It’s been hopping since Oracle Open World.  I’ve been doing a lot of events and Fortune 500 customer site visits—all of them on the topic of tier-1 workloads on VMware.

I think it inevitable that the enterprise trend to evaluate options to VMware, will collide with enterprises’ need to leverage virtualization’s benefits into tier-1 workloads, let alone horizontal scaling.  I look forward to the word-on-the-street revelations that will come from that.  Forget vendor posturing.  The passage of time makes it more difficult for people that over-represent themselves to maintain control of the message.  I find it interesting that the majority of the scaled shops we are talking to already have VMware Enterprise License Agreements in place but haven’t yet moved into tier-1 virtualization.  I also find it interesting that configuration defects in many shops go unnoticed but become sudden roadblocks when the shops attempt to virtualize a tier-1 workload.

I continue to slam into a consistent, significant uptick in RAC interest wherever I go.  On that topic, shops interested in RAC will want to make sure they look at Barb Lundhild’s OOW ’09 presentation “Understanding Oracle Real Application Clusters Internals”. There are significant RAC enhancements and component realignments as of DB 11g R2.

Oracle has somehow managed to stay out of USA Today and the Wall Street Journal so far this week, according to what I have noticed.  Expect that to change today with Larry Ellison’s keynote, assisted on-stage by California Gov Schwarzenegger.

I’m intrigued by Oracle’s Golden Gate acquisition announcement.  Golden Gate specializes in real time decision support data integration.  Look for Golden Gate to play well with Oracle’s strategic business intelligence acquisitions of Siebel and Hyperion business intelligence acquisitions.  These compliment Oracle’s tenured Data Warehouse Builder and OLAP—already tightly integrated with the database.

Major changes in the Oracle Partner program announced on Sunday.  Oracle’s acquisitions have outgrown the existing partner framework.  The partner program now allows and encourages specialization.  Among the changes is the separation (at least for partners) of decoupling certification from Oracle University training.  The Exadata Storage servers and Sun Oracle Database hardware are available for re-sale by Oracle Partners as of December 1.  I thank Ray Wang for his excellent recap of the Sunday announcements.

After hanging with VMware’s Chris Rimer (owns the Oracle relationship world-wide) and even speaking with him around the country, I finally get it on the Oracle-on-VMware “certification” issue.  Oracle doesn’t certify below the OS.  VMware is hardware to the Oracle red stack, because it’s below the OS.  With respect to Oracle’s VMware support clause that Oracle may ask a customer to assist replicating the bug on physical hardware, that makes Oracle’s VMware support policy no different than Oracle’s policy with HP or other hardware vendors.  This is consistent with Wim Coekaert’s response in Sunday’s partner Oracle Virtual Machine meeting to a guy asking a one-off question about VMware support.  Wim is reported to have said that Oracle’s no different than most other ISV’s with respect to that policy.  This is an appropriate time for me to remind that to-date Oracle support has never asked any HoB Oracle VMware customer to replicate any problem on native hardware.

I ran into Tim Gorman at last night’s Bloggers’ meeting.  We flew Tim into Omaha a few years ago to keynote at Solid Foundations.  Tim is on HoB’s very short list of Oracle business intelligence specialists to call.  He’s also an Oak Table member.  I also enjoyed chatting with John, a ten-year Oracle employee who blogs independently of Oracle’s blog site, and who works on Oracle’s MySQL documentation project.
 

I’ve enjoyed the steady stream of HoB customers and associates who have been stopping by the VMware pavilion.  It feels like a high school reunion.  Nebraska Workers’ Compensation Court’s Randy Cecrle observes that the exhibit floor is substantially shifted from previous years.  He’s not finding the third party content/document management, IDE or BPM vendors out there.  Much fewer development tool vendors.  He says he checked the program guide to make sure he wasn’t overlooking them.

I’ll be taking a look at what’s new in OVM 2.2, announced this week.

The best break-out session recommendation that I’ve heard yet from Oppenheimer Fund’s Roger Rose.  Monday Steve Shaw’s session S312645: “Oracle Database Performance on Linux: Tips, Tools, and Tuning for Intel Platforms.”  This included the option to disable the Linux background process that can slow down the clock for power consumption.  It also included changing the NUMA memory setting/interleave from 6K to 2M.

Look for my comprehensive review of the show’s keynotes tomorrow.