Oracle VM Reviews

We use the solution to deliver the correct license validation for the Oracle database. They advised us to use the Oracle VM for some environments.

VMware is user-friendly, with clear integration and detailed migration.

Oracle VM is not very stable. When you encounter any issue, it's unclear what is happening. Many websites offer various products with the same name, which can be confusing.

I have been using Oracle VM for six or eight years.

The product is not very stable when you upgrade the system. The system runs well. You will not have any problems with day-by-day work. For example, I have 12 machines running currently.

They have been running for many years. The new OEM has some issues. The new VM has been running for around one year now. If I upgrade the system, I will need a similar system with significant capacity or a high-quality environment before upgrading the production environment to prevent any system downtime.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six out of ten.

The product is not expensive. This support was 2000/year. If you have a very big infrastructure, it can increase because they require you to pay by the server. It becomes expensive if you have a lot of systems running on it.

The initial setup is not easy. Sometimes you have to spend one week to put some machines running on it. You need to clean the operation system, prepare everything, and do a lot of tests before you put the machine to get consistency and guarantee.

The Oracle VM was not user-friendly initially, but recent changes have significantly improved the entire product stack. They've transitioned from using DNS or the internal Oracle Linux product to a new Oracle VM, a completely different offering. While there were stability issues in the past, the latest version has addressed many of these concerns. However, there may still be occasional instances where you need to lock out installations to prevent issues. Despite past challenges, I recommend considering this product due to the improvements and ongoing support.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Clients are typically running Linux on Oracle VM, and then they're running Oracle databases on top of that.

The solution helps manage a company's costs. I typically run into great resistance as most organizations already have an existing virtualization infrastructure or technology. If you're running someone else's virtualization, having a third party or a second virtualization technology tends not to be warmly received. Any place I've got VMware, I never get a large Oracle VM infrastructure. I get what's needed, however. It serves a purpose as it keeps the number of cores down. It works. It's reliable. It's stable. It does what it needs to do. I've got no technical complaints about it. 

Due to the fact that it doesn't have as many, let's just say, bells and whistles, it's less distracting. It's not that difficult to master. 

The documentation that the product has on offer is very good. 

Once you get it set up, you tend to set it and forget it, and there's not a lot that you have to do.

The biggest reason for using Oracle VM is the CPU fencing or licensing of CPU cores. Oracle makes the claim that if you run on VMware, you're getting value from the processors in the cluster over and above the processes that are associated with your particular VM. Due to that stance, companies wind up licensing basically the entire cluster for VMware. If all you're doing is running Oracle's database, and it's got a particular purpose and it's very focused, you can put Oracle's VMware or Oracle's VM on the server, create your virtual machine, and set the number of CPU cores that is going to use. Oracle finds that acceptable for licensing. That will control your costs, due to the fact that suddenly you don't have to license 24 cores when in fact you're only consuming four or eight. It is used at that level as a licensing mechanism, quite frankly.

Oracle is probably the best database technology out there. Arguably, it is. I've never found anything as complete in terms of feature and functionality and sophistication. You could make arguments with niche or smaller venues. DB2 is certainly a viable alternative. So is the SQL server. Nothing scales and nothing handles complexity like Oracle. 

That said, not everybody buys Oracle for the complexity. They buy it for a particular purpose, whether they're a state and local government, or whether they're in some particular industry vertical. I work with four or five different industries. I've seen it in very small companies, in which case it's almost part of the woodwork or the fabric, so to speak. You don't really pay attention to it. On the other hand, large organizations that use it have it as it's the only game in town for certain features.

I've found that using Oracle VM is like stepping back in time. It's not kept up with technology. The only reason anyone uses it is that they're afraid of Oracle's licensing. Oracle has a tremendously bad licensing approach.

VMware, in comparison, has got so many different features that you can use in ESXi for example. Oracle is a lot simpler with fewer features.

I find their VM backup features to be somewhat difficult. I wish it was a little easier to back up and clone.

It would be ideal if Oracle could grow to take on VMware directly, in order to foster more competition.

