Oracle and Microsoft’s Cross-Cloud Partnership

A couple weeks back, Oracle and Microsoft announced their cross-cloud partnership.  This was wonderful news to me, as I’ve been working on numerous Oracle projects at Microsoft with Azure.

The Gist

To know that there is now a partnership between the two clouds and that there’s also a large amount of documentation about working between the two clouds is very helpful vs. the amount I’ve been working on based off just my knowledge.  Just as anyone appreciates a second set of eyes, I now have two company’s worth!

If you missed the announcement and curious what it’s about, Oracle has forged a partnership to do cross-cloud support to Azure for the non-database tier for many of their products.  These products include:

• Oracle E-business Suite
• Peoplesoft and
• JD Edwards
• Oracle Retail Merchandising Suite

There’s multiple support authentications for Ebiz to Azure.  The documentation linked about is for the Oracle Access Manager, but it offers you some insight to how in-depth Oracle and Microsoft have gone into making this a successful venture.

Oracle on Azure

Currently, most of my Oracle customers aren’t looking to leave Oracle-  they just want to use the Azure cloud to house the database instances.  This isn’t a difficult option, as I can build out what they need in Azure bare metal, (VMs) almost anything they require.  The list is long, (and not limited to):

• Oracle Databases 12c-18c, with hopefully 19c to soon follow
• Oracle Dataguard
• Oracle Enterprise Manager
• Oracle Golden Gate
• Oracle Essbase
• Oracle Hyperion
• Oracle Data Integrator
• APEX

I haven’t run into any databases that were too large for Azure to handle and for the one customer that was using over 1.7TB of memory, a quick AWR report granted me an opportunity to provide them with insight on how to eliminate a huge percentage of their memory, (and CPU) needs.

RAC

Yes, you can build Oracle RAC on Azure, but it requires a third party tool to support the software clustering such as FlashGrid and it’s not certified for support from Oracle.  Don’t fret though, because before ever going down this path, you should find out the business reason the customer is using RAC to begin with.  There is significant overhead to the software clustering and often the goal isn’t met by the product.

1. High Availability-  If the nodes all reside in one datacenter, does this meet HA?
2. Failover #1-  Many times neither the apps are able to reconnect when there is a failover
3. Failover #2- Due to the extra resource usage by each node/cluster, a failover can cause failure and evictions of more nodes
4. The Cloud- Azure possesses a number of HA features already built in and due to this, Oracle Dataguard will more than suffice over RAC

So this is part of my new world at Microsoft and I’ve foretold this for over a decade.  No matter what platform you choose, there is always some outlier that is mission critical that you need to manage.  With the introduction of the cloud, which creates easier access to other platforms and technology, our world just keeps getting smaller, only faster.  I’m alright with this and no, I won’t get bored this way.