Oracle VM Reviews

We use it for the integration part, as a jump host, or to create an ABS VM for lift and shift. That's what we use it for.

I'm just involved in providing VMs; application testing and development are handled by a different department.

The security is robust; it's encrypted. If you have a VM running on a private subnet, then it's highly secure, which is what everyone prefers with Oracle. 

If you want to access the VM from anywhere over the Internet, you put it in a public subnet. So, VMs are linked to that. The subnets are linked to it. So, it's perfectly secured if it's a private network. The security is set.

Integration capabilities are a little complicated. It could be made easier. Whether integrating with Azure or other platforms or integration with OIC itself, the integration part is a little complicated. The integration console could also be made a bit more user-friendly.

Sometimes, the API calls and procedures are a bit complicated. Not everyone is familiar with the systems and how to work with them, but a little easier steps would do better.

The console is clear, but the integration side of it, sometimes, the Oracle Cloud doesn't have an IDCS user. Normally, in the integration of Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS), it is useless. But now there's no Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) IDCS because it's been compressed to domain-based. So, it's domain-based right now. There's no ID here. Everyone has access, depending on the policy and access. 

However, in specific environments, like GovCloud, there need to be more upgrades. Maybe it's because it's GovCloud; it's like that. However, the integration part becomes a little complicated in terms of the GovCloud log, where we have to make adjustments. There are no IDCS users, so we need to put in an IAM user and implement the policies. The integration of the VM agent and connectivity agent becomes a little complicated.

I have been using it for two years. 

It is stable. But in some cases, the connectivity to the service gateways is a little complicated to the SaaS cloud. We have that difficulty. Oracle is working on that.

It's highly scalable. You can scale up and scale down, both vertically and horizontally. So, those are good features. 

The customer service and support are good. 

Positive

I've been working with Azure recently, so I started learning it. It's just like creating a VM, creating users, and setting passwords for them.

Oracle is entirely on a Linux platform. Very rarely Windows is used unless it's a Jump host or for IDP sessions. But Azure is completely Windows-based. So, we need to switch over and switch on to using Linux commands. That's the major difference. 

The initial setup is complex. We need to configure the integration on the console. We need to install that connectivity agent to a VM. And the whole process is a little complicated. Where it could be made a little easier, the API could be a bit easier where  OAuth tokens and everything generated is a bit more straightforward.

The whole process from the beginning will take around two days. For deployment and maintenance, two people are enough.

The user will be charged accordingly as well—pay as you go. So, that's also a feature that comes with Oracle.

Basically, you get charged only for storage. If I stop a VM, then I'm not charged for the CPU usage. So, that's fine.

The pricing is cheap. The charge is around $20 to $ 30 per day for that.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The only recommendation is, in case you lose the keys for the VMs, that becomes a little complicated process to get through. There is a process, but unless the person is very technically sound, the keys cannot be exchanged or checked. They cannot be retrieved, but they can be changed.

That's the only point you need to remember.

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.

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.

Clients are typically running Linux on Oracle VM, and then they're running Oracle databases on top of that.

The solution helps manage a company's costs. I typically run into great resistance as most organizations already have an existing virtualization infrastructure or technology. If you're running someone else's virtualization, having a third party or a second virtualization technology tends not to be warmly received. Any place I've got VMware, I never get a large Oracle VM infrastructure. I get what's needed, however. It serves a purpose as it keeps the number of cores down. It works. It's reliable. It's stable. It does what it needs to do. I've got no technical complaints about it. 

Due to the fact that it doesn't have as many, let's just say, bells and whistles, it's less distracting. It's not that difficult to master. 

The documentation that the product has on offer is very good. 

Once you get it set up, you tend to set it and forget it, and there's not a lot that you have to do.

The biggest reason for using Oracle VM is the CPU fencing or licensing of CPU cores. Oracle makes the claim that if you run on VMware, you're getting value from the processors in the cluster over and above the processes that are associated with your particular VM. Due to that stance, companies wind up licensing basically the entire cluster for VMware. If all you're doing is running Oracle's database, and it's got a particular purpose and it's very focused, you can put Oracle's VMware or Oracle's VM on the server, create your virtual machine, and set the number of CPU cores that is going to use. Oracle finds that acceptable for licensing. That will control your costs, due to the fact that suddenly you don't have to license 24 cores when in fact you're only consuming four or eight. It is used at that level as a licensing mechanism, quite frankly.

Oracle is probably the best database technology out there. Arguably, it is. I've never found anything as complete in terms of feature and functionality and sophistication. You could make arguments with niche or smaller venues. DB2 is certainly a viable alternative. So is the SQL server. Nothing scales and nothing handles complexity like Oracle. 

That said, not everybody buys Oracle for the complexity. They buy it for a particular purpose, whether they're a state and local government, or whether they're in some particular industry vertical. I work with four or five different industries. I've seen it in very small companies, in which case it's almost part of the woodwork or the fabric, so to speak. You don't really pay attention to it. On the other hand, large organizations that use it have it as it's the only game in town for certain features.

