Everytime I jump into any consolidation project, the first question I face is usually about whether the applications which are currently running on a Physical Server can be Virtualized or not. In-fact their have been situations when I have got a list of 800 applications from one of our Partners to know if they can be virtualized...
Well I have written about my stand on such questions in one of my post "VMware vCenter Server - Physical vs. Virtual". Here is the extract from that article.....
"People often ask me this question not only for vCenter but for all the other applications which they want to Virtualize. My answer to them is usually this "PLEASE ASK THE APPLICATION VENDOR". The team and the organization who have developed the application know the best about the attributes of the application hence they should be able to tell you whether an application can be virtualized or not."
Well as mentioned, the application vendor is the best person to tell, however here is the
link to Major global software vendors broadly
support customers running their applications on VMware environments.
"3693 Applications and Counting - http://vmware-alliances.force.com/supportedapps
Currently there are 3600+
applications certified to run on vSphere and there are more adding this list. The good part is that if you do not find your application here, you can submit the name of the app on this page and VMware along with the ISV community would work on getting the name on the list after conducting the required tests...
This
list is the one which has been created with the help of VMware Alliances and
though its comprehensive, it might not be complete. I appreciate this repository from VMware as this speaks about the confidence of VMware customers in Virtualizing the business and infrastructure applications running in their data-centers.
Hope this would help some taking decisions around Virtualizing those applications which you thought were not supported.