I’ve had VMware and Oracle on my mind recently, probably for three reasons:

1. In the last week or so, I’ve been involved in a two discussions about the viability/supportability of Oracle E-Business Suite on VMware, one on OracleCommunity.net, and the other on LinkedIn.
2. The IOUG recently sent out a VMware-sponsored email entitled, “Why Oracle DBAs should care about virtualization.”
3. I am an unreformed, unrepentant nerd.

So, if you're up for some lazy Saturday evening musings about Oracle and VMware, keep reading. I’ll try not to ramble too much.

FUD or misinterpretation? The difference between “supported” and “certified”

The crux of the recent online discussions in which I participated was the age-old question: Will Oracle support customers running on VMware, or not? The confusion arises from a My Oracle Support note stating Oracle’s position on the topic: Support Position for Oracle Products Running on VMWare Virtualized Environments (Doc ID 249212.1). If read too quickly, or too conservatively, it’s possible to conclude that Oracle won’t provide full support for its products in a VMware environment. Coupled with the knowledge that Oracle offers its own virtualization product, Oracle VM, that it does fully certify and support, it’s easy to see where Oracle customers might think twice about considering VMware as a virtualization platform.

It’s important to remember, however, that when it comes to Oracle products, there’s a big difference between certification and support. Certification of Oracle software on specific hardware platforms, for example, is pretty much out of scope for Oracle Support, and VMware is, in effect, providing a virtual hardware platform upon which to run your systems. The My Oracle Support note referenced above actually spells out pretty clearly how Oracle will support you if you’re running on VMware. What the note effectively states is, “If the reported issue looks like a problem with our software, we will support you. If your issue looks like it’s related to VMware, we’re going to send you to VMware for resolution.” While it might seem like this is a less-than-usual level of support, it’s actually entirely fair. If your problem could be traced to the OS, after all, you could expect to be referred to the OS vendor. Similarly, if the conclusion were that you had hardware problems, you could expect to be sent to your hardware vendor.

Incidentally, this illustrates a core benefit of the Oracle-OEL/Solaris-Oracle-VM technology stack: if you have issues that require intervention from Oracle Support, whether they’re with software, hardware, or virtualization layer, there’s no concern that you’ll be left playing “vendor volleyball.” Your issues will be handled entirely by Oracle, and there won’t ever be any finger-pointing between the various product support teams, because everyone is living in peace and harmony. *ahem*

Bottom line: Currently, yes, you’ll be supported if you run your Oracle environment in VMware. Unless your problem turns out to be VMware-related, in which case you probably want VMware’s help anyway.

That’s great and all, but does it work, particularly in production?

DIsclosure time: I’ve had my doubts in the past about the viability of VMware for production E-Business Suite environments, as noted here in a comment on Steven Chan’s blog. I’m just one guy, though. VMware’s products have matured since then, and some of the problems I alluded to were not strictly VMware issues. Even back then (2005-2006), though, I was comfortable running Grid Control and some production Oracle Collaboration Suite application tiers in VMware. From what I’ve read, things have only gotten better with VMware vSphere.

It’s worth noting that VMware itself runs Oracle products, including E-Business Suite, in a VMware virtualization environment. They also have a list of customer references on their web site; if you elect to use VMware in your production Oracle environment, you won’t be in uncharted waters. If you’d like to read about the experiences of an Oracle customer running on VMware without the marketing filter of the vendor’s website, I recommend reading Jay Weinshenker’s blog. That’s twice I’ve linked to him in two blog posts, but I’m not digitally stalking him, I swear. He just writes interesting stuff. I’ll probably link to him one more time before I’m done here.

Why not just use Oracle VM?

I have far more experience with VMware than I do with Oracle VM, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I present as a VMware fanboy. Oracle has made a clear commitment to the virtualization space, however, and has put together an attractive package to support it. Oracle VM might be a good fit for you, particularly if you:

• are interested primarily in virtualizing Oracle products (note: Oracle VM can be used for non-Oracle virtualization needs as well)
• haven’t already made an investment in VMware in other parts of your IT infrastructure.
• prefer having just one vendor to flog when things go wrong.

