Happy New Year 2010 to all readers of our blog I am very excited to make a great announcement just as we start into business in 2010.
In the past months, I have spoken to many SAP customers that told me about ONE issue they face, when virtualizing SAP: Oracle would not support SAP production landscapes on VMware. While many customers continued virtualizing SAP on Oracle despite these restrictions, some did not and had to delay their project. We have worked with SAP and Oracle to improve the support situation and in Q4 09 the stack was already under evaluation.
Now, I am happy to announce that Oracle modified their policy to support SAP/VMware users as follows (see SAP Note 1173954 for details):
1. Since Jan 13, 2010, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1
Interestingly, there is also a new note (SAP Note 1426182) created about “Support of Oracle Databases for XEN", which clearly highlights that “XEN virtualized environments on the Linux platform impact critical runtime related areas for the Oracle Database such as process scheduling, network and disk IO access. Therefore Oracle does not support to run production databases in XEN virtualized environments.” Also there is still no support from Oracle for Hyper-V.
To make this real simple:
All databases Oracle, IBM DB2, SAP Max DB, and MS SQL Server now support SAP production environments on VMware. On x86 platforms: • VMware was the first virtualization solution that supported SAP on Windows• VMware is the only virtualization solution that supports SAP on Windows and Linux• VMware is the only virtualization solution that is supported by all database vendors
If you haven’t done so already, now, it’s time to think about virtualizing SAP on VMware. There will be nothing that stops you.