I've found that using Oracle VM is like stepping back in time. It's not kept up with technology. The only reason anyone uses it is that they're afraid of Oracle's licensing. Oracle has a tremendously bad licensing approach.

VMware, in comparison, has got so many different features that you can use in ESXi for example. Oracle is a lot simpler with fewer features.

I find their VM backup features to be somewhat difficult. I wish it was a little easier to back up and clone.

It would be ideal if Oracle could grow to take on VMware directly, in order to foster more competition.

I've used Oracle for many years. It's been a long time. It's probably been about ten years on and off, depending on what the client needs.

The stability is quite good. You set and forget. It's not a fussy solution. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's great.

I didn't find scalability to be an issue, however, the difficulty is with any hardware refreshes done today. You're going to get more cores due to the fact that that's all Intel can do. Intel can't crank the clock speed much past five gigahertz, not without heroic amounts of cooling. It's just the laws of physics. All Intel can do, all AMD can do, is give you more cores. 

The problem is that Oracle's licensing model charges by the core. There's a formula to it and it depends on which features, etc., however, basically it's by the core that dictates the cost. At the end of the day, you're going to pay for the number of cores you're using.

Therefore, you've got to put it on a new machine without Oracle's virtualization technology to help you manage the licensing. You go from a basic 5,100 series Intel chip with four cores. to a new gold chip, or whatever it is, and it's got 18 cores. All of a sudden you owe Oracle a lot more money, as there are a lot more cores. 

That's not the kind of surprise that most companies appreciate. Your costs went up simply due to a newer chip. That's a hard sell. By using Oracle's virtualization technology, you can manage those licenses, allocate virtual CPUs to the level that you have an existing license, and control your costs while essentially getting a little bit more oomph. At least you're on a new, more reliable hardware platform. That's where virtualization really comes in.

It helps manage the licensing. Oracle should just fully embrace VMware as a viable licensable technology. It would make life a whole lot easier for a lot of companies, however, they're not going to. They had the same stance when Sun Microsystems had its own virtualization technology. In that case, Oracle acquired it, and all of a sudden Sun's virtualization technology was acceptable. It's a marketing game, to be perfectly frank, and we all know that. That said, Oracle gets to set the rules. 

I've used their technical support in the past and they are very, very good. I'd rate them at an eight or nine out of ten in terms of the service they provide.

Like a lot of environments, if you had a system down, that's a priority one issue, and they handle it well. I would put everything I own on their tech support. They have multiple support centers around the world, and you can follow the sun - which I have done to fix issues. That's outstanding.

If you have small questions, odd issues, it can take a while to get through tech support. That's typical, as your problem is not the default. Your problem is some complicated issue with an interaction between multiple pieces of software or multiple configurations, whatever it might be. Those kinds of issues are difficult to dissect and resolve. You'll go into this loop of, "Well, try this. Well, try this. Well, give us more information about this." I understand, however. That's just simply debugging. There's nothing to be done. It can just take a while. However, if it's a priority, if it's a P1, they're fantastic. They really do a good job.

I've used VMware quite often, and it's an outstanding solution. It's got lots of different options, and of course, you can do things like VMotion, which allows you to move a VM in the cluster. The reason for deploying Oracle's VM is to manage the licensing, however, as we would have had to buy 10 times the number of cores if it was in a VMware cluster. That would drive up the costs.

The initial setup takes a little bit of thinking, and a little bit of reading, however, it's not particularly difficult. If you have the rest of your hardware and everything in place, it installs within a day or two. By that I mean you need a day to install it and then another day or so to adjust and tweak, and I haven't found it to be that difficult to install.

On one hand, I like Oracle's licensing strategy in that they don't have license keys. You don't have to call and beg for another 30-day key and all the hassle that a lot of smaller companies do. Oracle does allow new users to understand what the value of their VM is for you. 

I see using this solution primarily as a way of maintaining or managing my costs. Anybody who's got any experience in another virtualization technology will pick it up fairly rapidly. It's not difficult to understand. It's not difficult to use. However, if you've got a set of standards and practices in your existing IT, it's another one to learn. It's another one to maintain. And most companies try to streamline.

Their licensing is based on the number of cores. Companies need to be careful about costs as they can rise rapidly.

We don't have a business relationship with Oracle. One of the things that's unusual about my company is we absolutely do not court or back any particular technology player as we're the trusted advisor helping companies understand and solve problems. How unbiased can I be if I'm getting marketing dollars from Oracle or from Microsoft or from somebody else? We stand on our own. That's not always easy, however, it's the right thing to do. When I make a recommendation, it is with 100% the customer's interests in mind.

I come in and work with companies that are in the process of migrating or updating off of older systems and into newer technologies, whether it be an on-prem hyper-converged type of infrastructure or into the cloud. I've got about 30 years' worth of experience with Oracle as an administrator and as a manager.

A lot of times the customers are not quite sure what they want to go with. VMware is the big player in the virtualization space. I'm involved with a customer right now doing a large virtualization project where they're moving from individual old servers to a virtualized Dell VxRail environment. Therefore, I don't work exclusively with Oracle.

