Oracle VM Reviews

Oracle license compatibility was the deciding factor for us. It's the only way to fulfill the Oracle license policy if you want to virtualize in a x86 environment.

Also, Oracle VM performance is one of the best that I've experienced. And the pre-seeded images that Oracle puts at your disposal makes your life really ease, i.e. you can have an Oracle RAC up and running within two hours with the OVM images.

I work in a consultancy, so I've deployed several OVM environments always with great results and high customer satisfaction. We've achieved the goal of being in line with the Oracle license, providing customers with better usage of their resources at better cost.

The product needs to improve the backup and snapshot functionalities. This is the main disadvantage compared to other hypervisors on the market.

I've used it for at least eight years since version 2.1 was released.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We've never found an instability problem with the hypervisor as it is simply rock solid.

On the other hand, the OVM Manager has had some problems and inconsistencies. The best option is to have the OMV Manager virtualized and to recreate it if there are issues as all the relevant info is stored in the hypervisor itself.

We have had no issues scaling it to our needs.

Oracle always works well in terms of support, and if you need extra assistance you can escalate your case, but at the moment I have never had to go so deep.

The hypervisor installation and setup is one of the most simple things that I have ever done. Just boot, select the proper installation method, configure (Linux-like), and you're done.

On the other hand, the Manager can be a little tricky, but the newer versions have become much easier. Just set up your OS and pre-requisites, database, and OVM Manager.

I've implemented in my own company for internal use and as consultant engineer, I've performed several implementations for clients.

You always can get faster result going with consultancy services as they provide expertise and background from many previous implementations of the product.

The ROI is very fast.

OVM has low impact and is licensed on a per-server basis. The cost is very affordable as you only have to pay support.

We evaluated VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, and RHEV. The main feature was the "Oracle License Compliant" and after the wide library of images. The stability and efficiency of the hypervisor was always great therefore the previous mentioned factors comes to decide.

It's a great product and becomes better with every release. It is based on the rock solid Xen hypervisor.

It's an easy and great product. You can test it for free and you will have great flexibility in the x86 world. Go for it without doubt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oracle VM allows you to control your licensing costs for Oracle because Oracle allows hard partitioning to control the number of cores you’re licensing.

You save vast amounts of money.

It's also very robust and it allows you to better use your hardware.

I would like them to include greater flexibility. I would like them to include multitudinous users and permissions capabilities. I would like them to design the system so that it is optimized for 10GB Ethernet at a minimum as opposed to 1GB Ethernet.

Oracle VM does not have what is commonly called role-based user permissions.
Everyone logs into the management console as an ‘admin’ and has full control over everything, as opposed to VMware, where you can (for example) give a particular user control over a certain virtual machine but no others. You can even give different grades of control, so a user would be able to reboot ‘his’ virtual machine but could not add disk space to it; or a storage administrator might have the right to add and delete storage but not affect any virtual machines at all.

I had a problem with Ethernet timeouts on my 10gb Ethernet connections and when I contacted them, they informed me that they had optimized their settings and values in the operating system kernel for 1gb Ethernet as was standard at the time. They gave me a listing of changes to the operating system that might optimize it for 10gb, but that might cause problems if and when I were to upgrade the system. The Oracle VM Server is not meant to be modified by the user; it is the hypervisor, and I didn’t wish to engage in the danger of modifying my base system.

I also am skilled in VMware. VMware costs about 10 times as much but also is about 10 times more usable. If they could learn that usability that VMware has, that would be wonderful.

I have been using the product since it came out in version 3.0. We're now at version 3.4.1. In version 3.0, many portions of it were unstable, especially when upgrading. They have made great strides and now at version 3.4.1, all the bugs seem to have been worked out.

The whole point of Oracle VM is that it allows me to access modern-day computers with large number of cores and large amounts of memory. Most users are not going to run into something that it cannot handle.

I've had to use tech support quite a bit, over the many iterations of the program. In the beginning, they were not so great. Now, they've also made great strides and learned their own product.

We were previously using Oracle on HP-UX. They ceased support on HP-UX and we cut over to Linux. We needed to control our licensing costs and Oracle VM was the way to do it.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was relatively simple. There were just Linux installs.

Oracle is the only vendor that sells this. That is all there is to choose. Oracle are the only ones who can provide it.

