Despite official signals to the contrary, Wikibon community members report that Oracle support for virtualization of Oracle databases using non-Oracle hypervisors “has been stellar”, writes Wikibon CTO David Floyer. As a result of that and the clear business value of virtualization, he estimates that 55 percent of Oracle production databases are now virtualized with the pace of adoption growing. The most popular hypervisor for Oracle virtualization: VMware.

Oracle virtualization has several real attractions, he writes. In addition to the infrastructure integration benefits, users can save by reducing or redeploying Oracle licenses by spending on servers with larger DRAM and using storage arrays with increased amounts of flash.

Wikibon says that best practice is to create a private “Oracle-as-a-Service” (OaaS) for tier 1 databases. This allows them to be consolidated and virtualized on best-of-breed server & storage infrastructure. A range of performance and availability options can be created within the OaaS to meet the requirements of different user communities.

Wikibon believes that the maturity of hypervisors generally and VMware specifically combined with Oracle’s excellent support for those hypervisors has spurred greater adoption than practitioners predicted 24 months ago. Wikibon believes that high-performance, flash-only or flash-enhanced storage will eliminate IO and performance bottlenecks in most organizations by 2016.

David Floyer’s full analysis, including his latest growth projections for virtualization, is available without charge on the Wikibon Web Site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon Community. Members can post comments on published research and publish their own questions, tips, Professional Alerts, and white papers on the site. They also receive invitations to the periodic Peer Insight Meetings, where their peers discuss how they are solving business and technical problems with creative use of advanced technologies.