I've used Oracle for many years. It's been a long time. It's probably been about ten years on and off, depending on what the client needs.

The stability is quite good. You set and forget. It's not a fussy solution. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's great.

I didn't find scalability to be an issue, however, the difficulty is with any hardware refreshes done today. You're going to get more cores due to the fact that that's all Intel can do. Intel can't crank the clock speed much past five gigahertz, not without heroic amounts of cooling. It's just the laws of physics. All Intel can do, all AMD can do, is give you more cores. 

The problem is that Oracle's licensing model charges by the core. There's a formula to it and it depends on which features, etc., however, basically it's by the core that dictates the cost. At the end of the day, you're going to pay for the number of cores you're using.

Therefore, you've got to put it on a new machine without Oracle's virtualization technology to help you manage the licensing. You go from a basic 5,100 series Intel chip with four cores. to a new gold chip, or whatever it is, and it's got 18 cores. All of a sudden you owe Oracle a lot more money, as there are a lot more cores. 

That's not the kind of surprise that most companies appreciate. Your costs went up simply due to a newer chip. That's a hard sell. By using Oracle's virtualization technology, you can manage those licenses, allocate virtual CPUs to the level that you have an existing license, and control your costs while essentially getting a little bit more oomph. At least you're on a new, more reliable hardware platform. That's where virtualization really comes in.

It helps manage the licensing. Oracle should just fully embrace VMware as a viable licensable technology. It would make life a whole lot easier for a lot of companies, however, they're not going to. They had the same stance when Sun Microsystems had its own virtualization technology. In that case, Oracle acquired it, and all of a sudden Sun's virtualization technology was acceptable. It's a marketing game, to be perfectly frank, and we all know that. That said, Oracle gets to set the rules. 

I've used their technical support in the past and they are very, very good. I'd rate them at an eight or nine out of ten in terms of the service they provide.

Like a lot of environments, if you had a system down, that's a priority one issue, and they handle it well. I would put everything I own on their tech support. They have multiple support centers around the world, and you can follow the sun - which I have done to fix issues. That's outstanding.

If you have small questions, odd issues, it can take a while to get through tech support. That's typical, as your problem is not the default. Your problem is some complicated issue with an interaction between multiple pieces of software or multiple configurations, whatever it might be. Those kinds of issues are difficult to dissect and resolve. You'll go into this loop of, "Well, try this. Well, try this. Well, give us more information about this." I understand, however. That's just simply debugging. There's nothing to be done. It can just take a while. However, if it's a priority, if it's a P1, they're fantastic. They really do a good job.

I've used VMware quite often, and it's an outstanding solution. It's got lots of different options, and of course, you can do things like VMotion, which allows you to move a VM in the cluster. The reason for deploying Oracle's VM is to manage the licensing, however, as we would have had to buy 10 times the number of cores if it was in a VMware cluster. That would drive up the costs.

The initial setup takes a little bit of thinking, and a little bit of reading, however, it's not particularly difficult. If you have the rest of your hardware and everything in place, it installs within a day or two. By that I mean you need a day to install it and then another day or so to adjust and tweak, and I haven't found it to be that difficult to install.

On one hand, I like Oracle's licensing strategy in that they don't have license keys. You don't have to call and beg for another 30-day key and all the hassle that a lot of smaller companies do. Oracle does allow new users to understand what the value of their VM is for you. 

I see using this solution primarily as a way of maintaining or managing my costs. Anybody who's got any experience in another virtualization technology will pick it up fairly rapidly. It's not difficult to understand. It's not difficult to use. However, if you've got a set of standards and practices in your existing IT, it's another one to learn. It's another one to maintain. And most companies try to streamline.

Their licensing is based on the number of cores. Companies need to be careful about costs as they can rise rapidly.

We don't have a business relationship with Oracle. One of the things that's unusual about my company is we absolutely do not court or back any particular technology player as we're the trusted advisor helping companies understand and solve problems. How unbiased can I be if I'm getting marketing dollars from Oracle or from Microsoft or from somebody else? We stand on our own. That's not always easy, however, it's the right thing to do. When I make a recommendation, it is with 100% the customer's interests in mind.

