50 Partners To Help You Virtualize Business Critical Applications

I just noticed an article on VMware’s Virtualize Business Critical Applications blog listing all the partners globally that have so far been accredited under the VMware Virtualize Business Critical Applications Program (VBCA) – http://blogs.vmware.com/apps/2012/12/50-partners-to-help-you-virtualize-business-critical-applications.html.

Virtualizing Business Critical Applications on VMware Whitepaper

I’ve been reading through a great whitepaper published by VMware recently that covers a number of different business critical applications. The Virtualizing Business Critical Applications on VMware whitepaper has plenty of good guidance for Oracle, SAP, Java, Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint, Hadoop and also covers support and licensing. The paper also includes all of the leading VMware Partners that are accredited by VMware under their Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Competency to provide services to help you virtualize these business critical applications. (<blatant plug>including IT Solutions 2000, my company</blatant plug>).

VMware’s Oracle Support Goes 24/7 From Q1 2013

I heard some great news yesterday from the man in charge of Oracle Solution Support at VMware Global Support Services. The Extended Oracle Support Policy that VMware provides for all customers running Oracle Software on VMware vSphere is going to be extended even further.

Planning to Migrate Oracle from Unix to Linux on vSphere

A while ago with much fanfare Oracle announced it would no longer develop it’s flagship software and database for use on HPUX and HP’s Itanium platform due to its perception that the platform didn’t have a solid roadmap. This caused a great flurry of lawyers filing papers on HP’s side. But the end result right now after the lawyers got involved Oracle will still be supporting HPUX for the meantime. But who knows how long this will last. So now might be the perfect time to consider migrating your Oracle databases and applications off the HPUX systems (and any other traditional Unix platform) and onto Linux on vSphere. This article will take you through a high level overview of why you should migrate to Linux on vSphere and some of the important considerations and methods to achieve a successfully migration. This is based on the experience I’ve gained from doing a few successful migrations projects, some of which I spoke about during breakout sessions at VMworld US 2012.

VMworld US 2012 and vSphere 5.1 Launch Roundup – My First VMworld

The twitter wires and blogosphere were ablaze with news out of VMworld US 2012 (August 27 – 30th). This was my first ever VMworld (with hopefully many more to come), and I greatly enjoyed it and I also enjoyed meeting many of you. My direct flight home to Auckland from San Francisco on Air New Zealand was the best flight I’ve ever had, and I got a full 8 hours sleep so I didn’t have any jetlag (Thanks Air New Zealand). But this article is all about my take on the event, what I learned, and vSphere 5.1. I’ve decided to do something slightly different to others, to take it all in, and then write this roundup post VMworld. I’m also going to target this towards the relevance to production and business critical applications environments. I’ll also give you some insight into the sessions I presented, the results and my lessons learned.

The Case for Larger Than 2TB Virtual Disks and The Gotcha with VMFS

Hypervisor competition is really starting to heat up. VMware just released vSphere 5.1 and Microsoft has recently released Windows Server 2012 and the new version of Hyper-V. A significant  new feature available now in Hyper-V / Windows 2012 is a new disk format VHDX, which has a maximum size of 64TB. With the new filesystem in Windows Server 2012 (ReFS) the maximum volume size increases to 256TB ( NTFS was limited to 16TB @ 4K cluster size). So how does vSphere 5 and 5.1 compare and what are the key considerations and gotchas? What are the implications for business critical applications? Read on to find out.

Fight the FUD – Oracle Licensing and Support on VMware vSphere

I keep hearing stories from Customers and Prospects where Oracle appears to be trying to deceive them for the purposes of extorting more license money from them than they are legally required to pay. I also keep hearing stories of Oracle telling them they would not be supported if they virtualized their Oracle systems on VMware vSphere. This has gone on now for far too long and it’s time to fight back and stop the FUD!

In my opinion the best way for you to prevent this situation for your company is by knowing the right questions to ask, and by knowing what your obligations are. The aim for this article is to give you the tools to pay only what you legally owe, while making the most efficient and economic use of your licenses, and get the world class support that you are used to, even in a virtualized environment on VMware vSphere. All without sacrificing availability or performance.

Third VMworld Session – Virtualizing Oracle: An Architectural and Performance Deep Dive

I’m not sure if I’m lucky or just a glutton for punishment. But I have picked up a third breakout session slot at VMworld and I will be co presenting with Mark Achtemichuk (@vmMarkA on twitter) who is a fellow VCDX and performance specialist in the VMware Technical Marketing Team. The session is APP-BCA1624 – Virtualizing Oracle:  An Architectural and Performance Deep Dive. If you have an interest in virtualizing Oracle and getting the best performance then this will be a session not to be missed. Here is the session abstract to wet your appetite.

Storage Sizing Considerations when Virtualizing Business Critical Applications

One of my fellow vExperts, Prasenjit Sarkar, has recently published a blog article titled Virtualizing BCA – What about application IO characteristics. I recommend that you take a look at this as it gives a good overview of a lot of the considerations around storage for Business Critical Applications. There are a few things I feel are also important over and above what is mentioned in the article and these may have a significant impact on your architecture design and application performance. Here I’ll cover some things you must consider to provide a solid storage design to support your most critical systems.

10 Reasons to Migrate Oracle Databases from Traditional Unix to Linux on vSphere

This article provides an overview of what I believe are 10 good reasons why you should seriously consider migrating Oracle Databases off traditional Unix platforms to VMware vSphere based on my experience managing, designing and implementing such projects.