Oracle VM Reviews

The big benefits to Oracle VM that I see in users that I work with are, first of all, performance. You don’t have what I call the "virtualization tax" like you do on other hypervisors. The CPU that you buy actually becomes more and more useful. You don’t have all that overhead. You get really good disk performance, almost comparable to bare metal when you configure it correctly. That’s an important feature for people that are using it. 

Overall, the biggest performance is around virtualization and automation, you can build private clouds with Oracle VM using Enterprise Manager.

Oracle VM is a great free product from Oracle. I love that, when I can say "free from Oracle." It’s a full feature hypervisor. It competes well with other hypervisors in the market. However, it’s free. You don’t pay anything to use it. You can, however, pay for support if you need support. 

It offers all the features you expect in a hypervisor, using technologies that they call Live Migration. It allows me to move VMs from one machine to another. I have a technology called Site Guard which is an automation tool for automating failover to disaster recovery sites. Feature for feature, it does almost everything VMware does but cost a lot less.

One is the hypervisor. Right now, it’s all using Xen. What would be really helpful is to have some choice, and the underlying hypervisor technology use KVM which is very popular with certain workloads. 

There are also some features around it, extracting virtual machines and managing it, that could show some improvement.

There’s still some area for improvement with some of the newer technologies.

It’s actually very stable. In the later releases, you can even patch the hypervisor without a reboot. That adds to the up-time of the environment. When you run Oracle Linux inside as guest VMs, you can also use the Ksplice technology and patch the VMs without any outage.

Scaling in Oracle VM is an interesting prospect because you have two ways you can scale it. You can, first of all, use really, really big hosts with large numbers of CPUs. Four-socket, eight-socket CPUs are fully supported with it. But you could also scale it with a large number of servers in the environment, so you can scale horizontally and vertically. I have not had any issues with the scalability of Oracle VM. It scales really well.

Setting up Oracle VM depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to do a basic install and use the normal management console, I’ve done that in a couple of hours. I’m experienced with it. 

But if you want to build private clouds with it, you want to interface the Enterprise Manager, have chargeback functionality for users, you want to do cloud automation; that’s a little more complicated. If you haven’t done it, it takes about a week. However, there’s a book from Oracle Press about Oracle VM 3 and building private clouds, and that helps a lot with what's involved in this task, to build and support a system.

The cost of scalability. You pay for what you use. It's free to download, free to install, and the support side has been very helpful.

The way it plays with the Oracle Database; it's all about the Oracle Database. The way it plays with the Oracle Database; it's all about the Oracle Database. The virtualization product Oracle puts out just complements the performance of the database.

I would say third-party plugins to other storage vendors. There are a lot of converged infrastructure setups; one that we have, multiple different hardware vendors. So that would be something we could definitely be looking for.

Also, the monitoring aspect. Right now, there's a hook in to OEM, but I would like to see that part a little bit more mature so that it's a standalone.

It's been pretty stable, especially with the new releases. The 3.4 major release has made a lot of significant performance gains and stability from the 3.29 days.

No issues at all. Adding hypervisors or server pools, even migrating to other instances across different disaster recovery sites, it's been pretty turnkey.

We have a lot of customers out there that are running Oracle Database and, as we're virtualizing, there are other products out there that are not cost-efficient for the customer. Oracle VM is the logical choice there.

That's the beautiful part. There's documentation out there and it's pretty straightforward, as long as you stick to the manual. It's pretty easy to set up. If you're installing an Oracle Database, you literally go to hours from what used to take days.

When selecting a vendor what's important, obviously, is the reputation in the industry, the kind of support they provide, and the features of the product that we'll be using.

If you're going from a bare metal type of implementation, the expectation is going to be that the performance level will be there, and Oracle VM is definitely a product that gives you that.

First because of the virtualization for Linux, I use just Linux basically in all VMs, a few with Windows. For Windows we decide to use a virtual box. In Linux, we choose to manage by the Command Line because my history is more Command Line.

I think more Command-Line options for the product, for deployments. I know that the latest version includes OpenStack support so you can manage things in any kind of OpenStack-certified solution. But I prefer to use Command Line traditionally with shells.

It's not stable if you don't use certified hardware. I work for a university and we don't have certified hardware, so we have to move the storage system to NVS instead of all of the cluster for a system because it's more stable.

Really, I don't have experience with a lot of installations because we have 20 or 25 virtual machines employed in a cluster.

