Oracle VM Reviews

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.

It is designed for enterprise-level virtualization, offering features such as live migration, high availability, and centralized management.

It is highly esteemed for its ability to efficiently optimize and enhance the operational speed and responsiveness of virtualized environments. It offers exceptional performance benefits.

The integration aspect may benefit from some enhancement. Incorporating analytics related to performance, particularly within the dashboard interface, would be beneficial.

I have been using it for two years.

I would rate its stability capabilities eight out of ten.

Scalability abilities are impressive, I would rate it nine out of ten.

They provide excellent support services, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

The installation takes just a few minutes, it is very prompt.

I have heard from my colleague that it comes with a high price tag. I would rate it five out of ten.

Overall, I would rate nine out of ten.

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 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.

We primarily use it for ERP in virtual environments.

The solution is very scalable. It's easy to adjust the size up and down.

It's stable. 

It's a great tool for complex organizations.

The pricing could be cheaper. It is very pricey.

This tool isn't for every company. It's very complex. 

I've been working with the solution for nine years, more or less.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It has been reliable. I would rate the scalability at an eight out of ten. We have external partners and an internal technical team that constantly works to stabilize everything. 

The scalability is very good. You can adjust it up and down. The scalability I would rate at a ten out of ten. It's great.

We have 250 users on the solution right now. Their job titles vary from senior to middle management. It's pretty static. We do not have plans to increase usage.

We've worked with technical support. We supplement it with our technical expertise. 

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The setup is pretty straightforward. It doesn't require any maintenance once it is up and running. 

It took about three weeks to set up the VM itself, however, Oracle in general takes a long time to implement - maybe six months.

I wasn't directly involved in the deployment process and cannot speak to how it was done. 

We have 36 technical staff that help handle the deployment and maintenance. 

We had an integrator install the solution for us. 

There may be an ROI, however, it may not be a lot. It's a very expensive tool.

We currently pay yearly licensing for the solution. 

it is an expensive solution. 

We currently are in the decision-making process of whether we're going to remain with Oracle or whether we're going to look at a different ERP.

We use an older version of the solution. While the solution started as an on-premises deployment, we've since moved to a private cloud. We did that in the last 18 months. 

This is a very complex system for complex organizations. It is not something I would recommend to everyone. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We are using Oracle VM as the platform for running our Oracle databases. The templates that are available for provisioning database nodes are very helpful. Using these pre-configured templates makes the deployment process quick and efficient.

By virtualizing our database tier on generic x86 hardware, it lowered hardware costs, improved performance, scalability and maintainability. We now have more redundancy than we had with proprietary hardware.

Ease of upgrades is certainly a strong candidate for improvement. I started looking at an Oracle 12 template and I have to say I liked the Oracle 11 template better, not from a database perspective but from an OS perspective.

We initially implemented version 2.2.1 in 2010 but never took it in to production. We had issues with stability that were ultimately traced to how the LUNs were presented to the guests. We went live with version 3.0 in 2011. We're currently on version 3.2.1.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability was a major issue initially and it was traced to how the LUNs were presented to the guests. Once that was resolved, the system was pretty solid.

I did have an issue with the guests running out of swap space and located a procedure to expand swap space without having to disrupt the LUN numbering convention.

It was initially subpar.

It was initially subpar. The issue with LUN presentation was discovered by us and not by tech support. I would think tech support would have been able to at least point us in that direction. Lately, it has been difficult to route issues to the correct group. Once there, however, support has been adequate.

For our database tier, we used proprietary hardware that worked well but we were limited to that type of hardware and it was reaching end-of-life. At the time, Oracle was adamant about their hypervisor being the only one that was license-compliant, so that took us in the direction of Oracle VM. I understand Oracle has backed away from that stance for other hypervisors, but at the time we didn’t want to double or quadruple or database licensing costs.

Unfortunately, I used my VMware experience and applied it to the Oracle VM setup. Looking back, that was probably not the right approach as some things in Oracle VM are very different. The LUN presentation issue came down to poor documentation as there were two ways to present the LUNs and the documentation made it seem the improper method was the way to go.

We did it in-house, but ultimately had to get Oracle involved for the initial implementation. The version we are currently on is very stable. I should probably consider upgrading, but it’s a lower priority task right now.

The ROI was very low considering that the initial license was free.

Support costs are manageable.

As a hypervisor, it is effective, however the functionality is a step down from VMware. Upgrades are getting easier to do, but still not as easy as VMware.

The current versions seem much more stable than the earlier ones. The best advice I have is to understand the documentation and don’t take prior experience with other hypervisors in to account.

A typical database node-guest configuration:

The disks for the O/S and swap are configured as Virtual Disks while the LUNs for ASM are configured as Physical Disks.

The environment was configured primarily to host our PeopleSoft implementation as well as several smaller databases. However, PeopleSoft is being replaced with another ERP solution so this environment will be used for historical purposes. The future of the other databases is yet to be determined.

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.

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.