Oracle VM Reviews

• Bare metal virtualization
• SR-IOV
• Live migration
• Hardware compliance

This product is directly related to hardware, so it is a complete technology with hardware, operating system, and virtualization software.

The following are attributes that have improved my organization -

• Robustness
• Security
• Scalability
• High performance

We have been using IBM POWER hardware, AIX and PowerVM. We were happy with the technology, but switched to Oracle because of cost issues. The new technology is as robust, secure, scalable as IBM. The performance is much better than IBM POWER7 but we did not have a chance to compare POWER8 with new SPARC technology. IBM POWER technologies came one and a half years after Oracle and thus IBM lost a big customer.

• The SR-IOV technology should be improved more as it only supports basic functions.
• It does not have a graphical maintenance screen. The OVM manager interface has so little functionality for managing control domains only. It is not a big problem if you have experienced administrators, but it would be nice to have a beautiful screen to use for everything which guides you into not making mistakes.
• Error handling takes the safest way, but safest way may cause business discontinuity. A few bad experiences occurred in this manner and should be fixed. For example, if you restart the server and resources assigned to virtual systems are more than available, it removes all virtual system definitions and resource assignments like WWNs. You have to redefine everything from backups. This takes time and the system is out of service in the meanwhile.
• Virtual WWNs were lost in one of the PDOMs while it was in maintenance mode. The system continued with other servers, but all disk access paths had to be re-defined from scratch for some LDOMs. It was so annoying because this was not accepted as a bug by Oracle.

We've used it for two years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We had errors, but they were fixed. The hardware and software work perfectly with the new SPARC technology.

We had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

We have experienced resources and we made a checklist of what we did with IBM and how to do it in SPARC. After that, we did not need much service and support. Software downloading and bug fix is pretty good with Oracle. We have had quick responses for case tickets from the available time zones.

We used IBM PowerVM on AIX servers. The main driver was changing the hardware. Both technologies are hardware specific. So we migrated from POWER hardware, AIX, and PowerVM to SPARC hardware, and OVM for SPARC Solaris.

I can compare triple-to-triple and none has any serious disadvantage to the other. Changing the technology was not a technical decision, but we as technical people declared that they are functionally equal.

The initial setup was straightforward and no more complex than PowerVM.

Our main effort was using in-house resources. The vendor team only supported training.

We consolidated lots of databases onto two big iron servers and got benefits from our database licenses. Oracle charges double for IBM server cores if you are using the Oracle database. The government procurement process may not care about price competition, so we defined our requirements, and bidding was made by another organization. IBM and Oracle bidding brought lower prices for the initial procurement cost. Maintenance costs are directly related to the initial price.

RISC hardware may seem more expensive than Intel CISC, but TCO was cheaper with more robust hardware with double performance. So the hardware technology was the main issue. We also decided that engineered systems are not suitable for complex business scenarios.

• Plan everything at the beginning. Do not change plans after you start.
• You must know what you are doing. Never leave any responsibility to the vendor or a third-party contractor.
• Write what you do, do what you write. Never leave any detail undocumented.
• Do something, validate documentation, then delete everything and make someone else do the same thing with the documentation.
• Security becomes a big issue after setup. Plan your security requirements during design. The vendor does not care about it. It cannot be added later.
• Plan your disaster recovery requirements and make your designs accordingly.

It seemed to be a great and risky adventure to migrate from IBM Power to Oracle SPARC, but we did the migration in 15 minutes in a complex environment with Oracle databases, SAP application servers, and in-house Java applications. If you see that it brings advantages, do not get scared -- just do it, nothing happens, and it works. You get a new experience.

The most valuable feature of this product is the quick and easy way to deploy new virtual machines from Oracle VM templates and your own templates. That is very useful to deploy new virtual machines in a few minutes with different Oracle products already installed and configured. For example, we can deploy a new virtual machine with Oracle Database installed and another virtual machine with Oracle WebCenter installed.

It reduced the time to deploy new machines and reduced the cost of licensing.

It would be very nice to improve the way to get hot backup clones of virtual machines and to schedule this jobs from Oracle VM Manager.

