Oracle VM Reviews

I handle both sales and technical. We also sell cloud technology, so I do a lot of extensive work on cloud implementation.

We are Oracle Gold partners. We do a lot of deployments around Oracle VM. We are core in Oracle infrastructure and Oracle banking. When I say Oracle infrastructure, I'm looking at the x86 servers, also the SPARC servers. When you look at infrastructure, these not only carry the servers themselves, we look at the virtualization technology, which is definitely Oracle VM, both on SPARC and on x86.

Recently, we have been doing a kind of mix where the customer wants Dell and Oracle x86 VM.

I have done this deployment for an insurance company, and they have a lot of insurance solutions which run on the Oracle database. They could not go for the expensive Oracle server, so they decided to go for the Dell server but now are hard partitioning Oracle VM to cut down on the cost of licenses.

We have installed life insurance solutions on Oracle VM hard partitioned, and the general insurance solution is hard partitioned to focus on Oracle VM. They have a dock management system that uses Oracle database, hard partitioned also to focus on Oracle VM. They have a business intelligence solution which also uses Oracle database, also hard partitioned to Oracle VM.

We have actually created the production and VR with loads of VLANs swinging through both production and VR side, all on Oracle VM.

Storage is Dell Unisys storage, and then the computer is all Dell servers.

It's a very flexible solution because you have all the commands that you can do yourself.

The OVM Manager is very extensive and very nice to use for those who don't have a 360 view of the hard coding of things. They can still use Oracle VM to run the show, especially in the SPARC version. I've done some deployment with Oracle SPARC VM, but using Connect to connect it to Oracle OVM Manager. We use the OVM Manager to provision the SPARC server rather than going through the hard work of writing the codes of SPARC VM yourself.

All these things make Oracle VM a kind of panacea solution for me.

Something that could be improved are the snapshots that go in the ZFS Storage. If you want to enjoy Oracle VM, you will definitely want it to go together with ZFS Storage to maximize on the snapshot facility.

In other virtualization like VMware, you can do the snapshot right at the level of VMware itself. You'll get customers complaining that, "We can't take a snapshot just like we do on our normal VMware solution."

I always advise my customers to go with ZFS Storage. If you maybe had a snapshot on the Oracle VM itself, it would make sense.

I've been born and bred with Oracle since 2001. It is a career for me. In the past 10 years, I moved between flex to core banking, CRM, ERP and Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle hardware T8 implementation.

It's extremely stable.

The solution is scalable because we are using production and VR 35 kilometers apart. Scalability is no issue.

The licensing for Oracle VM solution is very nice because you license the box.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

My advice is to throw away your VMware because the licenses will kill you. Throw away your Microsoft Hyper-V because it doesn't work. Just go with Oracle VM because it works.

Oracle Virtualization works and is the best in the world, so I don't know what guys are doing with other solutions.

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. 

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.

Cloning is the best feature in Oracle VM.

Oracle VM should have centralized storage, without which you can't clone or move one VM to another. If you have two Oracle KVM hypervisors without central storage and want to replicate a clone from one hypervisor to another, there is no technology to do that.

Oracle VM needs to change or refine its partition system. Oracle OVM takes five minutes to one hour to clone a system.

I have been using Oracle VM for seven years.

As compared to other solutions, Oracle VM is a stable solution.

I rate Oracle VM a seven out of ten for scalability. Around 500 users were using Oracle VM in my previous organization.

I have worked with Hyper-V and VMware.

Oracle VM's initial setup takes around twenty minutes. I rate Oracle VM an eight out of ten for its initial setup.

Since I'm a technical person, it takes half an hour for me to deploy Oracle VM.

Oracle VM is a good native product for Oracle applications and databases.

I rate Oracle VM a nine out of ten.

Our customers use the solution for database and service applications.

The solution's most valuable feature is live migration.

The solution's management, hardware, and backup recovery features could be better.

Our customers have been using the solution for four years.

We have ten solution users in our organization. They include system administrators.

The solution's technical support is quite good.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process is easy.

The solution's price is relatively low.

I rate the solution a seven. I advise others to go for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, the next platform for Oracle based on KVM.

We are a consulting company and one of the solutions that we assist our clients with is Oracle VM. I work with several different clients and they have different use cases.

My client using the Oracle VM says that it is working well.

I can use Oracle VM to manage my VMs and databases.

The interface on the newest version is good.

Oracle VM integrates well.

The network capabilities are good.

It is easy to migrate and clone VMs.

There have been some security issues in the past.

Having even more integration with other products would be an improvement.

The current version, 3.4.6, is usable. However, I had many problems with the Java console in previous versions, such as 3.2. It is easy to access now but prior to this, you had to install different versions of Java. The stability has improved over time.

This is a scalable solution. I can use many nodes inside of a cluster. Also, I can create one group and put several servers in it.

The Oracle technical support is very good.

I have also used KVM and it is a good tool.

VMware is another good tool but it is difficult to compare them. VMware has a better hypervisor but Oracle VM does many things, and it costs less.

Oracle VM is easy to set up. It can be deployed with one person.

We have five analysts for support and that work with it.

The price of the license is expensive.

Another one of the jobs that I do is assist my clients with migration to Oracle VM. For example, some migrate from VM to Oracle VM, and others migrate from Hyper-V to Oracle VM.

Overall, this Oracle VM works well for us. It is a good product, although Oracle is now recommending that we transition to Oracle KVM.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I manage the Oracle Cloud infrastructure, including all our VMs, firewalls and load balances.

The solution is easy to use. You can spin one up when you need to and then shut it down. When it is shut down the cost is minimal. It makes it very easy to do testing and training, including 'what-if'' situations.

I would like to be able to take all our logs and ship them to a corporate site. However, this feature could exist and I just haven't had the chance to explore that.

Stability is good, I would rate it an 8 out of 10 in this area.

Scalability is good.

The price compares well with other solutions. Oracle has flexible payment and cost methods. We use an annual credit plan by committing to one year in the Oracle environment. By making this commitment they provide deep discounts for what we do. They also offer a pay as you go and monthly plans.

I would rate Oracle VM a 9 out of 10.

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.