To be honest, I never ask for support. I try to solve myself. I'm a kind of an old hacker. I've used Linux from the beginning so I decide to solve problems myself. 

If you only use the Command Line, it's easy. If you use the VM Management Console, you need to do more. Basically, another VM to manage, by itself, the cluster. But no, it's not complex.

I recommend Oracle VM instead of VMware or some other Windows native solution to virtualize Linux servers. It's performant for Linux.

We were curious and wanted to test the product since we were standardizing our virtualized environment. 

We knew that VMware was feature-rich, and we wanted to look as others as well to avoid vendor lock in.

I've been using it for one years.

It was complex.

We did it in-house.

We were not happy with the aggressive licensing model of Oracle and thought we would end-up in a similar situation to the Database where we have to pay the license fee for passive nodes as well.

We selected VMware and KVM.

The Red Hat KVM is better than the OVM in terms of performance and simple support.

• It provides enhancements for network and storage configuration, policy-based management for delivering application resource flexibility, and a GUI.
• Distributed Resource Scheduling for capacity management, providing real time monitoring enabling re-balancing of a server pool.
• Distributed Power Management for reduction of powered-on servers.
• Centralized network configuration and management, using Oracle VM Manager
• Storage connect framework enabling direct leveraging of resources and functionality of storage systems from Oracle VM Manager.
• Plug ins are available for Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp and are  in development for SUN ZFS Storage Appliances and the Pillar Axiom 600 SAN storage system
• Supports up to 160 CPUs and 2 TB memory for physical servers
• Supports up to 128 vCPUs for Virtual Machines
• Browser based Oracle VM Manager GUI
• Job management framework
• Extensive event logging
• Performance statistics for CPU, memory, disk, and network for physical server and VMs

• Oracle's VM VirtualBox is a powerful, free, and open-source virtualization tool. However, you'll have to read a lot of documents and perform experiments in test environments to make it work for you.
• Oracle VM is the only certified solution for use with all Oracle software.
• Oracle VM: Virtualization is a key technology used in data-centers to optimize resources. Oracle VM provides an easy-use-centralized management environment for configuring and operating your server, network, and storage infrastructure from a browser based interface (no Java client required). It is accessible from just about anywhere.
• Oracle Virtualization comes with Desktop Virtualization and Server VirtualizationServer Virtualization.
• Designed for efficiency and optimized for performance, Oracle's server virtualization products support x86 and SPARC architectures. They nclude hypervisors and virtualization built into the operating system and hardware.

Desktop Virtualization: Oracle's comprehensive desktop virtualization solutions, from secure thin client devices to highly optimized virtual desktop infrastructure software, offer ease of administration, higher security, and better access.

It's similar to being Citrix-based with a little bit of difference on the technology side. It seems to handle some of the database mechanics better. Again, that's probably just the sampling size we've done, which may not be big enough, but it does seem to work with those a little bit better in our experience.

We've noticed that when working with Citrix with our Oracle clients who also use Oracle Linux, the monitoring and testing is simpler and easier for us to do.

It doesn't monitor everything, which is a little bit more difficult. It doesn't seem to have as many features or metrics to monitor as some others do, so you have to make some homemade scripts to do it. There are richer APIs out there that are able to pull the data back.

Also, finding files and downloading them and installing them can take a little bit of time. Once they've got it installed, it seems to work pretty good.

Operationally from a stability perspective, it has been pretty good. Some of the monitoring that we do will show when it starts getting stress, but then creating new ones has been effortless and it hasn't really been a problem.

We have been able to scale using it just fine.

It's a little bit cumbersome. To know exactly how to install it and the management pieces wasn't as straightforward as some of my admins have said.

Try it our and test it, and make sure it's going to be exactly what you need first versus the other options because they all have their own little idiosyncrasies, and you want to make sure it's going to be a fit for your organization.

It simplifies server management. In terms of server provisioning, it only takes a few clicks of a button and a bit of install automation. The server can be delivered in less than an hour, compared to physical machines.

The integrated web-based management console manages resources, virtual machine templates, and virtual machine images.

With our current OVM Manager version, migrating a VM from one repository to another repository was really complicated, especially editing and manually matching the configuration.

For the past three years, most of the issues we encountered were related to hardware issues. Based on our experience, I can say it is stable.

In terms of the visualization perspective, scaling was not an issue. You can scale without affecting the applications. You can even reconfigure WM hardware specs without affecting the system.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10. Most of the calls I placed with Oracle for support were handled as expected.

In our current infrastructure, we have both ESXi and OVM Manager.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. All you have to do is to choose the right options.

