Oracle VM Reviews

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.

We generally recommend this solution to our customers and we deploy it for them. The solution runs on the exologic environment with multiple VMs and multiple abbreviations. In this case the solution is being used in a telecommunications company. Most of our clients are big enterprise. We partner with Oracle and I'm a senior systems support engineer. 

The previous version was full of bugs but they seem to have resolved all the issues on it so it's a good solution. Oracle VM is a good visualization hypervisor, like VMware and Hyper-V. We can create clusters, and primary file takeaways.

They could improve deployment by making the documentation easier. Also, I always find it difficult to mount the image on the Oracle VM. There are a few things that could be improved, features such as mounting and unmounting the images on Oracle VM.

I've been using this solution for around five years. 

This is a stable product. 

Scalability is good, we're able to deploy the solution to big environments.

The initial setup is straightforward, deployment time really depends on the client's needs. Sometime it takes two to three days and sometimes it can take months. We also do the maintenance for them. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

A disclaimer: Though I have been working with various flavours of Linux since Slackware 1.2 in 1996, and I more recently focus in more enterprise computing and Oracle Database, my opinions tend to be colored with those use cases. We use this Virtualization platform to host our internal development training and PoC environments. Though Oracel HAs increasingly been adding support for a KVM based solution in recent years many of their signature virtualization platforms like the private cloud appliance are OVM based.

• Oracle has now made it available as a hypervisor on Oracle cloud to be deployed on Bare metal servers.
• Ability to patch with no downtime.
• Ability to ensure all prerequisites are satisfied without manual intervention saves time, effort, and makes the systems that we deploy for our clients more secure. 
• Licensing costs are less for Oracle Linux and for clients moving to the Oracle Cloud, as it is included in the price of the subscription.

The ability to live migrate VMs on the fly from one hypervisor to another has been very useful.The ability to pin cores to reduce licensing costs for our clients runnning core based oracel producs is also invaluable.One important factor to note is that to use live migration its important to create specifc pools devoted to certain products for exampel a pool for weblogic and a separate server pool for database. live migration is not permitted when using cpu pinnning to reduce license costs.

• ability to use live migration and cpu pinning together would be very useful. for example reserving certain physical cpus on the target system prior tothe live migration for example.

More than five years.

Initially, we had some teething troubles that we found were due to use of an unsupported storage solution. We switched to an Oracle ZFS appliance, and since then, we have had no issues.

We did not encounter scalability issues. However, we are constrained by our hardware since this is a development setup.

We have found support personnel of the EMEA region with whom we have interacted to be very knowledgeable. They were very supportive and had a very good grasp of both Linux and the product.

We have used Vmware in the past be faced challenges with supportability , compatibiollity with oracle products and licensing costs and complexity.

The initial setup was quite simple. We also were able to upgrade to various newer versions with minimum handholding.

We implemented in-house.

We are certified implementors of this technology now.

We were able to deploy our solution at near zero cost compared to other vendors since the licenses come with our Oracle hardware. Therefore, it is difficult to calculate ROI, as it is a very large number.

If you choose Oracle hardware, then this virtualization software is included along with support. Licensing of various oracle applications is one of the more expensive components of any implementation, the ability to hard partition it is a major advantage which outweighs any other disadvantage for various x86-based solutions.

We evaluated using Oracle VirtualBox, but it was more for desktop virtualization and did not fit with server virtualization. We also tried KVM, but the complexities in migration from one host to another deterred us, and the management was not as seamless for multiple hypervisors.

Given Oracle VM's favorable licensing policy allowing hard partitioning using virtualization, we found this to the the most optimal method to recommend to clients.

There are compelling reasons why one might prefer Oracle Linux to Red Hat Linux. Some of the major factors are:

1. One throat to choke. It is very useful to have one vendor on the pointy end of the stick. No finger pointing, and all buck passing is internal. Also, given the dev team is often using the same OS flavor, it can be a benefit in the first place. 
2. Optimised for databases. Many of the options: RPMs and settings which are best used to run a database are packaged into a single RPM that can be automatically deployed on Oracle Linux, but must be painfully and manually setup on RHEL. 
3. Ksplice: The ability to patch all aspects of a running Linux system, including the kernel with zero downtime is something that no other Linux provides. The UEK is enough of a differentiator to get the nod.

I recommend this for any customer wanting to reduce their licensing costs for packaged applications.

We primarily use this solution strictly for Oracle licensed products.

The solution has the exact features we need.

The solution lacks a lot of extra key features.

If you do a gap analysis between VMware and Oracle VM, you can't do VM Snapshot. That's one thing you can't do. It's a sort of a snapshot, but it's not really Snapshot technology. It requires that you're running on CFS-2.

There's an overall lack of integration with other software and there is also a lack of integration with backup solutions.

Oracle has stated that they intend to improve the solution. I'm not sure when this will happen, however. It may have been declared end of life, therefore, I can't imagine that they'll actually add to it at this point.

I've been using the solution for a little over three years.

The solution is very stable. I don't recall any bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability of the solution is pretty good. If an organization needs to expand it, they can do so.

We don't plan to increase our usage, however. We plan to move off it in the near future.

The solution was not necessarily complex. It was very straightforward.

The initial installation was a combination of a hired individual that had had some experience, and ourselves. Mostly it was done by our team getting training as much as we could, due to the fact that they kept on canceling the classes. Mostly we handled the implementation on our own.

We're simply customers. We don't have a business relationship with Oracle.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this product, as we are moving off of it. I would suggest that other organizations go with a KVM-based product. It's my understanding that Oracle will not be continuing with the product, and therefore no more work will be done to add features or improve the product.

Overall, I'd rate the solution six out of ten.