While the customers wonder if Oracle will merge its virtualization platform Oracle VM with the just acquired Sun xVM and the Virtual Iron ones, the company continues to fine tune its support policy for 3rd party hypervisors. That same policy that EMC recently attacked and that is generating a lot of discussion (here
and here) on virtualization.info.
In just one week Oracle changed a new article on the topic (requires login) two times as Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at the Burton Group, carefully tracked.
In the first edition of the document, dated May 6, Oracle finally accepted to provide the best effort support for 3rd party hypervisors:
The use of platform vendors’ virtualization technologies (both software and hardware based) to host Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and R12 is covered by Oracle’s policy with regards to 3rd-party products – that is, they are ‘not explicitly certified, but supported’.
What this means is that while these technologies are not certified, Oracle will not turn away a customer reporting an issue solely due to the use of these technologies. When possible Oracle will triage and attempt to diagnose the issue reported – Oracle support may attempt to replicate the issue in a non-virtualized environment and work with the customer to verify if the problem exhibits in such an environment.
On May 8 the article was edited to include a statement that excludes every Oracle competitor in the x86 virtualization space (at the moment including VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat):
This document provides a statement regarding Oracle E-Business Suite (11i, R12) support of Hardware Vendor Virtualization technologies on non x86/x86-64 systems.
This is the direct answer to the EMC provocations of the last weeks. After this, it would be interesting to know what kind of reaction had the Oracle customers instead.