I come in and work with companies that are in the process of migrating or updating off of older systems and into newer technologies, whether it be an on-prem hyper-converged type of infrastructure or into the cloud. I've got about 30 years' worth of experience with Oracle as an administrator and as a manager.

A lot of times the customers are not quite sure what they want to go with. VMware is the big player in the virtualization space. I'm involved with a customer right now doing a large virtualization project where they're moving from individual old servers to a virtualized Dell VxRail environment. Therefore, I don't work exclusively with Oracle.

Oracle has moved to KVM. Essentially they're trying to consolidate and trying to use KVM as it's slightly more popular and more robust virtualization technology. There are other ways of solving the problem, however, KVM has been around a while and Oracle's very tied to the Linux platform - although they do run on Windows and I've got clients running Oracle in Azure cloud. It really doesn't matter for virtualization.

In terms of the Oracle versions we would use, it was mostly the latest version that we could get our hands on. It's always best to go with the latest versions. Oracle has a support policy that they maintain the current version, one version back, and everything older than that tends to be somewhat difficult to get support on. Therefore, you don't want to linger. However, a lot of people use Oracle virtualization as what I'd call minimal infrastructure. We're running it due to the fact that we need to have virtualization based on Oracle licensing concerns. It works, however, it's not anywhere to the same level of sophistication or of tools that, say, a VMware would be. It's like stepping back about two or three generations of VMware.

I would advise others to understand what the value of this particular layer of the stack is going to provide for you. Oracle has a very good policy in terms of letting you download the software. There's really no license keys. You can play with it and try to understand it and make sure that it's going to work for you. You don't want to run this longer than necessary. Oracle's not going to let you use it for six months. However, you certainly can pull it down, install it, understand what it can and can't do for you, and then use it appropriately.

On a scale from one to ten, I would say it's a solid seven. It lacks some of the newer features that VMware and Microsoft virtualization technology have, however, that's not necessarily a showstopper for what it's used for. If you want all the flashiness, then you tend to rate it lower, yet it's quite functional and does the job.

We use this solution For running our in house development work. As we work with Oracle packaged applications thius allows us to deploy a full red stack and prevents any application software vs hypervisor compatibility issues. We have also deployed this solution at many customer sites where we use it to reduce licensing impacts using cpu pinning to reduce the number of cores needed to be licensed for individual products such as oracle database and weblogic.

We are able to run many different solutions on a small number of hypervisors. We can shut down those solutions that are currently not of interest and can expand or contract the resources, such as memory, that are assigned to different solutions so that a developer may struggle a little, but a client demo will fly on the same instance when given 200% more memory. 

We also use the live migration facility to move VMs among servers in our farm so we can perform patching and other activities.

This is supported by Oracle and optimized for running its database and software. Among the benefits is the ability to create huge pages within a VM, which is very beneficial for databases. The other major benefit is the ability to use OVM as a partitioning mechanism to reduce licensing costs for Oracle software.

Currently, there are some cases when the GUI and the back-end go out of sync. For example, the GUI shows the VM as running whereas it is actually already shut down. This could be improved.

I've used it for over four years.

When we were previously using a dual-head storage with automatic storage pathing, we faced issues with compatibility since the shared storage kept getting re-mastered to different heads by the various servers which did not choose to access by the default assigned heads. 

We fixed this by replacing our storage with a supported/certified one. We have seen much better stability when using one of Oracle's purpose-built virtualization appliances, like PCA or ODA, to implement virtualization.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

The customer service ranges from average to exceptional. We faced an issue with HBA NIC drivers that we could not solve and, at this point, we were told it was driver issue and they left it at that.

We chose this product because of the compatibility with other Oracle software and the ability to reduce license costs.

The initial setup was a little challenging at first as when we first started the hypervisor, we did not have support for our raid controller card so we had to learn to compile a custom kernel. However, the latest versions are much better.

