CIO — Virtualization market leader VMware today got a key bit of good news for its largest enterprise customers: ERP giant SAP announced it will support its products running in 64-bit Windows- and Linux-based production-level virtual machines based on VMware's ESX Server software.

Until now, CIOs who wanted to run SAP apps on such a VM, or virtual machine, could do so of course, but wouldn't get help from SAP if they ran into technical trouble.

ERP applications, often the most critical software in large enterprises, remain something of an emerging frontier for virtualization. While many CIOs are running a wide variety of applications on VMs now, the thought of putting the ERP applications on a VM still gives many CIOs pause. Since ERP apps are the most critical to business-side users, any slowdown in application performance would be a huge black eye for IT. And the art and science of balancing workloads on one physical server hosting multiple VMs, to avoid any such slowdowns, is young yet.

Also, because ERP and database applications are some of the most resource-hungry apps, it doesn't always make sense to run them on a VM, as they may just consume the I/O resources of the physical server to the point that another VM wouldnt be able to share that physical server effectively.

Still, ERP deployments are highly customized and vary from one enterprise to another, and some CIOs are already choosing to run ERP apps on a VM, notes James Staten, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. "You may want to put these apps on top of virtualization in order to take advantage of fast restart in a disaster recovery scenario, or for the non-disruptive upgrade [of the application itself], or in a test/development environment where you want fast set up and tear down," he says.

VMware also announced today that servers from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM have been hardware-certified for SAP solutions running on Windows and Linux with VMware ESX Server. This is a statement that VMware's rival, Citrix/Xen, cannot make yet.

SAP's main rival, Oracle, has come under fire recently for its comments regarding customer support for Oracle products running on VMs. Oracle has declined to provide official support for its products running on VMware-based production environment VMs.

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