Oracle VM Reviews

It offers live migration. It is the best virtualization option for Oracle databases for Linux as Oracle recognizes hard partitions for their database licensing.

If you need to put an Oracle Database on Linux or Windows for any reason, and don't want to pay to license a whole VMware cluster, this is the next best option.

There are several VMware features missing. I haven't done an in-depth analysis to understand which exact ones they are.

I've been using it for three years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Stability was great. There were no issues with instability.

I only deployed it to a small, three-node Oracle X5-2 cluster.

Never had to open an SR. It's pretty stable. I did create ask some fairly technical questions about it on the My Oracle Support Community and got some great help there.

We previously used VMware which we had to use for licensing reasons, and to be able to own the full stack (hardware/virtualization/OS). My team had minimal permissions on the VMware side.

It was fairly easy for an experienced Linux admin.

I did the implementation myself.

I never did an ROI calculation.

It's much cheaper than paying millions for Oracle DB in VMware. Support for Oracle VM and Oracle Linux are included when installed on Oracle hardware, which makes it a very cheap option. There is a free, unsupported version available too. That might be attractive to some.

If there are issues with the storage, then all the machines go down, even if I have a backup solution in place. So I have to restart the server, and then it starts working again. It has happened a few times, and it wasn't very comfortable. 

Apart from that, it's an okay solution for deploying VMs or switching them to another server if you have availability installed, and so on.

I'm not familiar with the latest version. There might be some new functionalities that we would like to have in our current solution. For example, having better backup options for virtual machines, such as online backup, would be cool to have.

This is something that I would like to see in our virtualization solution.

I have been working with Oracle VM for around ten years. So far, it has been working well. 

If you don't have any issues, it works perfectly. If you do encounter issues, there aren't many. But where there are some issues, it can be a little more challenging compared to other solutions I've worked with. However, I understand it better now as we are transitioning to the latest utilization from Oracle, which they use in their cloud.

I would rate the stability of Oracle VM a nine out of ten. We haven't encountered any issues while working in production. 

However, if there are any issues, it's important that the environment supports optimal utilization. Additionally, it's worth noting that we are using an older version of the Oracle server. We are currently in the process of installing it in a new data center.

It is a scalable solution. The new version is more scalable than the old one.

Overall, I am happy with Oracle's support.

Positive

I work with the paid version. We are moving to the latest Oracle virtualization solutions, so we are going to stick to this solution.

Overall, I would rate Oracle VM an eight out of ten. 

Feature-wise, the solution's high availability to most servers is good. The virtual sellers don't have a host. I think that one is the most valuable for me.

I know they moved from OVM, and I think right now, they are moving into KVM or something else. I don't have much to say about the improvement if they are already shifted to the KVM.

The configuration can be more flexible. It is a necessity.

I have been using Oracle VM since 2014. Also, I am not using the solution's latest version. I am using Oracle VM 3.4. I am a customer of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Right now, no one in my company uses the solution.

I rate the solution's technical support a ten out of ten. I have used their support, and it is good.

Positive

On a scale of one to ten, where one being difficult and ten being easy, I rate the setup a five because the vendor was supposed to have done the biggest part, and they actually don't configure everything.

The deployment was done in a week or two.

Three people, along with the vendor, were needed for deployment.

The solution's UI is good enough.

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

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.

The cost of scalability. You pay for what you use. It's free to download, free to install, and the support side has been very helpful.

The way it plays with the Oracle Database; it's all about the Oracle Database. The way it plays with the Oracle Database; it's all about the Oracle Database. The virtualization product Oracle puts out just complements the performance of the database.

I would say third-party plugins to other storage vendors. There are a lot of converged infrastructure setups; one that we have, multiple different hardware vendors. So that would be something we could definitely be looking for.

Also, the monitoring aspect. Right now, there's a hook in to OEM, but I would like to see that part a little bit more mature so that it's a standalone.

It's been pretty stable, especially with the new releases. The 3.4 major release has made a lot of significant performance gains and stability from the 3.29 days.

No issues at all. Adding hypervisors or server pools, even migrating to other instances across different disaster recovery sites, it's been pretty turnkey.

We have a lot of customers out there that are running Oracle Database and, as we're virtualizing, there are other products out there that are not cost-efficient for the customer. Oracle VM is the logical choice there.

That's the beautiful part. There's documentation out there and it's pretty straightforward, as long as you stick to the manual. It's pretty easy to set up. If you're installing an Oracle Database, you literally go to hours from what used to take days.

When selecting a vendor what's important, obviously, is the reputation in the industry, the kind of support they provide, and the features of the product that we'll be using.

If you're going from a bare metal type of implementation, the expectation is going to be that the performance level will be there, and Oracle VM is definitely a product that gives you that.

• Diverse guest operating system support: 10/10
• Secure live VM migration: 8/10
• Storage live VM migration: 8/10
• High Availability: 10/10
• Advanced management for zero extra cost: 10/10
• Faster software deployment with Oracle VM templates: 10/10
• Virtual Appliance support: 10/10
• Rapid VM provisioning and cloning: 10/10
• Full Stack management: 10/10

It supports diverse guest operating systems: Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Modern, low overhead architecture based on the Xen hypervisor for leading price/performance. The Xen hypervisor has been improved and included with Oracle VM Server.

Speeds application deployment with Oracle VM Templates and virtual appliances

Full Oracle VM Manager command-line interface (CLI) and Web Services API (WS-API) allow greater automation and interoperability

Advanced virtualization features including:

• Secure live migration
• Storage live migration
• VM high-availability (HA)
• Distributed Resource Scheduler(DRS)
• Distributed Power Management(DPM)
• Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtualto-Virtual (V2V) conversion
• Full Stack Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager
• Ready for OpenStack

The only improvement that I want to see is more flexibility in configuring and managing Oracle VM server with a CLI if there is no Oracle VM Manager. Oracle restricts you to managing the Oracle VM server via Oracle VM Manager and not through a CLI on Oracle VM Server.