We used it for three years and we stopped last year.

I encountered some issues with virtual networks and live migration feature in v3.2.

We had no issues with the stability.

We've had no issues scaling it.

7/10

7/10

The company where I was used VMware solutions for virtualization of environments, and we migrated all Oracle products to an Oracle VM infrastructure.

The initial setup was a little complex because no one in the company knew about this product as it was something new at the time. My team and I did a successful installation of our Oracle VM environment and migrated all Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic application servers to this new infrastructure, which are now in our production environment for client deliveries.

The implementation was done by a local team of the company with some issues but finally with success.

This aspect was done by another team in our company.

I think it is a good Oracle product, but it is necessary to have a dedicated team with the correct expertise for this task because it is different from other virtualization solutions. The team should include people who know about storage, networking, Oracle Linux OS, Xen Server, Oracle Database, etc.

• Diverse guest operating system support: 10/10
• Secure live VM migration: 8/10
• Storage live VM migration: 8/10
• High Availability: 10/10
• Advanced management for zero extra cost: 10/10
• Faster software deployment with Oracle VM templates: 10/10
• Virtual Appliance support: 10/10
• Rapid VM provisioning and cloning: 10/10
• Full Stack management: 10/10

It supports diverse guest operating systems: Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Modern, low overhead architecture based on the Xen hypervisor for leading price/performance. The Xen hypervisor has been improved and included with Oracle VM Server.

Speeds application deployment with Oracle VM Templates and virtual appliances

Full Oracle VM Manager command-line interface (CLI) and Web Services API (WS-API) allow greater automation and interoperability

Advanced virtualization features including:

• Secure live migration
• Storage live migration
• VM high-availability (HA)
• Distributed Resource Scheduler(DRS)
• Distributed Power Management(DPM)
• Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtualto-Virtual (V2V) conversion
• Full Stack Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager
• Ready for OpenStack

The only improvement that I want to see is more flexibility in configuring and managing Oracle VM server with a CLI if there is no Oracle VM Manager. Oracle restricts you to managing the Oracle VM server via Oracle VM Manager and not through a CLI on Oracle VM Server.

I've been using it for three years. I've been implementing Oracle VM for x86 across various projects.

If I face any issues in Oracle VM deployment, with the help of Oracle support I can solve the issue.

The first release of Oracle VM had issues, but now it's stable.

9/10 - It offers high performance and scalability.

You should implement Oracle Database or Oracle Application over a virtualized environment. I recommend that you implement Oracle VM for this reason, but this doesn't mean that Oracle products are not supported over VMware or Hyper-V; it is supported but not certified. It means that if there is any problem with the Database or an application over VMware, Oracle will try to simulate the error on an Oracle VM not on a VMware one. If there is no issue on Oracle VM, they will ask you to contact VMware support.

It's the best support ever as you can open one SR across Oracle hardware, Oracle VM Server, Oracle Solaris or Linux, Oracle Database, and any Oracle Application.

It comes with zero license cost. Unlike VMware, Oracle VM is free to download, use, and distribute. All you need to pay for is support, and support fees are affordable.

As an Oracle pre-sales engineer, when you buy Oracle x86 server, the server cost includes one year support for the following items:

1. Oracle Solaris & Oracle Enterprise Linux
2. Oracle VM Server
3. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c

We are a gold partner, and we use this product to compete with other virtualization products on the market like VMware and Hyper-V. Its features fit most of our customers.

You have to be familiar with hardware and Linux. From my experience in designing and architecting Oracle solutions, most customers implement an Oracle VM environment on Oracle X86 Servers with Oracle ZS3 NAS storage or Oracle FS1-2 flash storage.

Stability has proven to be satisfactory. The deployment is simple, a lot of the configurations, particularly the network related ones, have been made much simpler and cleaner in the latest releases (3.3.2+), and the GUI has become more responsive. 

At the moment the discovery of hosts and configuration can be performed only via the GUI and not by a command line on the hosts. To resolve some other issues, we decided to install Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud 13c to add monitoring capabilities, which OVM Manager lacks completely.

