While looking for some additional information on Oracle and VMWare I ran across a news story I missed last week. VMWare and Oracle have signed an agreement to make VMWare the standard virtualized Oracle environment.

VMware will become the virtualization development platform for Oracle server technologies, and Oracle plans to deploy 7,000 VMware virtual servers internally.

Prem Kumar, VP of server technologies engineering at Oracle, says the use of VMware virtualization products will enable Oracle to better optimize its products for use in multiple Windows and Linux operating-system environments. “We’ve gotten significant feedback from our customers requesting VMware support,” Kumar says. “We will be using VMware as our standard virtualized environment, including building product, testing, and installing, and it will be certified as a standard configuration.” [emphasis added]

or from another article

Under the agreement, Oracle will develop, test and support its 10g database and applications products to run on VMware’s operating environment virtualization products.

As part of the agreement, Oracle and VMware say they plan to work together to provide customers with problem resolution for Oracle’s 10g database and for 10g versions of its application server, Collaboration Suite and Enterprise Manager running on VMware.

Oracle has posted evaluation kits (VMWare machines with Linux/Oracle to evaluate the products) of which more than 12,000 copies have already been downloaded.
I’ve discussed VMWare before (here, and here) and have mixed thoughts about it. I’ve found it’s greatest strengths are in development, provisioning, and manageability. I’ve had some concerns about deploying Oracle on VMWare for production and high availability environments. This new partnership should only serve to address those concerns and ensure that the “entire stack” is fully supported. Great news for VMWare customers!