I've been using it for three years. I've been implementing Oracle VM for x86 across various projects.

If I face any issues in Oracle VM deployment, with the help of Oracle support I can solve the issue.

The first release of Oracle VM had issues, but now it's stable.

9/10 - It offers high performance and scalability.

You should implement Oracle Database or Oracle Application over a virtualized environment. I recommend that you implement Oracle VM for this reason, but this doesn't mean that Oracle products are not supported over VMware or Hyper-V; it is supported but not certified. It means that if there is any problem with the Database or an application over VMware, Oracle will try to simulate the error on an Oracle VM not on a VMware one. If there is no issue on Oracle VM, they will ask you to contact VMware support.

It's the best support ever as you can open one SR across Oracle hardware, Oracle VM Server, Oracle Solaris or Linux, Oracle Database, and any Oracle Application.

It comes with zero license cost. Unlike VMware, Oracle VM is free to download, use, and distribute. All you need to pay for is support, and support fees are affordable.

As an Oracle pre-sales engineer, when you buy Oracle x86 server, the server cost includes one year support for the following items:

1. Oracle Solaris & Oracle Enterprise Linux
2. Oracle VM Server
3. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c

We are a gold partner, and we use this product to compete with other virtualization products on the market like VMware and Hyper-V. Its features fit most of our customers.

You have to be familiar with hardware and Linux. From my experience in designing and architecting Oracle solutions, most customers implement an Oracle VM environment on Oracle X86 Servers with Oracle ZS3 NAS storage or Oracle FS1-2 flash storage.

I really like two features. The first one is the configuration of direct usage of logs on virtual machines. I don't need to create a repository to allocate storage to my virtual machine, rather I can just use store locally. The second one is the ease of migration or the ability to migrate VMs across hosts.

An expanded data transfer option is one of the features I would like to have added. It should allow virtual machines in one site, and replicate them to a different side.

I have been using Oracle VM for the last ten years.

The product is stable. It has some configuration issues. We experienced some instability. However, since we left the high score, it has been relatively stable. I would rate it seven out of ten. 

I've scaled the product recently. We had success with about eight nodes and extended it to ten. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Back in 2014 or 2013, during my tenure in the installation, I found it to be straightforward. It had simple steps including, installing the OVS server and OVM manager. The Oracle VM is installed on-premises. The initial deployment took over four days. But now if install any other environment, it won’t take more than four hours. It involved two people and we had done it ourselves. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The deployment was done in-house.

Oracle VM was recommended by the top management, and we deployed just that. This didn’t give us much chance to evaluate other options.

As per my experience using it, it's been wonderful. I recommend Oracle VM to anyone. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

I handle both sales and technical. We also sell cloud technology, so I do a lot of extensive work on cloud implementation.

We are Oracle Gold partners. We do a lot of deployments around Oracle VM. We are core in Oracle infrastructure and Oracle banking. When I say Oracle infrastructure, I'm looking at the x86 servers, also the SPARC servers. When you look at infrastructure, these not only carry the servers themselves, we look at the virtualization technology, which is definitely Oracle VM, both on SPARC and on x86.

Recently, we have been doing a kind of mix where the customer wants Dell and Oracle x86 VM.

I have done this deployment for an insurance company, and they have a lot of insurance solutions which run on the Oracle database. They could not go for the expensive Oracle server, so they decided to go for the Dell server but now are hard partitioning Oracle VM to cut down on the cost of licenses.

We have installed life insurance solutions on Oracle VM hard partitioned, and the general insurance solution is hard partitioned to focus on Oracle VM. They have a dock management system that uses Oracle database, hard partitioned also to focus on Oracle VM. They have a business intelligence solution which also uses Oracle database, also hard partitioned to Oracle VM.

We have actually created the production and VR with loads of VLANs swinging through both production and VR side, all on Oracle VM.

Storage is Dell Unisys storage, and then the computer is all Dell servers.

It's a very flexible solution because you have all the commands that you can do yourself.

The OVM Manager is very extensive and very nice to use for those who don't have a 360 view of the hard coding of things. They can still use Oracle VM to run the show, especially in the SPARC version. I've done some deployment with Oracle SPARC VM, but using Connect to connect it to Oracle OVM Manager. We use the OVM Manager to provision the SPARC server rather than going through the hard work of writing the codes of SPARC VM yourself.

All these things make Oracle VM a kind of panacea solution for me.

Something that could be improved are the snapshots that go in the ZFS Storage. If you want to enjoy Oracle VM, you will definitely want it to go together with ZFS Storage to maximize on the snapshot facility.

In other virtualization like VMware, you can do the snapshot right at the level of VMware itself. You'll get customers complaining that, "We can't take a snapshot just like we do on our normal VMware solution."

I always advise my customers to go with ZFS Storage. If you maybe had a snapshot on the Oracle VM itself, it would make sense.

I've been born and bred with Oracle since 2001. It is a career for me. In the past 10 years, I moved between flex to core banking, CRM, ERP and Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle hardware T8 implementation.

It's extremely stable.

The solution is scalable because we are using production and VR 35 kilometers apart. Scalability is no issue.

The licensing for Oracle VM solution is very nice because you license the box.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

My advice is to throw away your VMware because the licenses will kill you. Throw away your Microsoft Hyper-V because it doesn't work. Just go with Oracle VM because it works.

Oracle Virtualization works and is the best in the world, so I don't know what guys are doing with other solutions.