Oracle VM Reviews

Our customers use the solution for database and service applications.

The solution's most valuable feature is live migration.

The solution's management, hardware, and backup recovery features could be better.

Our customers have been using the solution for four years.

We have ten solution users in our organization. They include system administrators.

The solution's technical support is quite good.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process is easy.

The solution's price is relatively low.

I rate the solution a seven. I advise others to go for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, the next platform for Oracle based on KVM.

I found the mobile manager in Oracle VM a wonderful feature, in comparison with the command line interface.

There's room for improvement in terms of productivity in Oracle VM, because I find Nutanix has better productivity.

Oracle VM can have future improvements through the addition of newer features.

I'm also looking forward to a newer product version for Oracle VM, including making it compatible with Kubernetes and other modern technologies.

Oracle VM is so stable, that I find the databases are much better in Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.

Oracle VM is a scalable product.

The technical support from Oracle is wonderful. They provide best in class support, which I experience whenever I talk to their support team.

The initial setup for Oracle VM was easy. It wasn't a complex process.

Oracle VM pricing is expensive, because it runs on the Oracle database, and the Oracle database runs very smoothly on Oracle VM and Oracle Linux, and this can make pricing more expensive.

I was able to evaluate Oracle Solaris Virtualization that only runs on SPARC servers, and only runs on Oracle Solaris.

I'm working with Oracle VM, and I'm an administrator for it.

The customers use Oracle VM in their companies, and they're given ownership, so I'm currently working with other customers on their active assets.

My suggestion to people looking into implementing Oracle VM is that they should choose Oracle Exadata, instead of the Dell server, Lenovo server, or other products, because upgrading those takes a healthy amount of time, and they also have some vulnerability with other vendor products.

This is why I'm suggesting an integrated product like Oracle Exadata, which runs on Oracle Solaris, which runs on Oracle Linux, and it also has a database function, and it's completely integrated, and has built-in networking and record storage.

I would rate Oracle VM a nine out of ten.

The main use case of this solution is integration. The integration of the database and compatibility with the affiliate in terms of license management. This will reduce the cost of the license.

It is the same use case as vSan except that you can partition the applications and it forces you to license the processor, as opposed to the server.

I would like to simplify the processes to implement. When you want to implement Oracle, the steps that you perform could be simplified.

The usage could be easier, and more user-friendly.

I have been using Oracle VM for a few months, we started using it in November.

We are using version 3.4.

It's quite stable.

We have 10 users in our organization. It's a new product.

We are still in the testing phase. We are looking forward to observing its behavior. If it behaves well and there are no major incidents that give us or the support team issues, we will continue to plan ahead and implement it.

Technical support could be faster.

It is very difficult to implement.

It is not user-friendly, so you need a bit of skill to deploy it.

When compared to other solutions, it is quite complex. The complexity depends on the individual environment.

For the deployment, you need a consultant and an integrator. It is very difficult to deploy this solution. If you use the server storage, you need a consultant.

Oracle VM is inexpensive. It's open-source, but you pay for support.

Oracle is free of charge, although you have to have a subscription for the support.

Currently, they are trying to improve this solution database and technology. They are trying to upgrade it to make it a more customizable database.

I would certainly recommend this solution to other users who have Oracle applications. It has been customized to optimize this database.

I would rate Oracle VM a nine out of ten.

We are building a private cloud with Oracle VM. We want to implement Oracle RAC with Clusterware releases 12.2 and 18c, and with Oracle Database releases 11.2.0.4 to 18c.

We will implement a full dev/test environment with Oracle RAC and standalone databases. We will be able to fully use our ULA license agreement with Oracle and provide flexibility to our development teams.

Oracle virtual machine templates for rapid deployment are very useful. This allows us to deploy already-implemented and optimized virtual machines.

Snapshotting could be easier. And there could be more intuitive ways for cloning of virtual machines.

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.

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.

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.

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.