Collaborate 11 - A DBA Discussion on VMware

To start the conference, I brought together some of the top DBA  and user group leaders in the IOUG to have a dinner discussion on running Oracle production environments on VMware.  I thought I was going to have to present the benefits of VMware and why it's safe to run Oracle on VMware.  I was surprised when they all stopped me and said:  "We know Oracle runs well on VMware you don't need to convince us".  It was a great discussion all evening on VMware, best practices for running Oracle on VMware and where it makes sense.  A summary of key points include:

• Most companies will deploy their middle-tier applications and EBusiness Suite Applications on VMware first.  As they said, "middle-tier applications on VMware just makes sense".
• Applications in the cloud will be running on VMware as the platform of choice.
• The benefits of moving a Virtual Machine running Oracle from one host to another (vMotion), moving Oracle storage to a different storage array online (Storage vMotion) and having a VM running Oracle be able to automatically start up on another host if there is host failure (High Availability) are all great benefits of running Oracle on VMware.
• The great provisioning of being able to clone a VM running Oracle, using templates to deploy new Oracle platforms or using vCenter Converter to create a new cloned VM are all important features for Oracle environments.
• We all agreed there is going to be tremendous acceleration of the percentage of new platforms running on virtual machines and not physical machines.
• VMware deployments is going to continue to explode in good part to the deployment of middle-tier and databases being deployed in the cloud. 

The VMware environment has really evolved when now top DBAs in the user community understand the important role of virtualization and they see the business drivers and the cloud accelerating the move to virualization.