When I first started working on ESX about five years ago I went through the same light bulb process as everybody else. I remember a conversation I that I had in the lab one day -
"Wouldn't it be cool if you put Oracle RAC on top of ESX? Then you could have complete flexibility. A database spread across multiple VMs and those VMs could be moved around as needed."
"It would be cool. But - Who would do that? People use RAC because their database needs more than one server. That would be crazy."
It becomes less crazy the more your light bulbs come on about the benefits of virtualization. It's not just a consolidation story. It allows you to manage and run your infrastructure differently.
With recent changes in both Oracle and SAP support statements it is now possible and supported to run RAC with SAP on vSphere. I believe that the key reason why Oracle made the change to it's support statement was in response to customers. Customers were asking for this support because they wanted to run RAC on vSphere and in some cases they were already RAC on vSphere.
This is what makes it fun to have these crazy conversations about what would be cool. Sometimes crazy happens.
Todd
Running on Isla Mujeres Again
11 years ago
1 comment:
I remember having a similar discussion when helping out on some testing for the Banner Blackboard application. The backend was a massive RAC DB on 1855's and EMC storage, but the front-end machines were all virtualized. First time they'd tried it, and it actually worked pretty doggone well. Fun times.
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