This is a good news for most of the ERP users especially when you have SAP running in your production environment.

(see SAP Note 1173954 for details):
1. Since Jan 13, 2009, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1

Read the full details from the official announcement.

Oracle is no longer a software company today. With buy over for Sun Microsystems, they will able to deliver the hardware, platform, software, database, virtualization and etc. I think they will be more aggressive strategy to move themselves into the virtualization and integration market which may end up competing themselves with their partner such as VMware. This will definitely heat up the market or virtualization and hypervisor competition.

I had just done my vCenter upgrade today from 2.5 Update 3 to update 4. I notice some graphic interfaces changes compare to the previous version. Databases upgrade is required during the installation process. I will suggest to backup the databases related to virtual center before you perform any upgrade to your production environment. If anything goes wrong, you should able to restore your databases immediately. The Databases upgrade is supported with both Microsoft SQL and Oracle.

This GUI interface allow you to retain all the previous data of your virtual center. If you wish to refresh your database, you can choose Drop or Discard from the option above.

Upgrade in progress

Upgrade completed and you should able to see the summarize of the upgrade option.

If we analyze what happen to the IT spending on the financial and banking environment, you will not surprise to see that the amount of storage, servers, solution and unnecessary equipment been under utilized for every bank around the world. The IT department for financial sector had been comfort live for many years and is time now for them to review and revise their IT spending to ensure higher return from their investment.

Open source or reliable LINUX had not been really high utilize in financial sector are really due to the comfort living of their IT department. Personal point of view, why we have to run something else on the expensive IBM AIX, mainframe, HP UX, Microsoft, Oracle VS the reliable LINUX from x86 or x64 platform to perform the same result? The simple answer is really the mindset from the person.

If we compare the super computing for research and development, you will find that the top 5 fastest computing in the world are build from the x86 or x64 platform whihc you can common found from the market. If you are telling me that the x86 platform is under power, I will say is depend how you manage and deploy it. Looking at SAP, which is the biggest ERP solution around the world, and they even suggest to run on SUSE or Redhat Linux with the MaxDB and etc. My experience on that, it really perform as require and even outperform when we compare to the AIX machine that we previously have. We know the MAXDB are still far behind the Oracle, but at least from the operating system point of view, the LINUX always provide more reliable compare to Windows or proprited UNIX platform from HP and IBM.

Beside these, you may consider the operation maintenance cost, the open standard will provide more flexible and cost effective. Intel and AMD competition have also promise to increase from 6 cores to 12 cores in 2 years time. The processing power are always increasing from time to time.
I will not believe the x86 will not able to handle the load that require to run for any system in the world today, is really depend how we plan it and manage it. Some of the bank I know, they even run their critical machine on LINUX today, and I do not see the reason of others bank can’t. At the same time, Virtualization will provide the better utilization for every single dollar been invested by the business.

Moving forward to the current economy environment, to survive and sustain for IT department is challenge. Instead of sticking with old and expensive solution, it may end up the CEO will just fire the entire IT department and look for outsource vendor. I believe the IT department have to be more open and follow up with the open technology which are much more cost effective compare with those expensive solution. The more dollars for IT to save, that increase the percentage for the job security as well as business effective. Do not forget, IT is to assist the business to generate revenue higher and faster, you may not want to make IT as a cost and is not profitable when it show up in the entire financial summary to the boards. If that does happen, human will stop using IT and prefer to work on paper and pen again as traditional.