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Virtual Oracle database in VMware vSphere 4.0

There's a big discussion going on at my workplace about virtualizing Oracle databases. It used to be not done because of performance, but it offers many really useful features such as hardware independence, fail-over, VMotion and cloning, vmdk copies, etc.

Oracle had previously told us they supported Oracle in VMs. When they announced Oracle VM Server based on Xen, they retracted this statement. We weren't impressed. Microsoft tried to do the same things while they were working on Hyper-V and so on. Eventually, anti-monopoly laws forced them to support competitors in the same way as they support their own virtualization flavor. So I expect Oracle to do the same. In the mean time... we're playing with Oracle Xen thingy as well as investigating virtual databases running on VMware 4.0 aka vSphere.

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