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Previously Oracle had decline to provide the official support if you virtualizing your database instance into the VMware virtual infrastructure. Today, there is an official announcement from VMware which confirm the official support from oracle will be provided even you virtualize your database server into VMware.

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

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1 of the SLES 10 and 4 of the SLES9 SP3 are having the same problem which is mount in READ only mode today. Damm! I found the root cause and thanks to Linux kernel bug!

According to VMware KB Article 51306

VMware has identified a problem with RHEL5, RHEL4 U4, RHEL4 U3, SLES10, and SLES9 SP3 guest operating systems. Their file systems may become read-only in the event of busy I/O retry or path failover of the ESX Server’s SAN or iSCSI storage.

This issue may affect other Linux distributions based on early 2.6 kernels as well, such as Ubuntu 7.04

The same behavior is expected even on a native Linux environment, where the time required for the file system to become read-only depends on the number of paths available to a particular target, the multi-path software installed on the operating system, and whether the failing I/O was to an EXT3 Journal. However, the problem is aggravated in an ESX Server environment because ESX Server manages multiple paths to the storage target and provides a single path to the guest operating system, which effectively reduces the number of retries done by the guest operating system.

And the solution is:

This is not an ESX Server bug. This Linux kernel bug has been fixed as of version 2.6.22.

Note: This article does not supersede the Guest Operating System Installation Guide, a guest operating system upgrade may require an ESX Server upgrade as well.

For RHEL5, the resolution is to upgrade to Update 1, also refereed to as RHEL5.1

For RHEL4 U3 and RHEL U4, the resolution is to upgrade to Update 5, also refereed to as RHEL 4.5.

For SLES10, the resolution is to upgrade to SP2. For more information, see Novell KB TID 3605538.

For SLES9 SP3, the resolution is to upgrade to SP4, or SP3 Maintenance Release build 2.6.5-7.286.
For more information, see TID 3584352 – Filesystem goes read-only in VMware

For Ubuntu 7.04, the resolution is to upgrade to 7.10

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The VMware Converter 4 is now in public BETA. You will able to download the VM converter through the link below, providing you have an VMware store account for your log in. There are some new features in this version which provide the P2V solution for Linux environment on the fly. The Linux version which had been included are RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu Linux.

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Your customer want you to add a new volume in one of the VM SLES server but can not affort down time? No worry, you can do that easily with ESX.

Below is step by step guide with screen captured from the VM (my test machine is running on SLES10 SP2):

Tip: It is best to do a snapshot before you start this task, incase anything goes wrong.

1) This is my test VM machine. It is having one disk at beginning.

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SAP on VMware is hot but not new in the industry today. Many of us as the IT architect are seeking opportunity from time to time to reduce the IT spending but improving the productivity to the business. I would like to share my experience for SAP on VMware.

SAP always have their internal certify program which certify from software to hardware level to ensure their users are compliance with the application requirement for the SAP deployment. You will see a big range of choice you can choose from the certify list from Unix, Linux to Windows as an example. On my case, we choose Novell SUSE Linux as we have a good relation with Novell which require minimum amount of software subscription to run our environment. At the same time, the latest version of SAP are recommended to run on SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 64 bits with MaxDB 7.5. SUSE Linux 10 is perform as you need on VMware. The support from Novell and VMware both are committed to the VM which run the SUSE Linux. This had been the important point of why I am choosing SuSE linux over the rest of the operating system available.

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