Oracle VM Reviews

I think the most intriguing thing about Oracle VM is it's an enterprise-grade hypervisor. So it handles all the virtualization, and it's free. You don't hear the word Oracle and Free a lot, but there's a lot of stuff at Oracle that is free and Oracle VM is one of those.

It does most everything that you need in the enterprise for a hypervisor for virtualization. I can run VMs in it, I can do farms of VMs, I can run Linux, I can run Windows, I can run Solaris, I have a lot of choices of operating systems. It does everything that you need it to do for most of your needs for hypervisor.

There's a lot of benefits with Oracle VM that I like. I've been working with 3.4.1 which just came out. I've been working that prior to release. There's some features there that they added like Live Storage Migration that is really a key feature for that enterprise ability in the environment. The other thing is how it handles what are called partitions, from a licensing aspect. When I have Oracle licensing challenges that I have with some of the other hypervisors, Oracle VM is able to be configured so I don't have those challenges.

Cloning VMs helps a ton, especially when interface into EM, so users can build their own sandbox environmentnt, complete with WebLogic AND Database

What features would I like to see in Oracle VM in future releases? I can think of a ton of them. Some of them are just coming out. Better disaster recovery, though they just introduced a new technology called Oracle VM Site Guard that's helped a lot in disaster recovery. I would like to see better integration to Oracle networking hardware, so that would be nice, the integration between the Oracle physical networking hardware, the S2 switches would be nice for that integration.

For about 5 years now

Just issues on my part

Not in newer versions, but 3.0.1 had some issues, of course that was years ago

Scalability of the solution, we use it all in our labs and we have some small production use. I also have clients that are using it, not had an issue with scaling systems very large. Getting into server individual pods or pools or servers, 16 nodes, no problem. Getting into farms running thousands of VMs, no problem at all.

Great, the few times I have needed it.

Oracle technical support for OVM is one of the strong areas I've seen from Oracle support. The support staff are fairly knowledgeable on the product. I haven't had too many issues. When I had the few cases to open up as a port issue where they weren't able to help the surprising thing though with that is I haven't had to call Oracle support a lot for the product. It's a very stable product, very robust product. The number of tickets I've had to open up with Oracle have been minimal since I've been using the product heavily now for the last five years.

I think it becomes more of a why do you use it situation. One of the things is it's a cost savings. Since Oracle VM is free and the support's free when you have Oracle hardware, you don't have to pay the expense you pay with a lot of these other hypervisor packages out there. It's an immediate cost savings out of the gate. The other times you look at what do you want to run Oracle VM is when you have performance issue. The way it works technically under the covers, the lower level of the hypervisor, the VM runs faster and I get better performance. In small environments it's nice my application runs a little faster unvirtualized. In larger environments, it's actually a bigger deal. Not only do my applications runs faster but because of the efficiency I actually have to buy less hardware.

Up and running with VMs in an afternoon. Easy!

The initial setup for Oracle VM is pretty straightforward. Installing the hypervisor on what's called an OVS, Oracle VM Server takes maybe five minutes and you're up and running. Installing the management software itself, they may take a little longer, maybe an hour for a complete install from scratch before you're up and running, and it's all web based which is really nice. You don't have to have any special clients on it. Often I'll be managing the system either from Windows or even from my iPad.

The hard partiton technology really helps with Oracle licensing. For OVM, it's free!

Yes, but non could beat Oracle VM's price!

If I have to give it a rating between one and ten I would give it a nine. The reason I would give it a nine is there is some room for improvement with some of the areas in the manager. Some of the integration to the networking layer with the Oracle products would be nice.

My recommendation to peers is if you're looking at hypervisors, have an open mind. The market's not just dominated by single hypervisor. Look at the technology out there and give it a fair evaluation of what it's capabilities are.

Oracle license compatibility was the deciding factor for us. It's the only way to fulfill the Oracle license policy if you want to virtualize in a x86 environment.

Also, Oracle VM performance is one of the best that I've experienced. And the pre-seeded images that Oracle puts at your disposal makes your life really ease, i.e. you can have an Oracle RAC up and running within two hours with the OVM images.