Hire me for consulting. That's the big one.

The solution is primarily used for server virtualization. We have opportunities that we want to learn from. For our customers, we recommend this product. We have Oracle databases or Oracle, Linux, or Red Hat Linux to run it on a virtual machine, and Oracle VM fits perfectly into that.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the resource management from the OVM Manager. It makes document management very smooth. The performance is excellent.

I'm still evaluating the product and getting to know it.

The only thing I'm finding is that the backup software, which is supporting Oracle's virtualization platform, needs improvement. We're struggling to get a solution that will support my Oracle virtualization environment for backup purposes. I just found one on the internet. I was trying to reach out to that team now, to see how best we can use it. However, if Oracle had a solution to this, that would be ideal.

You need to have a model for documentation available for the users. Right now, if you have to search for some troubleshooting, you need to have Oracle login. Many personnel might not have that login. The reach, the availability of information to the end-user, is not there.

There are some articles that are publicly available, but there are some important documents that are not available to the public. You need to subscribe, or you need to have a licensed copy, some subscription with the product.

Any product, at the end of the day, needs support. When the support or the knowledge base or the information is not available or the documentation is not available for any of this, for the person who is implementing this, it's very difficult for them to get used to this product. They will simply move to another product.

I've been using the solution for two or three months now.

The solution certainly is stable. We don't seem to suffer from bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is very easy to scale.

I've never reached out to technical support, so I can't speak to their level of service. I tend to handle troubleshooting myself.

I have experience with Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix ZenServers.

The technology is all similar. It's about virtualizing the servers. However, I feel that VMware is much better and much more stable than Oracle VM.

At first, the initial setup was not so straightforward and was rather complex. This is largely due to the fact that we were not aware of the environment and how to use it properly. I believe it will get easier to implement over time.

You need to deploy the server and have the virtualization on top of that. Then you configure and install everything. How long it takes depends on the environment. If it's a small deployment, it may only take about two days. A larger deployment could take as long as six to eight weeks. 

I've done a file server deployment, and that only took three days.

You only need one person to deploy the solution.

We are consultants. We assist our customers with implementations.

We're partners with Oracle. We're consultants.

My advice to other potential users is this: nothing is better than planning. It's much in a better way to start a project. That way, you understand how much it is that you need to have or how many servers you require. It seldom matters when you deploy in the virtual environment. 

You need to be very hands-on in Linux environments. I come from a Windows background. I am not a Linux user, for the most part. That said, fo this project, I learned Linux.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

Quick provisioning is the most valuable feature. It comes bundled with Oracle Database Appliance and we use it for our PeopleSoft instances. You could basically create an instance for your dev environment, QA, UAT and production, and do it quicker than doing it from bare metal.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s all about speed, quickness; do it pretty quick. We also have customizations. If we have a base image, we can take that base image, apply customizations, take a snapshot, and then we can copy it with a cookie-cutter approach for other environments as well.

I like the idea of, snap, and everything's available to you. You can tweak it, make another image again and you can copy it.

We're using NFS, which I've been informed might not be the best file system to be using. However, with the latest version, apparently, there are supposed to be some updates that will help with the drivers to use NFS; it would make it more stable and better, performance-wise, as well.

It is stable. For the most part, it's the guys I work with who use it. I'm a project manager, but they're pretty happy with the technology.

We have not had to scale it that much.

The guys I work with are not too keen with the Oracle support. They tend to find their own solutions.

The reason we decided to invest in this new solution was all about cost. We were going with an n-tier architecture. We had 12 physical servers. Now, with the ODA, we have two chassis that run on a virtualized platform and it makes it a lot easier to manage.

Initial setup was pretty good. It was basically out of the box because the Oracle Database Appliance is being promoted as out of the box. You turn on a switch and a login script starts up the whole process; that worked out well. We had a few glitches in terms of learning how it all works together. We certainly overcame some of those challenges and we're really happy with the product.

Insert linkThere were no other vendors on the shortlist, because we're an Oracle shop.
Nonetheless, when I do think about working with a vendor like Oracle, I look for depth of knowledge, reliability and whether they have a pretty good clientele out there. It's always good to compare notes or see what other people are doing out there and help one another.

Look at what other people are doing, take notes and talk to your Oracle rep. They really come on board and help you out through the process.