References/Additional reading

As if I haven’t packed enough links into this post, here are a few more:

• Apparently Oracle and VMware were on others’ minds this weekend, because while I composed this post, I saw a tweet referencing a VMware article, “Yes, You Really *Can* Run Tier-1 Enterprise Applications on vSphere.
• Jay Weinshenker (told you I’d link him again) has written about reasons to run Oracle on VMware vSphere, and has discussed the Oracle license savings that can be achieved with a carefully laid-out VMware cluster.
• The Oracle VM page on OTN links to a lot of technical and marketing material about Oracle’s virtualization product.
• Steven Chan and his team have blogged several times about virtualization in the context of Oracle E-Business Suite, including posts on Support Policies for Virtualization Technologies and Oracle E-Business Suite and Using Oracle VM with Oracle E-Business Suite Virtualization Kit. The “Virtualization” listing of the blog’s Concepts section has more.

Update: Between Brian's suggestion for native oidadmin and the arrival of Oracle 10gR2 for Mac OS X Intel, which includes the oidadmin utility, there are now much better ways to run oidadmin on OS X than the route described in this post.

It's almost a perfect setup. Between SQL Developer, JDeveloper, and Instant Client, I can do a lot of Oracle-related work natively on my Mac. For those instances where I need a tool that doesn't exist for OS X, virtualization software like Parallels and VMware Fusion can help to fill in the gaps. One feature of VMware Fusion that I really like is Unity, especially now that it's available for Linux in Fusion 2.0. Simply put, Unity allows the display of individual windows from a virtual machine without displaying that VM's desktop, offering a slightly more seamless user experience. The application launched from the VM behaves like any other application window on the Mac desktop: it appears in the Dock; I can use Cmd-Tab to select the app, minimize it, etc.

To tie all of that introductory rambling together, here's the topic of the post: an example of creating a Linux Unity application for an Oracle tool that I miss having on my Mac. I use Linux Unity to launch the Oracle 10gAS oidadmin client. The method I'm about to describe is a little bit clunky, but until VMware provides a more straightforward way to add your own apps, it'll do.

Setup steps

1. Launch a Linux virtual machine that has the oidadmin tool installed. For my example, I just installed the 10gR2 client software in an OEL5 VM, which was pretty straightforward. Michael McLaughlin has some good material on his blog on installing and configuring Oracle software in VMware Fusion, if you're looking for more direction.
2. Log in to your VM as a user that can run the oidadmin tool.
3. Invoke Unity mode. (cmd-ctrl-U)
4. Launch an application from the VMware Fusion Applications menu (cmd-L). I used Terminal for this example, which for me is the under Utility menu. This will create an application at the host level in your VM bundle, which you'll be using to create an application (oidadmin) of your own. Note: in the course of testing these instructions, I found that I needed to launch Terminal twice to generate the application bundle used in subsequent steps. YMMV.
5. Locate the package on your host that contains your VM, navigate to the folder named Applications, and create a copy of the Terminal application. If you're doing this in Finder, you'll need to 'Show package contents' on the VM bundle, as shown:

   

6. Rename the copied application to something suitable. In my case, I chose 'oidadmin'.
7. Open the Contents folder of the copied application (again, if you're using Finder, you'll need to Show Package Contents on the app bundle):

   

8. Edit the Info.plist file, and change the values of the CFBundleDisplayName, CFBundleName, and DOGuestAppURI keys to the appropriate values. the first two should reflect the new name of your app, and DOGuestURI needs to contain the absolute path to your oidadmin executable in your VM:

   

9. Save the changes to Info.plist and close the file.
10. Launch your new application!

Wow, that's a lot of screenshots

It's true; I went a little Flysketch-happy with this one. If you prefer the command line, here are alternatives to steps 5-8:

5. Use cd to navigate to the Applications folder of the VM bundle. No need to 'show package contents,' since the VM bundle just appears as a directory. In my example, the command would be: cd ~/VMs/VMware/ClientSoup.vmwarevm/Applications
6. Make a copy of the app bundle created in step 4: cp -r Terminal\ —\ ClientSoup.app oidadmin\ —\ ClientSoup.app
7. Use your favorite text editor to modify the Info.plist file: vi oidadmin\ —\ ClientSoup.app/Contents/Info.plist The contents won't be as pretty to browse as they are with the Property List Editor, but hey, they're all just strings, right?
8. Enjoy having one less step than those non-command-line people.