We did it in-house as we wanted to gain the skills since we are a vendor for other clients. Having gone through the experience and gained a lot of knowledge in the process, we would recommend that it can be a little challenging.

We have recieved major beefits due to reduction of licensing costs for our customer due to the ability to use hard partitioning or trusted partitions.

OVM support licensing is included in the price of any Sun x86 servers. Since we can use the software for partitioning, it helps save on the licensing of other Oracle products that are licensed on a per-core basis.

We looked into KVm and Vmware however these options did not give us benefiits of hard partitioning and there were issues with certification and compatibility with oracle cots products.

We have seen stability challenges if the storage and network is not rock solid. In fact, the most robust solutions are those where the integration is already done, namely Oracle PCA, Oracle ODA, and Oracle Exalogic. These can be a little expensive for smaller setups, though the ODA is a very interesting choice in such constrained budget scenarios.

Clients who have two or more servers and want to virtualize their processes can deploy Oracle VM, the Virtual Machine. It's comparable with something called hard partitioning so that they can comply with Oracle's licensing policies.

There are other products in the market from other vendors, however, those virtualization technologies are not certified with Oracle regarding their licensing policies. Oracle VM comes with something specific called hard partitioning, which has to physically update the CPU core to virtual machines. This is very important. It allows virtual machines to comply with Oracle licensing policies. Otherwise, we can have big issues regarding product licensing.

Oracle VM as a product is very complete. All the features that come with Oracle VM are available within a single subscription. There are no hidden costs. Every feature that you want to use can be used without any hesitation. For example, if there are other products in the market, other virtualization products, they start selling only the basic module, then, if you want some feature they tell you, "No, you have to purchase another module for this feature". In Oracle VM, that is not the case. There is one subscription, one product, and it's everything you need. 

One of the features that we like in Oracle VM is live virtual machine migration. A virtual machine is either running on one physical server and can be moved from that physical server to another physical server live without shutting it down. That is the best part for us.

Apart from that, the graphical process that happens in the Oracle VM environment is also a great feature.

It's a very mature product.

The setup process is easy.

We find the solution to be stable. 

The pricing of the product is great.

Technical support is always helpful and responsive. 

The solution is at its end of life and is about to be discontinued. Whatever it is there today, version 3.4.7, that's the last version that will be issued. They are now done with it completely.

The stability on offer is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very mature.

It is the best virtualization platform hypervisor that is out there. Oracle itself has used Oracle VM in all its engineer systems, as well as in the past generation of Oracle Cloud. It's very stable and very robust.

It's a highly scalable product. They have deployed a server form of 1,000 servers with Oracle VM. 

It's totally scalable. For example, today you have some generation like Intel generation processor, and after three, four, five years, you want to add new servers to the same Oracle VM environment. However, you now have the next generation, like maybe Intel servers, Intel processors, Generation 10, whatever it is. You can still mix different Intel generation processors in the same Oracle VM consideration. From that point of view, it is totally scalable. It allows different CPU generations.

At this time, we have more than 100 to 200 clients that have installed Oracle VM. The solution likely has millions of clients. 

Regarding the support from Oracle, it's the topmost quality and leading the market of VM products. It's always very good. We've been very happy with their capabilities and support.

The implementation process is very straightforward. It is very user-friendly and it is very well-documented. 

The deployment process can be handled by one or two people. It's a total single product. It's a single product that needs to be installed on the physical servers. On the station side, just you have to install Oracle VM Manager, and that's it. 

Clients who use the solution pay for a subscription. Oracle VM and Oracle Linux, they're not sold as a license. However, they have support subscription. It is so cheap. It's almost 3% cheaper than any other virtualization product that is there in the market. There are many clients who use it exclusively for virtualization; they have converted their existing virtualization solution to Oracle VM.

We're a partner, a reseller, of Oracle VM.

Oracle VM is basically an infrastructure product. It needs to be installed on-premise. For the cloud, Oracle VM is not applicable as Oracle itself virtualizes everything and provides for the clients. With Oracle VM, we have deployed it to our client infrastructure on-premise in all instances.

