Nope don’t use it for mission critical Oracle databases if you value the DB… VDP has to quiesce (stop / silence) the DB – and this can cause performance and in my case – control file and eventually redolog corruption.
VMWares “Oracle Databases On VMWare Best Practices Guide” copyright 2016 VMWare states on page 54…
http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/solutions/vmware-oracle-databases-on-vmware-best-practices-guide.pdf
If you have the following in your alert log – it’s probably too late. At that point follow the directions in the alert log – or restore if a startup was attempted.
The controlfile header block returned by the OS
has a sequence number that is too old.
The controlfile might be corrupted.