Oracle VM Reviews

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.

Virtual machines are much cheaper than having physical machines. They are rolling out new machines very quick and fast. It saves time and saves cost, that’s how we feel; and also the systems are more reliable.

Saves time for procuring the new hardware. No more physical space sitting on the data centers.

It's stable. There are still ways you can break the system, but it's very minimal, compared to a physical system.

For real hardware, scalability is challenging. But with virtual, you can scale without affecting the software applications, you can still reconfigure the hardware. Whenever we ask them to increase the RAM or other things, they can do it, and never come back and say well, it's VM's role. But every two years, we need to update the VM build; that we know. After four years, our VMs get old, so we need to replace them.

So far the response is good. Our team never comes back and says Oracle is giving us a hard time.

It's a challenge for us to keep investing in it. We are a manufacturing company, not an IT company. Whenever Oracle comes, say every three to five years, and says everybody change the system, you need to find the budget for that. And in a year, it’s going to be outdated again, right? After four years, my system has become completely outdated.

I'm sure there is one product, Oracle Data Integrator for loading bulk data from one system to another. We just starting using it. It’s a very good product, but we haven’t used all the features. Once we explored all the features, we got feedback from the company. I know so far that it’s good.

I know that everything is on the cloud; but eventually, if you are a new startup company, go to the VM. You have control over what you have, while at the same time, not dependent on the hardware.

Quick provisioning is the most valuable feature. It comes bundled with Oracle Database Appliance and we use it for our PeopleSoft instances. You could basically create an instance for your dev environment, QA, UAT and production, and do it quicker than doing it from bare metal.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s all about speed, quickness; do it pretty quick. We also have customizations. If we have a base image, we can take that base image, apply customizations, take a snapshot, and then we can copy it with a cookie-cutter approach for other environments as well.

I like the idea of, snap, and everything's available to you. You can tweak it, make another image again and you can copy it.

We're using NFS, which I've been informed might not be the best file system to be using. However, with the latest version, apparently, there are supposed to be some updates that will help with the drivers to use NFS; it would make it more stable and better, performance-wise, as well.

It is stable. For the most part, it's the guys I work with who use it. I'm a project manager, but they're pretty happy with the technology.

We have not had to scale it that much.

The guys I work with are not too keen with the Oracle support. They tend to find their own solutions.

The reason we decided to invest in this new solution was all about cost. We were going with an n-tier architecture. We had 12 physical servers. Now, with the ODA, we have two chassis that run on a virtualized platform and it makes it a lot easier to manage.

Initial setup was pretty good. It was basically out of the box because the Oracle Database Appliance is being promoted as out of the box. You turn on a switch and a login script starts up the whole process; that worked out well. We had a few glitches in terms of learning how it all works together. We certainly overcame some of those challenges and we're really happy with the product.

Insert linkThere were no other vendors on the shortlist, because we're an Oracle shop.
Nonetheless, when I do think about working with a vendor like Oracle, I look for depth of knowledge, reliability and whether they have a pretty good clientele out there. It's always good to compare notes or see what other people are doing out there and help one another.

Look at what other people are doing, take notes and talk to your Oracle rep. They really come on board and help you out through the process.

There are many valuable features. I'm only naming a few here.

First, it provides the enterprise-level hypervisor that supports virtual machines to run enterprise applications. It allows virtual machines to use a specific number of physical processors and cores to handle complex application. It also provides a high-available virtual infrastructure for applications as the virtual machines can be migrated or failed over to a different physical server to avoid a system down time.

Oracle VM simplifies the application deployment with a large number of predefined VM templates. Oracle has published VM templates for most Oracle products, and you can also build templates by yourself.

Oracle VM allows application users to pay for the software license by virtual CPUs instead of the physical CPU.

Oracle Enterprise Manager can manage and monitor the entire Oracle VM virtualization stack.

I am on a team that is responsible for validating and architecting Oracle VM on Dell servers and storage. For example, we helped a customer design a private cloud system based on Oracle VM, Dell's latest 13g servers and Dell flash-based storage. The private cloud system was designed to offer Database as a Service (DBaaS).

The product works well for all its intended purposes. I would prefer that Oracle provide more backup capability for the Oracle VM stack, including the applications running on virtual machines.

It would be even better if Oracle Enterprise Manager could directly manage the Oracle VM stack, without needing the Oracle VM manager sitting in middle.

I have been working on Oracle VM since 2009 when Oracle released Oracle VM release 2.1.

The product is easily to deploy and very well scalable.

It has been a good experience working with Oracle support on Oracle VM. I didn’t have too many issues with that. Once in a while, we have to log bugs or issues in Oracle Bugzilla, which is Oracle's bug tracking system for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.

Initial setup of Oracle VM and the rest of stack was very straightforward. The steps in Oracle documentation were very easy to follow.

We implemented Oracle VM stack by ourselves. One of my words of advice is, if you need to implement complex applications such as an Oracle RAC database on an Oracle VM stack, it takes some learning curve. You need to understand both Oracle VM and Oracle RAC stack, and would need to design the special networking and shared storage that are required by Oracle RAC database. An Oracle white paper such as https://www.oracle.com/technetw... will definitely be helpful. Here are a couple of screen shots from one of our previous Oracle RAC POC projects:

Oracle Infrastructure Cloud based on Oracle VM and Oracle EM 12c

Oracle VM architecture designed for Oracle RAC database

With Oracle VM, you only pay for the software license based on the # of the virtual CPUs on which the application runs.

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.

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.

It reduces the licensing cost for other Oracle products, and because it's based on Xen, it has no performance problems.

We've been able to use it successfully for deployment of our online application.

It needs automatic migration that's similar to VMware vMotion. The DRS feature in VMware migrates virtual machines based on the load on the hosts. Oracle VM does not have this feature, and I don't want users complaining about the performance bottleneck due to the load on the host.

We've been using it for three years.

I deployed it within a week and didn't have any issues with it.

Thankfully, everything was stable in spite of my limited knowledge.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The customer service was good.

We also use VMware products, which I personally prefer. VMware products are an administrator's dream. They have thought of everything, including DRS, HA, templates, and virtual machine deployment. It is very easy to do all these tasks.

The initial setup was a bit of both straightforward and complex, but it's easy if you know VMware.

I carried out the implementation.

It reduces the licensing cost for Oracle products, though I still prefer VMware.

Oracle VM was chosen mostly due to licensing issues and it is based on the stable KVM product of Red Hat.

VMware is the best, but for saving license costs for Oracle products, Oracle VM is good and stable.

The CPU pinning feature that allows to link a virtual CPU (VCPU) to a physical CPU core. This feature is very useful in a virtualized environment who has on premise applications licenced by restricted number of CPU cores.

As a virtualization solution, this product help us to build and deploy development environments more quickly.

Resizing of Virtual disk needs to be improved, as does hot swap for VCPU and RAM.

I've been using it for years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

While it is a good solution for virtualization, Oracle VM is less flexible than other market solutions like VMware.