Oracle VM Reviews

It is cloud-based, so I can access the management consoles from anywhere within or outside my organization if I have VPN access. Its a very light pool so its quite fast in nature, the hypervisor itself is very small its around one and half gig in size so its very light, and boots very fast. It consumes no overhead. For example, if there is a physical server of say 128 gigs and 4 core CPU, all of these 4 cores and 128 gigs are available to you.

In addition, on the network card you can do WLAN tagging, you can do non WLAN tagging, you can do IP based multi-passing and you can do storage level multi-passing.

I think the most valuable features are:

• Excellent support team
  
• Compatibility with: Linux, Windows, Ubuntu and Solaris

The management can be improved more, and become more agile. It would be nice for it to become more rich in terms of UI. In addition, the replication to disaster recovery needs improvement.

This product upgrades or updates comes in two flavors, one is a community update and one is subscription based updates. For the subscription based updates you have to pay Oracle, its a very small amount of money for the subscription. In contrast, the community support is free. You can choose whichever way you want.

Again, it is extremely scalable. Notes can be added on the fly, but it needs to do better form work before it is a true virtualization software. 

If you compare Oracle VM vs VMware or Oracle VM vs Hyper-V, there is a definite difference in GUI. The GUI of Hyper-V and VMware are phenomenal. The GUI of Oracle VM is not that great, it is sluggish in nature, but it does everything that it is supposed to do. So, you have command line access, you have the GUI based access too, so my recommendation is to make the GUI better. It has improved in the past couple of years, and it should continue to do so.

It is simple and straightforward, and it will only require you one system integrator to do the job. If you can read the English directions on the screen, then you can do it.

It is a cheap solution for a company's VM needs. It is simple to use, and has a great support system. It appears to be a win-win for any organization.

Pricing and licensing is one of the main decision making reasons for going to Oracle VM because it was cost-effective.

Oracle VM needs to add a backup feature. 

I have been using the product since 2014. 

I rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate Oracle VM's scalability a ten out of ten. 

I have never contacted Oracle support. 

I also use IBM as per project requirements. 

When we installed the product in 2014, its documentation was simple and crystal clear. Now, it is complicated. We have to jump from one page to another. I rate its deployment an eight out of ten. Deployment takes around two hours to complete. 

I managed the deployment myself. 

Oracle VM is not expensive. I rate its pricing a three out of ten. 

The solution is easy to configure once you understand the documentation. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

It offers live migration. It is the best virtualization option for Oracle databases for Linux as Oracle recognizes hard partitions for their database licensing.

If you need to put an Oracle Database on Linux or Windows for any reason, and don't want to pay to license a whole VMware cluster, this is the next best option.

There are several VMware features missing. I haven't done an in-depth analysis to understand which exact ones they are.

I've been using it for three years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Stability was great. There were no issues with instability.

I only deployed it to a small, three-node Oracle X5-2 cluster.

Never had to open an SR. It's pretty stable. I did create ask some fairly technical questions about it on the My Oracle Support Community and got some great help there.

We previously used VMware which we had to use for licensing reasons, and to be able to own the full stack (hardware/virtualization/OS). My team had minimal permissions on the VMware side.

It was fairly easy for an experienced Linux admin.

I did the implementation myself.

I never did an ROI calculation.

It's much cheaper than paying millions for Oracle DB in VMware. Support for Oracle VM and Oracle Linux are included when installed on Oracle hardware, which makes it a very cheap option. There is a free, unsupported version available too. That might be attractive to some.

If there are issues with the storage, then all the machines go down, even if I have a backup solution in place. So I have to restart the server, and then it starts working again. It has happened a few times, and it wasn't very comfortable. 

Apart from that, it's an okay solution for deploying VMs or switching them to another server if you have availability installed, and so on.

I'm not familiar with the latest version. There might be some new functionalities that we would like to have in our current solution. For example, having better backup options for virtual machines, such as online backup, would be cool to have.

This is something that I would like to see in our virtualization solution.

I have been working with Oracle VM for around ten years. So far, it has been working well. 

