(Cloud)Tip of the Day: Running Oracle in Windows Azure

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Today’s (Cloud) Tip… Running Oracle in Windows Azure

The announcement just came out a while back, but I thought it was momentous enough to stick into the rotation.

From https://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/06/24/partners-in-the-enterprise-cloud.aspx:

“…Oracle will certify and support Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure. That means customers who have long enjoyed the ability to run Oracle software on Windows Server can run that same software on Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure and take advantage of our enterprise grade virtualization platform and public cloud. Oracle customers also benefit from the ability to run their Oracle software licenses in Windows Azure with new license mobility. Customers can enjoy the support and license mobility benefits, starting today.

We will add Infrastructure Services instances with preconfigured versions of Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server for customers who do not have Oracle licenses. Also, Oracle will enable customers to obtain and launch Oracle Linux images on Windows Azure.

We’ll also work together to add properly licensed, and fully supported Java into Windows Azure – improving flexibility and choice for millions of Java developers and their applications. Windows Azure is, and will continue to be, committed to supporting open source development languages and frameworks, and after today’s news, I hope the strength of our commitment in this area is clear.”

This is big on multiple fronts. Not only is it a huge validation of the quality and potential of Windows Azure, but it also simultaneously opens up new fronts for customers to virtualize Oracle on Hyper-V. Remember – up until this announcement, Oracle only supported virtualizing their products on a Xen-based hypervisor (https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/oracle_vm_blog_basics_of_oracl). That meant that if you had a Hyper-V based virtualization environment, you were still stuck running Oracle on bare metal.