PeopleSoft VMware Support

I am a huge fan of VMware and have been using it since some version long ago before the company was acquired by EMC. I use it as an integral part of my day-to-day activities and actively promote its use within our company and clients.

VMware (and virtualization in general) is the Matrix for hardware. Once your server has been virtualized it has no idea that it isn’t a physical server; in fact unless you know where to look (MAC address, device drivers, system tray icon if you have it setup thusly, etc.) you’d be hard pressed to say if the server you were connected to was virtualized or not.

The driving rationale behind the wave of virtualization has been the ability to recapture under-utilized CPU and centrally manage thousands of servers at a comparatively low cost. The Achilles Heel of virtualized servers is hard disk I/O but even that is becoming a moot issue with the uptake of SSD devices. My T500 laptop running 64-bit Windows 7 and VMware Workstation 7.0 on a OCZ Vertex 60GB SSD with 4GB of RAM can boot a Windows 2008 server instance in under 15 seconds and have PeopleSoft running in less than 30 seconds altogether. How much more so then if you have an array of SSDs (notwithstanding the reliability and cost concerns, both of which are rapidly becoming less of an issue).

So, back to the topic at hand. Does Oracle support PeopleSoft on a VMware platform?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that Oracle initially denounced VMware / virtualization. Then they decided to offer their own virtualization solution OracleVM and so supported a virtualized PeopleSoft only on OracleVM. Then they realized that their stance to support only their own virtualization technology in the face of growing customer demand for VMware doesn’t really hold water except when considering their desire for global domination and so finally relented (without really admitting anything).

The most recent statement on the topic is found in Oracle Support Document ID 847092.1 which states:

Oracle certifies our products (PeopleTools and EnterpriseOne Tools) on certain operating systems (including Solaris, HPUX, Linux, MSWindows, AIX etc.), not on specific hardware configurations. Therefore, as long as a customer configures their machines with supported operating systems, we will treat them as though they are independent systems and provide full support.

So in a roundabout way Oracle has embraced the brave new virtualized world with open arms without actually endorsing or having to certify any particular underlying technology. In other words, if your operating system is supported on your virtualization platform and Oracle has certified your operating system for PeopleSoft then you’re in the clear.

VMware opens up a whole new toolbox for your organization to effectively deploy and maintain PeopleSoft servers. The significant operational and sunk costs associated with high availability an fault-tolerance are now significantly reduced, allowing even smaller, budget conscious organizations to consider enterprise-level uptime.

Sorry Neo, I’m taking the blue pill.