Support for Oracle RAC on vSphere - Removing the Barriers

I've been excited for a couple of days now.  Two days ago Oracle modified their official support stance for their products on VMware vSphere to include Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).  Previously RAC was the only product that Oracle had specifically called out as unsupported.  With the change of a couple of days ago - everything is supported (with a couple of caveats - like a specific version number and a few other things).

The reason this is exciting is that it removes a major barrier to the perception of vSphere as a platform for high performance enterprise applications.  Oracle RAC is a high performance cluster solution that is often used by customers for their most critical Oracle databases to ensure high availability and provide scale-out performance. The fact that RAC is now supported by Oracle running on VMware vSphere illustrates that vSphere is capable of running the most demanding and intensive applications.  Previously when a customer would hear that RAC wasn't supported on vSphere it would put plant a seed of doubt, but that is now gone.

This was the biggest unsupported statement from one of the biggest software companies and getting it reversed is a removal of a barrier to move to a more flexible, more efficient, and easily managed datacenter.

There is still plenty of work to be done to improve the support and licensing aspects of Oracle software on virtualized environments, but I think that this change with RAC support is a very positive step.

Todd