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. 

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. 

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.

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.