Oracle has moved to KVM. Essentially they're trying to consolidate and trying to use KVM as it's slightly more popular and more robust virtualization technology. There are other ways of solving the problem, however, KVM has been around a while and Oracle's very tied to the Linux platform - although they do run on Windows and I've got clients running Oracle in Azure cloud. It really doesn't matter for virtualization.

In terms of the Oracle versions we would use, it was mostly the latest version that we could get our hands on. It's always best to go with the latest versions. Oracle has a support policy that they maintain the current version, one version back, and everything older than that tends to be somewhat difficult to get support on. Therefore, you don't want to linger. However, a lot of people use Oracle virtualization as what I'd call minimal infrastructure. We're running it due to the fact that we need to have virtualization based on Oracle licensing concerns. It works, however, it's not anywhere to the same level of sophistication or of tools that, say, a VMware would be. It's like stepping back about two or three generations of VMware.

I would advise others to understand what the value of this particular layer of the stack is going to provide for you. Oracle has a very good policy in terms of letting you download the software. There's really no license keys. You can play with it and try to understand it and make sure that it's going to work for you. You don't want to run this longer than necessary. Oracle's not going to let you use it for six months. However, you certainly can pull it down, install it, understand what it can and can't do for you, and then use it appropriately.

On a scale from one to ten, I would say it's a solid seven. It lacks some of the newer features that VMware and Microsoft virtualization technology have, however, that's not necessarily a showstopper for what it's used for. If you want all the flashiness, then you tend to rate it lower, yet it's quite functional and does the job.

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.

I use Oracle VM in my company mainly for simple things, not heavy stuff. In general, Oracle VM mainly helps with the monitoring of different servers.

The automatic start of the product to work as a background process has shortcomings and needs improvement. If you restart the machine to implement a feature through auto-start, you should get a tray icon or a service without the need for any additional tuning or scripts.

I have been using Oracle VM for more than three years. I use the solution's latest version. I use the solution on my desktop through Windows. I don't know if Oracle VM has a server version or not.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine or ten out of ten. I am not sure if the problem is in the product itself or the virtual machine.

Around three people use the solution, and our company doesn't plan to increase the solution's usage.

If I have issues with the solution, I read online documents or public forums.

I have experience with VMware ESXi and a bunch of free products, like Linux-based VMs and KVM. I did not switch from any other solutions to Oracle VM. I use Oracle VM for some special use cases.

The product's initial setup phase was simple.

One can deploy the solution by just downloading and installing it.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in less than a minute.

One admin is enough to take care of the deployment and maintenance of the product.

I currently work as a consultant for different IT products, so I take care of the deployment phase by myself.

I have not seen any direct impacts in my company from the use of the solution to be able to see the value that the product offers, maybe because I used it for monitoring purposes only, but it does help me resolve issues quickly.

There is no need to make any payments to use the solution. You can just download the product and use it for free.

I recommend the solution to others as it is a stable solution that works properly.

Considering my use cases, I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

We are using the virtual machine to host our databases and other applications.

What I like best about this product is that it's free. It helps customers and end-users save money.

I would like to see better orchestration, as it would help in terms of setup. 

Better automation would help in terms of provisioning and configuring new VMs.

Oracle VM should be more feature-rich.

Using this product should come at no charge, regardless of the platform.

We have been using Oracle VM for two or three years. We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

I have not seen any issues with stability.

Scalability has not been a problem. One of our older clients has about 1,000 end-users and one that we are working on now is expected to have about 50,000.

We have support directly from Oracle and we haven't had any issues with it.

I also have experience with VMware. The setup for VMware is a little bit easier.

The initial setup is not as easy as VMware, but over time and with experience, it will become easier.

Oracle VM is free if you are running it on Oracle infrastructure hardware, otherwise, it is subscription-based.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to consider the total cost of ownership. It does not make sense to try and save money on hardware if you are going to have really expensive software. Be sure to look at the entire ecosystem, rather than the itemized cost.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I was using it for my project work. Our product, where I was working, needed support in Oracle VM, so I was trying to explore how our product could be used on top of Oracle VM. It was primarily to support our product on Oracle VM. That is mostly the use case I was trying for.

Our product had several issues with post-migration. The keys in our disk storage were not operating properly for writing the I/O, which was a problem. It was not functioning correctly, which is why we could not use it. I was not attempting to use any specific features.

I have been using it for two to three years. Currently, I am not using it.

Based on all the testing I have done, I found there were no issues with its performance.

I did not go through any support channel for issues, so I am not familiar with customer service.

Neutral

I found it easy to set up. If you follow the document, you are able to install Oracle directly. One person can install it without additional help. Although I was not working extensively on it, the first installation and a few minor instances were sufficient to use it.

I could not find any other alternatives. I was mainly dealing with one particular feature, and I did not explore other features I wanted to use.

The project I was working on has closed. I am no longer exploring anything new. Mostly, our customers are enterprise customers with no test issues. I rate the overall solution eight out of ten. I didn't deal with anything related to it since I was using trial versions and did not encounter any pricing-related issues.