Production Oracle DB 11g on a virtual server. Bad idea?
GxFlintApr 25 2013 — edited Apr 28 2013We will soon switch our IT Manager, he is also not been very professional, so we are not believing on everything he says anymore.
We just got a new Dell R720 server that will host our Oracle DB.
The server hasn't even been turned on yet but we know that the load on the server will be very low for a long time.
One of our problems is that we need to run a VERY important application. Since it is not very resource consuming compared to it's importance we chose to run it on a not so new Xeon 5110 1.60 GHz - 4GB RAM server. He said it's not a good idea and that we should buy a new server. (money is very low)
The software vendor suggested to virtualize our R720 server, host a vm running our database, and along with it other smaller machines like the one I described above.
I suggested the use of Oracle VM, Oracle Linux for the database host and transforming the physical servers servers in VM with P2V.
Our IT Manager didn't like that, he said that it's not recommended to run a database on a virtual machine. But our software vendor said that many of their clients run their solution this way.
What are our options? Is it really that bad to virtualize?