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.

About VMware Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Competency

To be accredited by VMware under their Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Competency requires a partner meet a number of minimum requirements including:

Training requirements and VMware certification requirements including Infrastructure Virtualization Competency, VSP-VBCA, VTSP-VBCA, Specialist Virtualizing Business Critical Apps Training, and VCAP-DCD
Specialist application domain knowledge for the applications the partner will be accredited for (SAP, Oracle, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server)
A customer reference for a completed project or 3 prospective customers

For more information about VMware Partner Competencies and why they benefit customers visit the following links:

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/partners/competencies/ – Partner Competency Overview and Value
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/partners/competencies/vbca.html – Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Partner Competency

When I went through this process for my company I took the customer reference route. The reference was for a large Oracle Database migration from Sun E25K servers to RedHat on vSphere. I was fortunate to have a few good projects to choose from.

If you want to achieve the best return on investment and lowest risk when migrating or deploying business critical applications on VMware vSphere it would be a good idea to seek advice and expertise from one of the VBCA accredited partners or VMware Professional Services who have done it successfully before.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.