Oracle RAC 11g R2 Standard Edition on vSphere
I was recently engaged to design and implement a VMware vSphere architecture solution for a large company that wanted to virtualize Oracle RAC 11g R2 as the back end of a small number of web based online transactional systems. Nothing unusual about that, I hear you say. Well the interesting thing with this project is that the customer intended to use Oracle 11g R2 Standard Edition (11.2.0.3). Up until this point all of the Oracle single instance and RAC systems I had been involved with virtualizing were using Enterprise Edition licenses. This was only a relatively small project and a small part of a very large Oracle landscape, although it was still business critical. The customer was planning to use this project as the test case for virtualizing Oracle RAC 11g R2 with VMware vSphere, with the aim of potentially migrating a significant number of additional database systems off their existing Intel standalone, IBM pSeries and Sun SPARC platforms (which are and will remain using Oracle Enterprise Edition).
