Oracle doesn’t officially support its products running on VMware, but it will happily support you if you virtualize on its Xen variant, Oracle VM. But at least one large Oracle PeopleSoft customer with which I spoke recently refuses to play along and will maintain its VMware status quo.

“We looked at Oracle VM, but it’s where VMware was two or three years ago,” the systems administrator said, who asked that he and his organization not be named.

Not only did this system administrator find Oracle VM to be technically inferior to ESX Server, but also he didn’t want the burden of having a second virtualization environment to run and manage. “We’d rather not do that,” he said.

The other alternative — to switch from PeopleSoft to a competing product that’s supported on VMware — isn’t an option. “Our investment in PeopleSoft is too great,” he said, and “in the grand scheme of things, running it on dedicated hardware is a drop in the bucket.”

It’s a shame, he said, because in the past six months, his group has begun actively virtualizing not only “the low-hanging fruit,” but increasingly more production workloads. “This whole Oracle-hating-VMware thing has really put a crimp in our style,” he said. Meanwhile the organization’s CIO has approached Oracle and told the vendors, “We’d like to [virtualize Oracle applications], but with terms that don’t involve unilateral demands that we use only your software,” the administrator reported. As of yet, no word back from Oracle, but as far as he’s concerned, there’s no deal to be made.

“[Oracle] can either change their mind, or we’ll keep buying physical hardware. We’re not moving to Oracle VM.”