Oracle 10g in Win2k3 on VI3

[aschilling01]

Our shop is new to the virtual world, but it seems like it's really taking hold. I've seen a lot of information about running 10g on RHEL in a VM environment but can't seem to track down any information on running it in a virtualized win2k3 model. Our situation is this - we have a database that has maybe[/i] 20 users, but they're spread across 3 time zones and unfortunately the application was written to poll for system time instead of instance time... We don't want to add more hardware to the datacenter if at all possible, so I was wondering if anyone had some real-world experience (tweaks, pitfalls, just won't work, etc.) with the sort of scenario I'm looking at.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Is the application picking up the PCs system time? If you're running Citrix on the same LAN as the Oracle VM you could run the app on that and then disable client time zones for the Citrix sessions (i.e. they would run on the timezone of the Citrix server).

Something to consider is time drift in the Oracle VM. This PDF will give you some info (page 12 and on). It's still applicable even though it is meant for domain controllers.

http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9710.pdf

[aschilling01]

The app is currently running in Citrix with timezone correction turned on - that part is functioning correctly. Reports are show a print date/time with corrected for the appropriate time zone of the user. The data being recorded to the database is picking up the timezone of the Oracle server.

We're not currently running the Oracle in VM we're in the process of investigating the possibilities.

Thanks for the info.

[SillyRegistrati]

Oracle 10g runs perfectly in a VM under VI3. Windows 2003 SP1 and SP2, Windows 2003 R2 (without and with SP2), 32 bits and AMD64/EMT64. We have above 15 VMs with Oracle, light load, few users (dev boxes, 10-15 users max). Some have been running for over 9 month now. As far as I can tell, physical server or VM in VI3, no difference.