Oracle VM Reviews

I am an Oracle Specialist and manage Oracle databases. Oracle VM is being used in test-based environments, dedicated services. Being a product expert and an engineer, I help customers work with Oracle. I have seen this solution in customer organizations that are in excess of 10,000 users.

The biggest advantage of Oracle VM is that you can separate your clusters to get your licenses agreement in scope.

Oracle VM has a bigger fence next to VMware in size, so when you install or migrate day-to-day services with Oracle-related applications, it will always look better, or be a better fit in an Oracle VM environment.

You will have a faster migration using Oracle VM because it is an Oracle product.

The performance could be better because I need to purchase a lot of CPUs to perform in the workbench.

I have been using Oracle VM for many years.

The scalable of Oracle VM is good if you have a good link.

Technical support at Oracle has been better in the past. Currently, you get first-level support so it takes you a long time to get the correct level of support. 

The initial setup of Oracle VM is as straightforward as it can be taking me 20 minutes.

My customers are all working with enterprise edition licenses with Oracle.

For Oracle-based environments, it is always better to use Oracle software because of the integration. 

I advise people when they are on their first visualization layers to go to Oracle first and see if that is performing. Otherwise, if you go to other virtualization layers your whole cloud stack will be licensed as well on one domain.

When you install Oracle VM in a VMware environment, it can have mismatches with libraries that are not correctly compiled. It is important to have a dedicated service or an Oracle VM to test if it is working and it's not the hypervisor that is causing the concern.

I rate Oracle VM an 8 out of 10.

We primarily use this solution strictly for Oracle licensed products.

The solution has the exact features we need.

The solution lacks a lot of extra key features.

If you do a gap analysis between VMware and Oracle VM, you can't do VM Snapshot. That's one thing you can't do. It's a sort of a snapshot, but it's not really Snapshot technology. It requires that you're running on CFS-2.

There's an overall lack of integration with other software and there is also a lack of integration with backup solutions.

Oracle has stated that they intend to improve the solution. I'm not sure when this will happen, however. It may have been declared end of life, therefore, I can't imagine that they'll actually add to it at this point.

I've been using the solution for a little over three years.

The solution is very stable. I don't recall any bugs or glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability of the solution is pretty good. If an organization needs to expand it, they can do so.

We don't plan to increase our usage, however. We plan to move off it in the near future.

The solution was not necessarily complex. It was very straightforward.

The initial installation was a combination of a hired individual that had had some experience, and ourselves. Mostly it was done by our team getting training as much as we could, due to the fact that they kept on canceling the classes. Mostly we handled the implementation on our own.

We're simply customers. We don't have a business relationship with Oracle.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this product, as we are moving off of it. I would suggest that other organizations go with a KVM-based product. It's my understanding that Oracle will not be continuing with the product, and therefore no more work will be done to add features or improve the product.

Overall, I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

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.

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 product is simple and easy to use. 

The tool's price and stability could be better. 

I have been working with the solution for four years. 

I would rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. 

We have around 150 users for the solution. 

The tool's deployment was straightforward. The deployment took around 10 minutes to complete. 

We use the product's free version that is not licensed. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten.

We have a few servers, and I tag them to the storage. Through that, we create VMs by provisioning some RAM, CPU, and storage. The RAM and the CPU get adjusted when we buy more servers to add to the cluster. 

We are not using its latest version. We are yet to migrate to its latest version.

It has saved us millions of dollars by generating many VM's out of a simple server added to a server  pool which is highly available.

Its ease of management and simplicity are most valuable. It is free, and you can provision an unlimited number of VMs at no cost for clients. They also provide perfect support.

The user interface of the version that we have requires improvement. They have already improved the user interface by moving away from OVMM to OVM or KVM which uses the oVirt engine and has a completely new feel for the user interface, but we are yet to migrate to that. The new UI is much better and more intuitive.

I would like it to be simple. It is serving all of our needs, and I don't think it is necessary to keep adding. We are able to provision a VM in ten minutes, and provisioning it in five minutes will not have any added benefit.

Just keep it simple.

I have been using this solution for over ten years.

It is very stable. That's why I've used it for all my clients.

It is highly scalable. It can be scaled to any amount that you want. The RAM, CPU, and storage can be easily scaled.

It is suitable for big and small organizations. We have deployed it for financial institutions and banks with lots of users and VMs. They use it for all kinds of things.

We have their 24/7 support. The hardware that we're using is Oracle hardware, and it is mandatory that you have the HW support. We also have field delivery engineers for the hardware support and premium support for Oracle Linux and virtualization.

Their support is perfect and wonderful. They respond immediately, but it also depends on the severity.

We used a different solution which had license limitations but Oracle VM is free and unlimited VMs can be provisioned at any time if there is adequate compute power.

It is very simple and straightforward. You just need to connect a bunch of servers to the storage, and you're done. For installation, you just download the parts of the software and install them on the server. Once installed, you discover them through the management interface, and that's about it.

The software installation takes about 20 minutes, but it also depends on how many services you are attaching to the storage. Its maintenance involves just upgrades.

We are Oracle Field Engineers and have lots of Specialization around the product.

All other vendors are selling their licenses to use the VM, but Oracle isn't doing that, which is its biggest advantage. 

It is free. All you have to do is get the hardware. You can create an unlimited number of VMs for free. With VMware, you have to purchase licenses for the number of VMs that you want to create. You only pay for their premium support, and even that is optional. I am now learning this product, and we can even do without the support.

We considered the following below:

1. The physical memory supported by Oracle VM is higher

2. No of vCPU supported on guest(VM) is higher 

3. Product is free and this is the best part 

I would recommend this solution to others. I have recommended this to many different clients. It is for free, which is its biggest advantage. We are also Oracle partners, so we tend to go for Oracle.

I would rate Oracle VM a ten out of ten.

It is cloud-based, so I can access the management consoles from anywhere within or outside my organization if I have VPN access. Its a very light pool so its quite fast in nature, the hypervisor itself is very small its around one and half gig in size so its very light, and boots very fast. It consumes no overhead. For example, if there is a physical server of say 128 gigs and 4 core CPU, all of these 4 cores and 128 gigs are available to you.

In addition, on the network card you can do WLAN tagging, you can do non WLAN tagging, you can do IP based multi-passing and you can do storage level multi-passing.

I think the most valuable features are:

• Excellent support team
  
• Compatibility with: Linux, Windows, Ubuntu and Solaris

The management can be improved more, and become more agile. It would be nice for it to become more rich in terms of UI. In addition, the replication to disaster recovery needs improvement.

This product upgrades or updates comes in two flavors, one is a community update and one is subscription based updates. For the subscription based updates you have to pay Oracle, its a very small amount of money for the subscription. In contrast, the community support is free. You can choose whichever way you want.

Again, it is extremely scalable. Notes can be added on the fly, but it needs to do better form work before it is a true virtualization software. 

If you compare Oracle VM vs VMware or Oracle VM vs Hyper-V, there is a definite difference in GUI. The GUI of Hyper-V and VMware are phenomenal. The GUI of Oracle VM is not that great, it is sluggish in nature, but it does everything that it is supposed to do. So, you have command line access, you have the GUI based access too, so my recommendation is to make the GUI better. It has improved in the past couple of years, and it should continue to do so.

It is simple and straightforward, and it will only require you one system integrator to do the job. If you can read the English directions on the screen, then you can do it.

It is a cheap solution for a company's VM needs. It is simple to use, and has a great support system. It appears to be a win-win for any organization.

Pricing and licensing is one of the main decision making reasons for going to Oracle VM because it was cost-effective.