Oracle VM Reviews

We have a data center with multiple racks. The product Oracle VM Server is deployed on two of our HP G10 servers. Comparatively this product is more flexible & reliable for oracle Applications & Databases. we have all our PROD env on this platform and It also enables us to clone an oracle app / db product for a test environment within a few minutes. We are Oracle customers and I'm the system and infrastructure Admin.

we have also test and development env. live cloning of oracle app /db within minutes is a great feature and very helpful for us. 

The live cloning within minutes is a great feature and live migration is very easy. It's the most reliable feature and it's not available in VMware or Hyper-V. Performance, scalability and flexibility are all good in this product. 

All features are ok. just need to add performance monitoring tools for all running VMs & reporting facility as well.

I've been using this solution for six years. 

There is good stability with this product and we've been able to upgrade when necessary without any problems. We have the technical skill and product knowledge so it's easy for us.  This solution is more stable than VMware and Hyper-V. 

This solution is easy to scale. We can add the storage and increase VM capacity without a problem. this product is scalable. storage, network, NFS, servers can be easily added or migrated.

although we have technical support license. but from last five years we didn,t need any support. as we have technical skill set and product knowledge. . 

Positive

we were using physical servers. then we move to VMWare but we faced issue regarding oracle apps / dbs performance. then we found OVM solution. this is best for oracle products. VMWare is also a good product but as for as performance of Oracle aap / db is concern . Oracle VM server is best option

I configured the applications and deployed this solution. Deployment doesn't take very long, it just depends on the situation. I can build an Oracle environment in one day and deploy virtual machines. to mange Oracle VM server we need Oracle VM Mmanager. that is also easy configure. a complete guide is available. just study thoroughly before deployment.

no vendors at all. i tested and deployed this product by myself. initially it was 3.4.2 then we upgraded to 3.4.5. 

We found this product to be reasonably priced, it's not expensive like VMware. 

as mentioned earlier we used physical env as well as vmware & hyper-v. we are still using the same for other applications. But for oracle products we choose oracle vm server.

I highly recommend this solution, especially for oracle apps & dbs. within five minutes you can make a clone even if it's one terabyte. 

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

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 Oracle VM for the ESX servers from NetApp. It's a product for development.

What I like the most is the failover and the quick restore of virtual machines.

The interface is quite user-friendly. They are easy to use.

Based on my experience, I don't do enough to actually dislike any of the features that I use.

When deploying machines, we had a couple of issues, where it took up two to three times before it ran with no issues.

Integration with cloud products would be beneficial. At the moment, a lot of companies actually have that available with on-premise. 

The security improvement around it, to integrate it with the cloud. It's something that every company is now focusing on. That would be the way to go.

I have been working with Oracle VM for more than ten years.

It's quite stable. It's very reliable. We run most of our servers as virtual machines. We pretty much run the entire company across it.

It's a scalable solution. Across the whole company, we have 2,500 users.

I personally have not contacted technical support, but the site support team has.

There were no complaints, it was more of a support call. We have a contract in place, when we have some issues, we just call for support.

In regards to pricing, a lot of that is dictated. The tools and technology that we use are dictated by a global engineering team based in the US. 

Because it's one shop fits all, for a big corporation, or a big company like us if they say we have to use VMware, then we've got global partners, and we approach our partners for pricing. 

With having a global contract, we get some discounts. we just move forward with it. 

We don't really have much of a say when it comes down to pricing, because it's all done at a global level.

Oracle has always been one of the best database software on the market, and that's from at a corporate level. 

We used to use SQL in the past, and we've moved away from SQL in a lot of ways. So, I would definitely recommend Oracle based on its stability, the support it provides and being reliable.

I wouldn't give it a 10 unless I knew exactly everything about it. There's a certain aspect of it that I don't use because it's done by our global engineering team. what I know of it, I think, eight is reasonable.

If I knew more about the product, having used all of the features that comes with it, and still didn't have an issue and find it still being stable and reliable and a great product to work with, I'll probably give it a 10. 