Oracle claims "whatever you can do via manager, you can do via EC", but in my opinion that's not true because a lot of tasks are simply too slow via EC than via the manager.

My first attempt with Oracle VM was around two years ago. I was asked to set up a four-node cluster with 3.3.1 release on top of Fujitsu hardware (Fujitsu Primequest 1800E).

v3.3.1 was pretty much disappointing in terms of performance, especially when it came to migration. It took minutes for a VM with a lot of memory to migrate across different hosts. This led us to upgrade the environment to 3.3.2, and changing the underlying hardware. Fujitsu Primequest was dismissed in favor of Fujitsu RX 300 S8 due to a compatibility issue as Primequest were not certified on 3.3.2.

3.3.2 was a bit faster but it didn't take long for us to experience one of its major bugs - the migration of any VM with 64GB plus RAM failing with an OpenSSL error.
This was fixed in a short time with the help of Oracle support who suggested to upgrade the OpenSSL packet.

We only had a single crash on one host in more than two years as the kernel panicked. An SR was opened to Oracle, but it led to nowhere.

We've had no issues scaling it to our needs.

It's fairly straightforward.  All you have to do is to install via script the so-called "OVM Manager", which is basically a Java administration GUI run on a WebLogic server with MySQL underlying it as a metadata repository. At the time, Oracle Database was a choice too, but it's no longer the case because, as an Oracle guy revealed, the Database engine has a major bug which corrupts lob data which prevents the the manager from working properly.

While the software is still missing a lot of capabilities which its major competitor (VMware) has and a performance boost is highly recommended, it could still be a choice if you have to virtualize Oracle software.

Oracle license compatibility was the deciding factor for us. It's the only way to fulfill the Oracle license policy if you want to virtualize in a x86 environment.

Also, Oracle VM performance is one of the best that I've experienced. And the pre-seeded images that Oracle puts at your disposal makes your life really ease, i.e. you can have an Oracle RAC up and running within two hours with the OVM images.

I work in a consultancy, so I've deployed several OVM environments always with great results and high customer satisfaction. We've achieved the goal of being in line with the Oracle license, providing customers with better usage of their resources at better cost.

The product needs to improve the backup and snapshot functionalities. This is the main disadvantage compared to other hypervisors on the market.

I've used it for at least eight years since version 2.1 was released.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We've never found an instability problem with the hypervisor as it is simply rock solid.

On the other hand, the OVM Manager has had some problems and inconsistencies. The best option is to have the OMV Manager virtualized and to recreate it if there are issues as all the relevant info is stored in the hypervisor itself.

We have had no issues scaling it to our needs.

Oracle always works well in terms of support, and if you need extra assistance you can escalate your case, but at the moment I have never had to go so deep.

The hypervisor installation and setup is one of the most simple things that I have ever done. Just boot, select the proper installation method, configure (Linux-like), and you're done.

On the other hand, the Manager can be a little tricky, but the newer versions have become much easier. Just set up your OS and pre-requisites, database, and OVM Manager.

I've implemented in my own company for internal use and as consultant engineer, I've performed several implementations for clients.

You always can get faster result going with consultancy services as they provide expertise and background from many previous implementations of the product.

The ROI is very fast.

OVM has low impact and is licensed on a per-server basis. The cost is very affordable as you only have to pay support.

We evaluated VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, and RHEV. The main feature was the "Oracle License Compliant" and after the wide library of images. The stability and efficiency of the hypervisor was always great therefore the previous mentioned factors comes to decide.

It's a great product and becomes better with every release. It is based on the rock solid Xen hypervisor.

It's an easy and great product. You can test it for free and you will have great flexibility in the x86 world. Go for it without doubt.

When deploying the Oracle database, you can license only the processors used for the database rather than all the processors on the box, as with VMWare. Plus, it’s free.

We are able to build large hosts (using Oracle Virtual Cloud Appliance, for example) and wait to license CPUs for our databases until we need them. That translates into more money up front for servers and salespeople.

I’d like to see an improvement in read latency and write bandwidth to meet or exceed VMware's performance, and also smooth out the variance in both. People are choosing VMware over OVM left and right despite the licensing issues. OVM needs to be faster than anyone else, especially with Oracle’s own products.