I work in a consultancy, so I've deployed several OVM environments always with great results and high customer satisfaction. We've achieved the goal of being in line with the Oracle license, providing customers with better usage of their resources at better cost.

The product needs to improve the backup and snapshot functionalities. This is the main disadvantage compared to other hypervisors on the market.

I've used it for at least eight years since version 2.1 was released.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We've never found an instability problem with the hypervisor as it is simply rock solid.

On the other hand, the OVM Manager has had some problems and inconsistencies. The best option is to have the OMV Manager virtualized and to recreate it if there are issues as all the relevant info is stored in the hypervisor itself.

We have had no issues scaling it to our needs.

Oracle always works well in terms of support, and if you need extra assistance you can escalate your case, but at the moment I have never had to go so deep.

The hypervisor installation and setup is one of the most simple things that I have ever done. Just boot, select the proper installation method, configure (Linux-like), and you're done.

On the other hand, the Manager can be a little tricky, but the newer versions have become much easier. Just set up your OS and pre-requisites, database, and OVM Manager.

I've implemented in my own company for internal use and as consultant engineer, I've performed several implementations for clients.

You always can get faster result going with consultancy services as they provide expertise and background from many previous implementations of the product.

The ROI is very fast.

OVM has low impact and is licensed on a per-server basis. The cost is very affordable as you only have to pay support.

We evaluated VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, and RHEV. The main feature was the "Oracle License Compliant" and after the wide library of images. The stability and efficiency of the hypervisor was always great therefore the previous mentioned factors comes to decide.

It's a great product and becomes better with every release. It is based on the rock solid Xen hypervisor.

It's an easy and great product. You can test it for free and you will have great flexibility in the x86 world. Go for it without doubt.

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 allows you to control your licensing costs for Oracle because Oracle allows hard partitioning to control the number of cores you’re licensing.

You save vast amounts of money.

It's also very robust and it allows you to better use your hardware.

I would like them to include greater flexibility. I would like them to include multitudinous users and permissions capabilities. I would like them to design the system so that it is optimized for 10GB Ethernet at a minimum as opposed to 1GB Ethernet.

Oracle VM does not have what is commonly called role-based user permissions.
Everyone logs into the management console as an ‘admin’ and has full control over everything, as opposed to VMware, where you can (for example) give a particular user control over a certain virtual machine but no others. You can even give different grades of control, so a user would be able to reboot ‘his’ virtual machine but could not add disk space to it; or a storage administrator might have the right to add and delete storage but not affect any virtual machines at all.

I had a problem with Ethernet timeouts on my 10gb Ethernet connections and when I contacted them, they informed me that they had optimized their settings and values in the operating system kernel for 1gb Ethernet as was standard at the time. They gave me a listing of changes to the operating system that might optimize it for 10gb, but that might cause problems if and when I were to upgrade the system. The Oracle VM Server is not meant to be modified by the user; it is the hypervisor, and I didn’t wish to engage in the danger of modifying my base system.

I also am skilled in VMware. VMware costs about 10 times as much but also is about 10 times more usable. If they could learn that usability that VMware has, that would be wonderful.

I have been using the product since it came out in version 3.0. We're now at version 3.4.1. In version 3.0, many portions of it were unstable, especially when upgrading. They have made great strides and now at version 3.4.1, all the bugs seem to have been worked out.

The whole point of Oracle VM is that it allows me to access modern-day computers with large number of cores and large amounts of memory. Most users are not going to run into something that it cannot handle.

I've had to use tech support quite a bit, over the many iterations of the program. In the beginning, they were not so great. Now, they've also made great strides and learned their own product.

We were previously using Oracle on HP-UX. They ceased support on HP-UX and we cut over to Linux. We needed to control our licensing costs and Oracle VM was the way to do it.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was relatively simple. There were just Linux installs.

Oracle is the only vendor that sells this. That is all there is to choose. Oracle are the only ones who can provide it.

Hire me for consulting. That's the big one.

The solution is primarily used for server virtualization. We have opportunities that we want to learn from. For our customers, we recommend this product. We have Oracle databases or Oracle, Linux, or Red Hat Linux to run it on a virtual machine, and Oracle VM fits perfectly into that.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the resource management from the OVM Manager. It makes document management very smooth. The performance is excellent.