Launching the app

Here's your reward for all that hard work:

Once the new application is created, you can launch it just as you would any other Mac application. For best results, your virtual machine should be running and logged in as the use that can launch oidadmin. It's worth noting, however, that if the VM is suspended, attempting to launch the application will resume the VM. You'll just need to wait for the VM to restore its previous state. Here are just a few ways to launch the new oidadmin application:

• Navigate to the Applications folder of your VM package, as in step 5 above, to find the oidadmin.app and launch it directly. (yeah, I know: Ugh.)
• Create an alias to the new application and put the alias somewhere that's easier to access.
• For launching from the command line, you could create an alias:

  zathras:~ jpiwowar$ alias oidadmin='open -a ~/VMs/VMware/ClientSoup.vmwarevm/Applications/oidadmin\ —\ ClientSoup.app'
  zathras:~ jpiwowar$ oidadmin

• Use QuickSilver, if you're into that sort of thing:

  

It's still not perfect

I'm still tinkering with using the Unity feature in Linux VMs, and figuring out whether the limitations I'm seeing are perceived or real. This is what I've seen so far that is less than ideal:

• I haven't found a way to easily add my own applications to the seeded list in the Applications menu, which is why I engage in the copy app/rename app/edit info.plist cycle described above.
• The host OS doesn't seem to always recognize when an application launched from the VM has exited. Even after closing the window on the VM, an icon for the app still remains in the Dock. To re-open the application, I've found that I either have to launch it twice, or click on the orphan Dock icon to make it go away prior to attempting a re-launch.

That's all, folks

And that's how I run oidadmin on my Mac. I hope that someone out there in Internet-land finds this to be useful. If so, toss me a comment!

Oh boy, this is going to be fun. The recent release of VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2 offers a big boost to the feature set of VMware Fusion (not to be confused with that other company's "Fusion" product). The Windows/Mac integration and 3D/2D graphics improvements aren't deeply appealing to me, since I'm mostly running Linux VMs, but there are a number of new features that really jump out as a big deal to me:

• Multiple snapshots can be a blessing and a curse. The curse mostly comes into play when cleaning up snapshots on VMs that have large disks (such as E-Business Suite servers), but there are a lot of instances where I wish I had more than one "save point."
• Lower resource utilization probably doesn't mean the ability to create 4GB of RAM from 2GB, but anything that frees up more resources for the host has to be a good thing, and based on my experience using ESX server, VMware knows resource management pretty well.
• Linux Unity may seem like a fluffy thing to like, but it fits a need for me: the ability to run non-Mac-native Oracle client tools, such as oidadmin, without having to deal with either setting an X display (involves typing) or using a Windows OS (involves, um, Windows).
• Scripting with vmrun may allow me to throw out my functional-but-clunky Perl script for cloning VMs, and stop worrying if a vmx file format change in future releases will break the script.
• Running a VM "headless" would be pretty cool. That's not in the release notes, but it is in the VMware Fusion Power User's Guide, which, by the way, is a document well worth reading.

The current version of VMware Fusion is already a pretty solid product, but the 2.0 features are really bringing Fusion up to a level that more closely matches its Windows counterpart, VMware Workstation. Virtualization on the Mac is becoming a much richer experience. Now, if VMware could just release a Mac version of the Virtual Infrastructure Client, my VMware+Mac wish-list would be all but complete.

Of course, I've yet to take the beta for a test drive, so maybe I'm falling prey to marketing ("Ooo, look, shiny things"). Regrettably, it wouldn't be the first time. My initial plan was to hold off rocking the boat with my VMware machines and just wait until VMware Fusion 2.0 was fully released, but some of these features are making me rethink my "betas in VMs, not VMs in betas" rule. If nothing else, I think I have to satisfy my "I wonder if that means what I think it means" curiosity. After all, it's not like I have a production environment to worry about these days...

Whoops

Apologies for the two-post drift into Mac-land. It is a bit of a risk when reading here...I try not to be a drooling fanboy, but I really like my MBP. I'll be getting back to Oracle stuff, Oracle Apps specifically, with my next few posts.