I've been using it for three years.

It’s a bit clunkier to deploy and manage than other systems, e.g. VMware.

We have had no stability issues.

Scalability has not been an issues.

Oracle is very good at supporting engineered systems, so if you’re using OVM on a PCA, you get good service. Otherwise, it’s pretty typical tier-one/tier-two tech support.

I have used VMware, Hyper-V, and AIX LPARs. I chose Oracle VM (when using x86) not only because it’s free, but because of the Oracle DB licensing benefits. Hyper-V is not really all there yet. VMware is awesome, but the Oracle licensing is a crippling problem.

I would say it’s less straightforward than you’d expect. I haven’t installed it recently, but my impression was that it was about 70% ready for prime-time. Once you have it installed and sorted out, it runs pretty smoothly. Getting it there is another issue entirely.

We mostly use a vendor to set up OVM, but occasionally we will do it in-house as well. My main advice is to practice it first, read all documentation, look at MOS documents, and review all blogs and community discussions you can find.

For our specific ROI, OVM allows us to buy larger systems to accommodate projected growth but not go broke on licensing. We can get new licenses on demand when we have a reason to buy them rather than all up front and hoping we expand into it. That means we can concentrate on selling new opportunities and buying the licenses after the sales are locked in. We don’t have money sitting out there idling.

The biggest benefit is being able to license Oracle products (especially the DB) based on the number of CPUs actually used rather than all the CPUs on the box as you have to do with VMware. This results in a lot more flexibility in the sizes of servers you can buy and how you plan for future growth. If you had to buy all Oracle licenses for every CPU, you might get a smaller server to start with and that doesn’t really help with expansion.

Properly sizing your equipment for growth often means buying equipment much larger than you need right away. The money you save with Oracle VM by not buying extra licenses means you can focus on preparing your hardware for the future rather than having to balance between licenses, hardware, and practicality.

Before speccing out your systems, it’s best to start figuring out how many CPUs you need now and in the future, then you’ll be able to decide what server/VM solution you need. If you’re looking at a small software footprint now, but in one to two years you expect to double or triple your transactions, you’ll definitely want to start with a big server and OVM to reduce software licensing costs.

My main advice is not to do your first install when sitting at the client building a production system. Practice it beforehand and make sure you work the bugs out. Once you install it the first time, it’ll be far easier to breeze through it on subsequent installs.

The most valuable features for us are the large number of available network configurations and its high degree of scalability.

We've improved a lot as I use it for creating VMs for software development purposes for our team. We can have one VM to share with the team that has all development tools set up so that when a new developer joins the team, they can be ready to work just by copying the VM. So it's saved lots of time for each developer to set up their development environment. Also, it keeps the team aligned with the different tools they use.

I would like to see more improvements in the synchronization between the host machine and the VM especially in Mac machines. Also, more features around folder sharing would be an improvement.

We've used it for six years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

I previously used VMware but switched because I got better support from Oracle.

It depends on how deep I want to go, but normally the initial setup is straightforward.

I used a mixed team of vendor and in-house personnel for the implementation.

I think the pricing is fair.

It allows hard partitioning platforms, thus keeping the licenses intact.

We have two datacenters, holding less than 15 physical servers and still running over 300 virtual ones.

With v2.X it was possible to do everything in the CLI or the shell. Now, on v3.X everything must be done either in the GUI or CLI, and there's no option to use the shell. I am old school, so I hate GUI. CLI is working well and I wish it to be that in future.

We have been using it for the past seven years, and have created 10 different environments.

There have been no issues with the deployments.

There was nasty bug on DomU UEK3 kernel year ago, which wiped virtual machine disks if a certain combination was used. Now, it's fine.

We have had no issues scaling it as needed.

I've never had to contact them.

The initial setup is as easy as walking. After that, it gets a little complicated, but if one knows what one is doing, it is still easy.

In-house. If you know Linux and Xen, you are good to go. If you don't, get a partner to do this for you.

As it's Oracle, there was no need to evaluate anything else.