Because I don't use the extended features, I would rate Oracle VM an eight out of ten.

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.

Live migrations work as advertised and, if set right, it moves VMs around to balance out the resources.

Development of the product seems slow, but then again, I do not want a rushed product. Oracle states that this is their solution for their products, but Windows is fully supported. It may not have all the features of VMware, but those features come at a cost (monetarily and performance-wise). I want a rock solid foundation, and I don't want a bunch of hooks into the foundation of my Windows infrastructure.

The system we set up has two nodes (hosts) and one manager. We are using an HP DL 380 for the manager and 385s for the hosts, which, at the time, were not on the compatibility list, but it still works.

We have most of our Windows domain on OVM. One host has one domain controller, the other host has another domain controller. So just in case we lose a host, we do not loose an authentication server.

We had problems with the PV drivers setting CPUs above eight, but this limitation is noted in the ReadMe file.

Once the system was up and running, the VMs ran great! We have Windows 2003, 2008 and 2008R2 servers. At the time, in July 2013, 2012 was not supported.

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

I was using Oracle OEM and Dell Foglight on virtual machines that were already on the market. When Oracle came with its own VM product that was better suited to an Oracle environment and easy to use with Oracle builds, we switched.

I set up the manager first. Since this is an Oracle installation, I chose to install the manager software on Oracle Linux 6.1. Nothing fancy needed, but I installed the desktop to make things easier for me. I have two NICs set up, one to connect to my network, and the other to connect to the hosts (for management, VM live migrations, and the heartbeat). I then installed the manager software and you just need to click Next>Next>Next. Be sure to write the password down, as this is the password needed to gain access to the management console (via web).

The hosts were a snap. We do not have any hard drives in the host, but do have a flash card to boot from. So I chose the "minimal" install for the flash card install, and you need to set a root password and a discover password. Make note of them as you will need the discover password to make the connection in the manager. Keep the discover password the same for all hosts to make it easier. Once in the manager, before you discover all the hosts you need to manage, you will need to set what the VLANs are, bonds to the network, how many virtual NICs you will need, etc. After you discover the nodes, you will need to set up a pool repository that keeps all the info on the VMs. This repository should go on the SAN. Another repository should be set up for all your ISOs and other VM volumes if you chose not to use raw LUNs. Connect all the storage you will use (we have HP P4300s). We use all raw iSCSI LUNS for our VMs. We lose some functionality in OVM, but gain others via the SAN (snapshots, etc).

You get enterprise features for no cost or low cost if you chose to purchase support.

Do not attempt to run OVM on old hardware as it only runs on 64-bit systems. Check with the hardware compatibility guide for more details.

This is a great solution and, in my opinion, it's a rare jewel that more Windows shops should be looking at.

When deploying the Oracle database, you can license only the processors used for the database rather than all the processors on the box, as with VMWare. Plus, it’s free.

We are able to build large hosts (using Oracle Virtual Cloud Appliance, for example) and wait to license CPUs for our databases until we need them. That translates into more money up front for servers and salespeople.

I’d like to see an improvement in read latency and write bandwidth to meet or exceed VMware's performance, and also smooth out the variance in both. People are choosing VMware over OVM left and right despite the licensing issues. OVM needs to be faster than anyone else, especially with Oracle’s own products.

I've been using it for three years.

It’s a bit clunkier to deploy and manage than other systems, e.g. VMware.

We have had no stability issues.

Scalability has not been an issues.

Oracle is very good at supporting engineered systems, so if you’re using OVM on a PCA, you get good service. Otherwise, it’s pretty typical tier-one/tier-two tech support.

I have used VMware, Hyper-V, and AIX LPARs. I chose Oracle VM (when using x86) not only because it’s free, but because of the Oracle DB licensing benefits. Hyper-V is not really all there yet. VMware is awesome, but the Oracle licensing is a crippling problem.

