 server virtualization environments?
A: Oracle VM is the only x86-based server virtualization environment on which Oracle products are supported.
That means that while the company will officially support its database software running in Oracle VM, it won't support the same on VMware or Microsoft virtualization platforms. Taking it one more step in the direction of weird, even though Oracle VM is based on the open source Xen hypervisor technology, they won't offer support for Citrix/XenSource, Virtual Iron, Red Hat or Novell either. Instead, the company line seems to be that Oracle VM is priced in such a way that people can afford it, so why not just use it instead to virtualize your Oracle applications?
In a recent ComputerWorld article, Oracle told the magazine that there is "no change" to its support policy for customers running Oracle applications under virtualization from VMware Inc. -- primarily because they were never guaranteed full support in the first place.
"Oracle has not certified any Oracle software on VMware virtualized environments," the company said in a statement. Thus, "Oracle support will assist customers running Oracle software on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS without virtualization, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running VMware. If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS without virtualization. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for support."
In other words, customers can expect Oracle's help only if they can prove that a bug is totally unrelated to the virtualization platform they are using.
Not exactly the shining view of virtualization and support that we were hoping for. Reproducing and troubleshooting a bug from a test environment is bad enough. But can you imagine being asked to replicate a problem in a full-scale production environment? Sure, it’s easy for a software vendor to tell you to just reproduce the problem in another environment, but the reality is, this just isn't economically feasible. One of the main use cases of virtualization right now is to consolidate equipment. Who has "spare" equipment in the data center waiting to be used to "reproduce" a problem? And more to the point, who has the time? What are the costs associated with trying to migrate a virtual environment to a physical environment just to reproduce a problem? When you think about it, it's almost akin to asking someone running the application on an HP server to please reproduce the problem on a Dell server. And who would do that?
Perhaps Oracle will change their view somewhere down the road. Maybe it will coincide with them changing their pricing structure to reflect a more virtualization friendly pricing schema by moving away from worrying about the number of physical processors found in the underlying physical host server. And just maybe around that same time, virtual disk I/O will have come to the rescue to help relieve the disk I/O bottleneck problem found in server virtualization. Then, companies can more readily and easily consolidate their enterprise, production databases into a virtualization environment, and take advantage of high availability, consolidation, portability, cheaper licensing and better support all at the same time. Can 2008 turn it all around?
David Marshall
David Marshall has been involved in the technology industry for over 14 years and has been a virtualization industry expert for the past seven years, allowing him to publish and get quoted in numerous technology magazine articles covering the subject of virtualization. In addition to his work in the field, he also authors the InfoWorld Virtualization Report where he can also be heard twice a week via his podcast. He also founded and operates the virtualization news blog, VMBlog.com and has also appeared on a number of conference panels focused on the subject of virtualization for various trade show events. David is also a co-author of the book "Advanced Server Virtualization: VMware and Microsoft Platforms in the Virtual Data Center", a book that details years of hands on experience using and implementing server virtualization solutions.