I'm still evaluating the product and getting to know it.

The only thing I'm finding is that the backup software, which is supporting Oracle's virtualization platform, needs improvement. We're struggling to get a solution that will support my Oracle virtualization environment for backup purposes. I just found one on the internet. I was trying to reach out to that team now, to see how best we can use it. However, if Oracle had a solution to this, that would be ideal.

You need to have a model for documentation available for the users. Right now, if you have to search for some troubleshooting, you need to have Oracle login. Many personnel might not have that login. The reach, the availability of information to the end-user, is not there.

There are some articles that are publicly available, but there are some important documents that are not available to the public. You need to subscribe, or you need to have a licensed copy, some subscription with the product.

Any product, at the end of the day, needs support. When the support or the knowledge base or the information is not available or the documentation is not available for any of this, for the person who is implementing this, it's very difficult for them to get used to this product. They will simply move to another product.

I've been using the solution for two or three months now.

The solution certainly is stable. We don't seem to suffer from bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is very easy to scale.

I've never reached out to technical support, so I can't speak to their level of service. I tend to handle troubleshooting myself.

I have experience with Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix ZenServers.

The technology is all similar. It's about virtualizing the servers. However, I feel that VMware is much better and much more stable than Oracle VM.

At first, the initial setup was not so straightforward and was rather complex. This is largely due to the fact that we were not aware of the environment and how to use it properly. I believe it will get easier to implement over time.

You need to deploy the server and have the virtualization on top of that. Then you configure and install everything. How long it takes depends on the environment. If it's a small deployment, it may only take about two days. A larger deployment could take as long as six to eight weeks. 

I've done a file server deployment, and that only took three days.

You only need one person to deploy the solution.

We are consultants. We assist our customers with implementations.

We're partners with Oracle. We're consultants.

My advice to other potential users is this: nothing is better than planning. It's much in a better way to start a project. That way, you understand how much it is that you need to have or how many servers you require. It seldom matters when you deploy in the virtual environment. 

You need to be very hands-on in Linux environments. I come from a Windows background. I am not a Linux user, for the most part. That said, fo this project, I learned Linux.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I find the VM server features useful for moving VM’s while keeping the most important ones available.

With Oracle VM we can deliver new infrastructure much faster by deploying from templates and cloning it after customizing.

I would like to see a proper and stable client to access Oracle VM Manager. Installation documents should be improved regarding storage details and shared cluster disks.

I have used it for three years for many US, UK and European clients.

The issues I found were related to cluster disk shared on our SAN. It was about detailed storage configurations.

The issues I found were related to cluster disk shared on our SAN. It was about detailed storage configurations.

The issues I found were related to cluster disk shared on our SAN. It was about detailed storage configurations.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see the same level of expertise as I see regarding Oracle Databases. Oracle must improve their support skills and knowledge base to help clients with issues.

I also use VMware vSphere, but for Microsoft based solutions (Windows Servers, Sharepoint, MSSQL, etc). Oracle VM is a better choice and cheaper one when we are using Oracle Solutions.

The initial setup was very hard and required me to create a build doc to my company so anyone could do it again. The cluster documentation is not straightforward when we use 3rd party SAN hardware.

I implemented it for British and European clients using my own build document as there was not enough information for Hitachi SAN storages. I would advise you to create a proper POC and test all hardware pieces. Also, Oracle Linux is a must have on these kind of environments.

Well, this is the most important factor on Oracle VM as it is a free solution to implement, and very cheap to license. If you also use Oracle VM as operating system, then all makes sense regarding pricing, support and performance.

It still lacks a reliable Oracle VM Manager able to also report performance. Also, Oracle Support knowledge base is still growing. My advice is to have skilled people to implement it. Although it is cheap, it needs the correct skills for a proper cluster implementation and to resolve issues.

• Bare metal virtualization
• SR-IOV
• Live migration
• Hardware compliance

This product is directly related to hardware, so it is a complete technology with hardware, operating system, and virtualization software.