I would say it’s less straightforward than you’d expect. I haven’t installed it recently, but my impression was that it was about 70% ready for prime-time. Once you have it installed and sorted out, it runs pretty smoothly. Getting it there is another issue entirely.

We mostly use a vendor to set up OVM, but occasionally we will do it in-house as well. My main advice is to practice it first, read all documentation, look at MOS documents, and review all blogs and community discussions you can find.

For our specific ROI, OVM allows us to buy larger systems to accommodate projected growth but not go broke on licensing. We can get new licenses on demand when we have a reason to buy them rather than all up front and hoping we expand into it. That means we can concentrate on selling new opportunities and buying the licenses after the sales are locked in. We don’t have money sitting out there idling.

The biggest benefit is being able to license Oracle products (especially the DB) based on the number of CPUs actually used rather than all the CPUs on the box as you have to do with VMware. This results in a lot more flexibility in the sizes of servers you can buy and how you plan for future growth. If you had to buy all Oracle licenses for every CPU, you might get a smaller server to start with and that doesn’t really help with expansion.

Properly sizing your equipment for growth often means buying equipment much larger than you need right away. The money you save with Oracle VM by not buying extra licenses means you can focus on preparing your hardware for the future rather than having to balance between licenses, hardware, and practicality.

Before speccing out your systems, it’s best to start figuring out how many CPUs you need now and in the future, then you’ll be able to decide what server/VM solution you need. If you’re looking at a small software footprint now, but in one to two years you expect to double or triple your transactions, you’ll definitely want to start with a big server and OVM to reduce software licensing costs.

My main advice is not to do your first install when sitting at the client building a production system. Practice it beforehand and make sure you work the bugs out. Once you install it the first time, it’ll be far easier to breeze through it on subsequent installs.

The big benefits to Oracle VM that I see in users that I work with are, first of all, performance. You don’t have what I call the "virtualization tax" like you do on other hypervisors. The CPU that you buy actually becomes more and more useful. You don’t have all that overhead. You get really good disk performance, almost comparable to bare metal when you configure it correctly. That’s an important feature for people that are using it. 

Overall, the biggest performance is around virtualization and automation, you can build private clouds with Oracle VM using Enterprise Manager.

Oracle VM is a great free product from Oracle. I love that, when I can say "free from Oracle." It’s a full feature hypervisor. It competes well with other hypervisors in the market. However, it’s free. You don’t pay anything to use it. You can, however, pay for support if you need support. 

It offers all the features you expect in a hypervisor, using technologies that they call Live Migration. It allows me to move VMs from one machine to another. I have a technology called Site Guard which is an automation tool for automating failover to disaster recovery sites. Feature for feature, it does almost everything VMware does but cost a lot less.

One is the hypervisor. Right now, it’s all using Xen. What would be really helpful is to have some choice, and the underlying hypervisor technology use KVM which is very popular with certain workloads. 

There are also some features around it, extracting virtual machines and managing it, that could show some improvement.

There’s still some area for improvement with some of the newer technologies.

It’s actually very stable. In the later releases, you can even patch the hypervisor without a reboot. That adds to the up-time of the environment. When you run Oracle Linux inside as guest VMs, you can also use the Ksplice technology and patch the VMs without any outage.

Scaling in Oracle VM is an interesting prospect because you have two ways you can scale it. You can, first of all, use really, really big hosts with large numbers of CPUs. Four-socket, eight-socket CPUs are fully supported with it. But you could also scale it with a large number of servers in the environment, so you can scale horizontally and vertically. I have not had any issues with the scalability of Oracle VM. It scales really well.

Setting up Oracle VM depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to do a basic install and use the normal management console, I’ve done that in a couple of hours. I’m experienced with it. 

But if you want to build private clouds with it, you want to interface the Enterprise Manager, have chargeback functionality for users, you want to do cloud automation; that’s a little more complicated. If you haven’t done it, it takes about a week. However, there’s a book from Oracle Press about Oracle VM 3 and building private clouds, and that helps a lot with what's involved in this task, to build and support a system.

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.