As you most likely have heard, Microsoft and Oracle have reached an agreement to support Oracle technology running on Hyper-V and Azure. See the announcements from both companies websites and read more here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-24WSNewsPR.aspx
https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud/entry/oracle_and_microsoft_join_forces
To summarize, Oracle has certified it’s software running on Oracle Linux or Windows Server that runs on Hyper-V. Wow, magically Hyper-V is certified?? I would like to see that certification process if anyone has it. Please do share.
Oracle has also allowed for licensing of virtual cores when running on Windows Azure and will provide pre-configured instances of Oracle software to Microsoft.
Now for a reality check. Oracle is supported on VMware and other hypervisors, it is not certified. https://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/showdoc?db=NOT&id=794016.1 (Note you will need an Oracle Login to view the link) With that said, what does certified even mean? Do you also certify your hardware, network and switches that run your infrastructure? Most IT shops run Oracle on VMware today and many have proven Oracle to run better in a virtual machine since the introduction of vSphere 4.
Now for the licensing. Hyper-V is still considered soft partitioning technology. This is where nothing has changed in favor of Hyper-V. Licensing on Hyper-V is still based on the processors available to the machine or the cluster. So, you will need to license the whole cluster to run Oracle software. This is the same for VMware. The only approved hard partitioning technology is still Oracle VM. Read here www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf
And now it’s time for Really? with rkelly.
So your thinking about virtualizing Oracle on Linux and your going to run it on Windows? Really? Linux on Windows? Really? Wow!
Ok, so your a windows shop, you really want to buy double the hardware, switches, racks and cables just to use Hyper-V? Really? …Really?
Your thinking about running your most important data systems on a platform that needs to be patched the first Tuesday of every month? Really? Those DBA’s are going to love you! Really!