Impressions from VMworld - Clearing up Misconceptions
- by Monica Kumar
Gorgeous sunny weather…none of the usual summer fog…the Oracle Virtualization team has been busy at VMworld in San Francisco this week. From the time exhibits opened on Sunday, our booth staff was fully engaged with visitors. It was great to meet with customers and prospects, and there were many…most with promises to meet again in October at Oracle OpenWorld 2012.
Interests and questions ran the gamut - from implementation details to consolidating applications to how does Oracle VM enable rapid application deployment to Oracle support and licensing. All good stuff! Some inquiries are poignant and really help us get at the customer pain points. Some are just based on misconceptions. We’d like to address a couple of common misconceptions that we heard:
1) Rapid deployment of enterprise applications is great but I don’t do this all the time. So why bother?
While production applications don’t get updated or upgraded as often, development and QA staging environments are much more dynamic. Also, in today’s Cloud based computing environments, end users expect an entire solution, along with the virtual machine, to be provisioned instantly, on-demand, as and when they need to scale. Whether it’s adding a new feature to meet customer demands or updating applications to meet business/service compliance, these environments undergo change frequently. The ability to rapidly stand up an entire application stack with all the components such as database tier, mid-tier, OS, and applications tightly integrated, can offer significant value. Hand patching, installation of the OS, application and configurations to ensure the entire stack works well together can take days and weeks. Oracle VM Templates provide a much faster path to standing up a development, QA or production stack in a matter of hours or minutes. I see lots of eyes light up as we get to this point of the conversation.
2) Oracle Software licensing on VMware vSphere In the world of multi-vendor IT stacks, understanding license boundaries and terms and conditions for each product in the stack can be challenging. Oracle’s licensing, though, is straightforward. Oracle software is licensed per physical processor in the server or cluster where the Oracle software is installed and/or running. The use of third party virtualization technologies such as VMware is not allowed as a means to change the way Oracle software is licensed. Exceptions are spelled out in the licensing document labeled “Hard Partitioning".
Here are some fun pictures!
Visitors to our booth told us they loved the Oracle SUV courtesy shuttles that are helping attendees get to/from hotels.
Also spotted were several taxicabs sporting an Oracle banner!
Stay tuned for more highlights across desktop and server virtualization as we wrap up our participation at VMworld.
