Oracle VM Reviews

With Oracle VM, the most valuable feature is the virtualization of the hardware, making it easier to maintain and support than actual OS's and networks resources. 

We can run software on a host separate from other hardware resources, which is important when we need to take a snapshot and restore it later on another VM.

But it also comes down to the fact that it's a product by Oracle, the industry leader. We know we can rely on it and that it'll be supported by an established company.

The fact that it cannot do a hot snapshot is a problem for us, but we work around it. We need to have good backups, while the system is up, which don't don't right now with Oracle VM. Our workarounds are fine for now, but we'd prefer to be able to just do hot snapshots when we need to.

We've had no issues deploying it.

I think it's fine, there are no issue there. We haven't had any big issues with it being unstable.

The scalability has been there for us as well. We've been able to scale as needed.

It's implemented just fine. The setup was pretty easy and straightforward. It was a combination of an easy product to install and technical expertise as well.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

We didn't really evaluate other products because we already run a lot of other Oracle solutions. Obviously, Oracle VM is supported by Oracle, which makes things easier than if we had used, for example, vSphere or Hyper-V.

Study ahead of time so you know what you're working with. Also, plan your implementation.

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.

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

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. 

• 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.

Stability has proven to be satisfactory. The deployment is simple, a lot of the configurations, particularly the network related ones, have been made much simpler and cleaner in the latest releases (3.3.2+), and the GUI has become more responsive. 

At the moment the discovery of hosts and configuration can be performed only via the GUI and not by a command line on the hosts. To resolve some other issues, we decided to install Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud 13c to add monitoring capabilities, which OVM Manager lacks completely.

Oracle claims "whatever you can do via manager, you can do via EC", but in my opinion that's not true because a lot of tasks are simply too slow via EC than via the manager.

My first attempt with Oracle VM was around two years ago. I was asked to set up a four-node cluster with 3.3.1 release on top of Fujitsu hardware (Fujitsu Primequest 1800E).

v3.3.1 was pretty much disappointing in terms of performance, especially when it came to migration. It took minutes for a VM with a lot of memory to migrate across different hosts. This led us to upgrade the environment to 3.3.2, and changing the underlying hardware. Fujitsu Primequest was dismissed in favor of Fujitsu RX 300 S8 due to a compatibility issue as Primequest were not certified on 3.3.2.

3.3.2 was a bit faster but it didn't take long for us to experience one of its major bugs - the migration of any VM with 64GB plus RAM failing with an OpenSSL error.
This was fixed in a short time with the help of Oracle support who suggested to upgrade the OpenSSL packet.

We only had a single crash on one host in more than two years as the kernel panicked. An SR was opened to Oracle, but it led to nowhere.

We've had no issues scaling it to our needs.

It's fairly straightforward.  All you have to do is to install via script the so-called "OVM Manager", which is basically a Java administration GUI run on a WebLogic server with MySQL underlying it as a metadata repository. At the time, Oracle Database was a choice too, but it's no longer the case because, as an Oracle guy revealed, the Database engine has a major bug which corrupts lob data which prevents the the manager from working properly.

While the software is still missing a lot of capabilities which its major competitor (VMware) has and a performance boost is highly recommended, it could still be a choice if you have to virtualize Oracle software.