I was not involved in the procurement phase.

I was not involved in the procurement phase.

Based in my experience, I would recommend this product in terms of:

• Support
• Stability
• Scalability
• Overall ease of management

The valuable features are the cost and the convenience of the physical machines, meaning that you can have multiple virtual machines that you can use for many other different tools, not just Hyperion. We work with different Oracle products such as EBS, OBIEE, and Hyperion and they're all integrated so we don't have to have different physical servers located in our datacenter. What you can do is create different virtual machines in the same physical server and use that for any of our products.

For example, we are going to upgrade our Oracle BI product, so that needs to have more servers. What we are thinking to do is to create more VM's in the same physical server instead of buying more physical servers. It's just a matter of creating a new virtual machine, which is not a big task for the administration team. Probably within an hour they're able to build up a new server for us, so it's easy, faster and cheaper that way.

Initially, you did not have an option in Oracle VM to build an image and just restore into a different physical or virtual environment, but now the option is included. That's one thing I thought wasn't there and wanted to have, because we are planning to move our Essbase database server from physical to virtual, and I thought it's not going to be easier because you can't just export the physical server and just import everything into the virtual machine. Now the integration is there. You can export the physical server's configuration, their registries and everything, the databases and then just import them to virtual machines. That's the only lacking feature I thought was with VM, but they have included it. 

It still takes some time and the valuations have to be done by the admin, so it still is taking more time. That's, I think, one of the challenges that we recently had when we were talking to our administration team. The Windows and Linux admins took some time, like a couple of days, to build servers for us, which as far as I think being an IT person, it's a virtual machine. Once you have the image it should be easy enough to import it into the new virtual machine, built up like a snapshot. 

I think they could make the implementation faster. It's still taking some time, which should be eliminated in the future, I think, and it will be because I've seen a lot of improvement already.

If deployment could be more faster, that would good, but right now it's fine. It solved my problem of migrating from physical to virtual, so initially I had to reinstall Essbase and it's a big challenge in the Linux machine.

I haven't seen any big issue with the stability. There have been no issues with instability that I've seen.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Within one day, we had migrated a physical to virtual server and then we had a database working, and it was like seamless transition. We just changed the alias of that machine to whatever the listing server alias name was, and the application picked up right away.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

I looked into vSphere and Hyper-V, and then decided that we could not go with any other non-Oracle virtual technology. It had to be Oracle VM, so that's one thing I wanted to make sure was that we had Oracle VM as a new server, otherwise Hyperion is not going to be supported on non-Oracle virtual servers.

For us, the biggest thing I think is the compatibility with all the other Oracle products. We have ERP and EPM and all these reporting tools like BI. The most important factor for us is when you talk about the compatibility of all these different products, it has to have compatibility with dependent operating systems, the servers, the database, Internet Explorer browsers, Java, and all those different tools that are integrated in our system.

If we go with any other virtual servers or virtual products, let's say VMware, it is compatible but it's not 100% guaranteed that we'll be supported by Oracle support. Let's say in the future if we have a problem, Oracle support might say we are not able to support because you are using third-party tools. That's the most important factor and advantage over other tools in the market available when we choose to go with Oracle.

We just did the upgrade of our Oracle Hyperion, so one thing I learned is we could not go with any other tool because we have all these Oracle products integrated tightly and we cannot just install them on some other non-Oracle products. I think we are also talking about to move from physical to virtual for one of our Essbase databases. Right now it's on Essbase, which is under Hyperion, on a physical server, so again, just to take advantage of the cost and the recovery and the disaster recovery and all those benefits that virtual machine has to offer.

Prepare for the development time and the allocation of resources. That's the key thing. When you're building an image or a Oracle VM server, how much resources are you allocating? Let's say for example, the storage and buffer memory and the processor speed for each of your instance for that physical server capable of 100 gigabyte of memory, and then you're trying to build 10 servers out of it that are virtual servers. You need to analyze and review, out of those 10 servers, which server needs more resource and more hard space based on your application growth. That is the key thing that I've seen. Some admins don't pay attention when they're building the package. It really depends on the factor of what tool is going to be implemented on what server. How much space and how much processor speed is it going to need?

For example, the Essbase database in Hyperion needs a lot of memory and processing speed. It needs more threads to calculate the data, so for that you need to allocate as much resources as you can as compared to maybe other tools which don't need that much of resources.

Planning to build your package for your client for the virtual machine on the physical server is the key thing.