If you don't have any issues, it works perfectly. If you do encounter issues, there aren't many. But where there are some issues, it can be a little more challenging compared to other solutions I've worked with. However, I understand it better now as we are transitioning to the latest utilization from Oracle, which they use in their cloud.

I would rate the stability of Oracle VM a nine out of ten. We haven't encountered any issues while working in production. 

However, if there are any issues, it's important that the environment supports optimal utilization. Additionally, it's worth noting that we are using an older version of the Oracle server. We are currently in the process of installing it in a new data center.

It is a scalable solution. The new version is more scalable than the old one.

Overall, I am happy with Oracle's support.

Positive

I work with the paid version. We are moving to the latest Oracle virtualization solutions, so we are going to stick to this solution.

Overall, I would rate Oracle VM an eight out of ten. 

We are building a private cloud with Oracle VM. We want to implement Oracle RAC with Clusterware releases 12.2 and 18c, and with Oracle Database releases 11.2.0.4 to 18c.

We will implement a full dev/test environment with Oracle RAC and standalone databases. We will be able to fully use our ULA license agreement with Oracle and provide flexibility to our development teams.

Oracle virtual machine templates for rapid deployment are very useful. This allows us to deploy already-implemented and optimized virtual machines.

Snapshotting could be easier. And there could be more intuitive ways for cloning of virtual machines.

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.

Feature-wise, the solution's high availability to most servers is good. The virtual sellers don't have a host. I think that one is the most valuable for me.

I know they moved from OVM, and I think right now, they are moving into KVM or something else. I don't have much to say about the improvement if they are already shifted to the KVM.

The configuration can be more flexible. It is a necessity.

I have been using Oracle VM since 2014. Also, I am not using the solution's latest version. I am using Oracle VM 3.4. I am a customer of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Right now, no one in my company uses the solution.

I rate the solution's technical support a ten out of ten. I have used their support, and it is good.

Positive

On a scale of one to ten, where one being difficult and ten being easy, I rate the setup a five because the vendor was supposed to have done the biggest part, and they actually don't configure everything.

The deployment was done in a week or two.

Three people, along with the vendor, were needed for deployment.

The solution's UI is good enough.

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

We have a data center with multiple racks. The product Oracle VM Server is deployed on two of our HP G10 servers. Comparatively this product is more flexible & reliable for oracle Applications & Databases. we have all our PROD env on this platform and It also enables us to clone an oracle app / db product for a test environment within a few minutes. We are Oracle customers and I'm the system and infrastructure Admin.

we have also test and development env. live cloning of oracle app /db within minutes is a great feature and very helpful for us. 

The live cloning within minutes is a great feature and live migration is very easy. It's the most reliable feature and it's not available in VMware or Hyper-V. Performance, scalability and flexibility are all good in this product. 

All features are ok. just need to add performance monitoring tools for all running VMs & reporting facility as well.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

There is good stability with this product and we've been able to upgrade when necessary without any problems. We have the technical skill and product knowledge so it's easy for us.  This solution is more stable than VMware and Hyper-V. 

This solution is easy to scale. We can add the storage and increase VM capacity without a problem. this product is scalable. storage, network, NFS, servers can be easily added or migrated.

although we have technical support license. but from last five years we didn,t need any support. as we have technical skill set and product knowledge. . 

Positive

we were using physical servers. then we move to VMWare but we faced issue regarding oracle apps / dbs performance. then we found OVM solution. this is best for oracle products. VMWare is also a good product but as for as performance of Oracle aap / db is concern . Oracle VM server is best option

I configured the applications and deployed this solution. Deployment doesn't take very long, it just depends on the situation. I can build an Oracle environment in one day and deploy virtual machines. to mange Oracle VM server we need Oracle VM Mmanager. that is also easy configure. a complete guide is available. just study thoroughly before deployment.

no vendors at all. i tested and deployed this product by myself. initially it was 3.4.2 then we upgraded to 3.4.5. 

We found this product to be reasonably priced, it's not expensive like VMware. 

as mentioned earlier we used physical env as well as vmware & hyper-v. we are still using the same for other applications. But for oracle products we choose oracle vm server.

I highly recommend this solution, especially for oracle apps & dbs. within five minutes you can make a clone even if it's one terabyte. 

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10.