I'm working on configuring the vCenter Server Appliance to use an Oracle database and it seems that the database requirements are not very enterprise friendly. I'm having two issues with our DBAs. First, our policy is not to run jobs on the database servers. The permissions vCenter requires for dbms_job and dbms_lock are not allowed. From what our DBAs have told me the jobs are just running stored procedures, so we should be able to schedule them in our enterprise scheduler and not need to use dbms_job. VMware support has told us that this wouldn't be supported. I'm curious if anyone has done this anyway and scheduled jobs to execute the stored procedures from another application server/scheduler?
The second issue is our policy that the application shouldn't run as the user that created and owns all of the database objects. The DBAs created a vpxuser account and created synonyms for all of the objects in the vpxadmin schema. When I change the vCSA configuration to use vpxuser the vCenter service won't start up. The error says that VPX_ENTITY_SEQ is not defined, but it is and we've verified that vpxuser can select the next value from the sequence. If anyone has experience using an account other than vpxadmin after the installation I would love hear about it. I'm waiting for a response from support on this, but I'm afraid it will be another "not supported". I suspect we will be buying an Oracle license to run the database outside of our enterprise database environment.
Finally, can anyone comment on the future of support for PostgresSQL? I think it would be great if VMware would fully support it (beyond the embedded database with 5 hosts and 50 VMs). We've had an appliance with the embedded database well above this (around 1000 VMs) for several months and had no issues other than having to increase the disk space and memory available to it. I know it's not supported - it's all test/dev of course! Thanks for any responses and suggestions.