The following are attributes that have improved my organization -

• Robustness
• Security
• Scalability
• High performance

We have been using IBM POWER hardware, AIX and PowerVM. We were happy with the technology, but switched to Oracle because of cost issues. The new technology is as robust, secure, scalable as IBM. The performance is much better than IBM POWER7 but we did not have a chance to compare POWER8 with new SPARC technology. IBM POWER technologies came one and a half years after Oracle and thus IBM lost a big customer.

• The SR-IOV technology should be improved more as it only supports basic functions.
• It does not have a graphical maintenance screen. The OVM manager interface has so little functionality for managing control domains only. It is not a big problem if you have experienced administrators, but it would be nice to have a beautiful screen to use for everything which guides you into not making mistakes.
• Error handling takes the safest way, but safest way may cause business discontinuity. A few bad experiences occurred in this manner and should be fixed. For example, if you restart the server and resources assigned to virtual systems are more than available, it removes all virtual system definitions and resource assignments like WWNs. You have to redefine everything from backups. This takes time and the system is out of service in the meanwhile.
• Virtual WWNs were lost in one of the PDOMs while it was in maintenance mode. The system continued with other servers, but all disk access paths had to be re-defined from scratch for some LDOMs. It was so annoying because this was not accepted as a bug by Oracle.

We've used it for two years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We had errors, but they were fixed. The hardware and software work perfectly with the new SPARC technology.

We had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

We have experienced resources and we made a checklist of what we did with IBM and how to do it in SPARC. After that, we did not need much service and support. Software downloading and bug fix is pretty good with Oracle. We have had quick responses for case tickets from the available time zones.

We used IBM PowerVM on AIX servers. The main driver was changing the hardware. Both technologies are hardware specific. So we migrated from POWER hardware, AIX, and PowerVM to SPARC hardware, and OVM for SPARC Solaris.

I can compare triple-to-triple and none has any serious disadvantage to the other. Changing the technology was not a technical decision, but we as technical people declared that they are functionally equal.

The initial setup was straightforward and no more complex than PowerVM.

Our main effort was using in-house resources. The vendor team only supported training.

We consolidated lots of databases onto two big iron servers and got benefits from our database licenses. Oracle charges double for IBM server cores if you are using the Oracle database. The government procurement process may not care about price competition, so we defined our requirements, and bidding was made by another organization. IBM and Oracle bidding brought lower prices for the initial procurement cost. Maintenance costs are directly related to the initial price.

RISC hardware may seem more expensive than Intel CISC, but TCO was cheaper with more robust hardware with double performance. So the hardware technology was the main issue. We also decided that engineered systems are not suitable for complex business scenarios.

• Plan everything at the beginning. Do not change plans after you start.
• You must know what you are doing. Never leave any responsibility to the vendor or a third-party contractor.
• Write what you do, do what you write. Never leave any detail undocumented.
• Do something, validate documentation, then delete everything and make someone else do the same thing with the documentation.
• Security becomes a big issue after setup. Plan your security requirements during design. The vendor does not care about it. It cannot be added later.
• Plan your disaster recovery requirements and make your designs accordingly.

It seemed to be a great and risky adventure to migrate from IBM Power to Oracle SPARC, but we did the migration in 15 minutes in a complex environment with Oracle databases, SAP application servers, and in-house Java applications. If you see that it brings advantages, do not get scared -- just do it, nothing happens, and it works. You get a new experience.

The most valuable features for us are the large number of available network configurations and its high degree of scalability.

We've improved a lot as I use it for creating VMs for software development purposes for our team. We can have one VM to share with the team that has all development tools set up so that when a new developer joins the team, they can be ready to work just by copying the VM. So it's saved lots of time for each developer to set up their development environment. Also, it keeps the team aligned with the different tools they use.

I would like to see more improvements in the synchronization between the host machine and the VM especially in Mac machines. Also, more features around folder sharing would be an improvement.

We've used it for six years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

I previously used VMware but switched because I got better support from Oracle.

It depends on how deep I want to go, but normally the initial setup is straightforward.

I used a mixed team of vendor and in-house personnel for the implementation.

I think the pricing is fair.