This product now is more than 12 to 15 years old. It has been in the market for a long time. Oracle has announced the end of life of this product. Soon, it is going to be finished. Next year, they're not going to launch any more versions of Oracle VM.

Right now, there is no advice that I can give as the product is at the end of life. If a company has Oracle VM in their environment, it is good to have an Oracle VM patch to the latest version and to keep it stable, and that's it. It's not going to be distributed anymore after next year.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

We are using the virtual machine to host our databases and other applications.

What I like best about this product is that it's free. It helps customers and end-users save money.

I would like to see better orchestration, as it would help in terms of setup. 

Better automation would help in terms of provisioning and configuring new VMs.

Oracle VM should be more feature-rich.

Using this product should come at no charge, regardless of the platform.

We have been using Oracle VM for two or three years. We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

I have not seen any issues with stability.

Scalability has not been a problem. One of our older clients has about 1,000 end-users and one that we are working on now is expected to have about 50,000.

We have support directly from Oracle and we haven't had any issues with it.

I also have experience with VMware. The setup for VMware is a little bit easier.

The initial setup is not as easy as VMware, but over time and with experience, it will become easier.

Oracle VM is free if you are running it on Oracle infrastructure hardware, otherwise, it is subscription-based.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to consider the total cost of ownership. It does not make sense to try and save money on hardware if you are going to have really expensive software. Be sure to look at the entire ecosystem, rather than the itemized cost.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I was using it for my project work. Our product, where I was working, needed support in Oracle VM, so I was trying to explore how our product could be used on top of Oracle VM. It was primarily to support our product on Oracle VM. That is mostly the use case I was trying for.

Our product had several issues with post-migration. The keys in our disk storage were not operating properly for writing the I/O, which was a problem. It was not functioning correctly, which is why we could not use it. I was not attempting to use any specific features.

I have been using it for two to three years. Currently, I am not using it.

Based on all the testing I have done, I found there were no issues with its performance.

I did not go through any support channel for issues, so I am not familiar with customer service.

Neutral

I found it easy to set up. If you follow the document, you are able to install Oracle directly. One person can install it without additional help. Although I was not working extensively on it, the first installation and a few minor instances were sufficient to use it.

I could not find any other alternatives. I was mainly dealing with one particular feature, and I did not explore other features I wanted to use.

The project I was working on has closed. I am no longer exploring anything new. Mostly, our customers are enterprise customers with no test issues. I rate the overall solution eight out of ten. I didn't deal with anything related to it since I was using trial versions and did not encounter any pricing-related issues.

I'm usually working in the public sector or hospitals that have many critical systems, including the SKN information system or some emergency that are medical.

The main program to consider, from an improvement perspective for Oracle VM, is how to extract the existing VM or migrate it to Oracle KVM.

In the roadmap of Oracle, Oracle VM is finished, and this is the last year. Oracle KVM, which is Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager. In fact, I had to suppress my Oracle VM environment for Oracle KVM, which is Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager. I'm a certified partner for Oracle Database. Also, I'm certified in Oracle Exadata.

There are issues with the solution's stability since it crashes.

I have issues with its scalability since one cannot have many VMs. So, it reaches limits at an early rate. Hence, it's very difficult to scale. Also, you have a file system that is not supported. The file system is based on OCFS2, which is an open-source file system that is not very reliable. It is not a problem with Oracle KVM or XFS since you have many file systems, but this is not the case with Oracle VM.

The initial setup for Oracle VM is very difficult. The main problem is the stability and scalability of the solution. The drawbacks are the backup. There are no backup products certified with Oracle VM. This is not a problem with Oracle KVM. Another problem is when you patch your kernel, Xen is in the kernel, and Xen is not very reliable. In fact, you may have some crashes, so it's very difficult to maintain Oracle VM.

Oracle VM follows an annual subscription model. It's not a very expensive product. This is not the price of VMware.

I wouldn't recommend it to others since it is a final and old product. Also, the product is nearing its end.

Overall, I rate the solution a four out of five.

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.