Oracle VM Reviews

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.

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.

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.

• Bare metal virtualization
• SR-IOV
• Live migration
• Hardware compliance

This product is directly related to hardware, so it is a complete technology with hardware, operating system, and virtualization software.

The following are attributes that have improved my organization -

• Robustness
• Security
• Scalability
• High performance

We have been using IBM POWER hardware, AIX and PowerVM. We were happy with the technology, but switched to Oracle because of cost issues. The new technology is as robust, secure, scalable as IBM. The performance is much better than IBM POWER7 but we did not have a chance to compare POWER8 with new SPARC technology. IBM POWER technologies came one and a half years after Oracle and thus IBM lost a big customer.

• The SR-IOV technology should be improved more as it only supports basic functions.
• It does not have a graphical maintenance screen. The OVM manager interface has so little functionality for managing control domains only. It is not a big problem if you have experienced administrators, but it would be nice to have a beautiful screen to use for everything which guides you into not making mistakes.
• Error handling takes the safest way, but safest way may cause business discontinuity. A few bad experiences occurred in this manner and should be fixed. For example, if you restart the server and resources assigned to virtual systems are more than available, it removes all virtual system definitions and resource assignments like WWNs. You have to redefine everything from backups. This takes time and the system is out of service in the meanwhile.
• Virtual WWNs were lost in one of the PDOMs while it was in maintenance mode. The system continued with other servers, but all disk access paths had to be re-defined from scratch for some LDOMs. It was so annoying because this was not accepted as a bug by Oracle.

We've used it for two years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We had errors, but they were fixed. The hardware and software work perfectly with the new SPARC technology.

We had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

We have experienced resources and we made a checklist of what we did with IBM and how to do it in SPARC. After that, we did not need much service and support. Software downloading and bug fix is pretty good with Oracle. We have had quick responses for case tickets from the available time zones.

We used IBM PowerVM on AIX servers. The main driver was changing the hardware. Both technologies are hardware specific. So we migrated from POWER hardware, AIX, and PowerVM to SPARC hardware, and OVM for SPARC Solaris.

I can compare triple-to-triple and none has any serious disadvantage to the other. Changing the technology was not a technical decision, but we as technical people declared that they are functionally equal.

The initial setup was straightforward and no more complex than PowerVM.

Our main effort was using in-house resources. The vendor team only supported training.

We consolidated lots of databases onto two big iron servers and got benefits from our database licenses. Oracle charges double for IBM server cores if you are using the Oracle database. The government procurement process may not care about price competition, so we defined our requirements, and bidding was made by another organization. IBM and Oracle bidding brought lower prices for the initial procurement cost. Maintenance costs are directly related to the initial price.

RISC hardware may seem more expensive than Intel CISC, but TCO was cheaper with more robust hardware with double performance. So the hardware technology was the main issue. We also decided that engineered systems are not suitable for complex business scenarios.

• Plan everything at the beginning. Do not change plans after you start.
• You must know what you are doing. Never leave any responsibility to the vendor or a third-party contractor.
• Write what you do, do what you write. Never leave any detail undocumented.
• Do something, validate documentation, then delete everything and make someone else do the same thing with the documentation.
• Security becomes a big issue after setup. Plan your security requirements during design. The vendor does not care about it. It cannot be added later.
• Plan your disaster recovery requirements and make your designs accordingly.

It seemed to be a great and risky adventure to migrate from IBM Power to Oracle SPARC, but we did the migration in 15 minutes in a complex environment with Oracle databases, SAP application servers, and in-house Java applications. If you see that it brings advantages, do not get scared -- just do it, nothing happens, and it works. You get a new experience.

• It provides enhancements for network and storage configuration, policy-based management for delivering application resource flexibility, and a GUI.
• Distributed Resource Scheduling for capacity management, providing real time monitoring enabling re-balancing of a server pool.
• Distributed Power Management for reduction of powered-on servers.
• Centralized network configuration and management, using Oracle VM Manager
• Storage connect framework enabling direct leveraging of resources and functionality of storage systems from Oracle VM Manager.
• Plug ins are available for Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp and are  in development for SUN ZFS Storage Appliances and the Pillar Axiom 600 SAN storage system
• Supports up to 160 CPUs and 2 TB memory for physical servers
• Supports up to 128 vCPUs for Virtual Machines
• Browser based Oracle VM Manager GUI
• Job management framework
• Extensive event logging
• Performance statistics for CPU, memory, disk, and network for physical server and VMs

• Oracle's VM VirtualBox is a powerful, free, and open-source virtualization tool. However, you'll have to read a lot of documents and perform experiments in test environments to make it work for you.
• Oracle VM is the only certified solution for use with all Oracle software.
• Oracle VM: Virtualization is a key technology used in data-centers to optimize resources. Oracle VM provides an easy-use-centralized management environment for configuring and operating your server, network, and storage infrastructure from a browser based interface (no Java client required). It is accessible from just about anywhere.
• Oracle Virtualization comes with Desktop Virtualization and Server VirtualizationServer Virtualization.
• Designed for efficiency and optimized for performance, Oracle's server virtualization products support x86 and SPARC architectures. They nclude hypervisors and virtualization built into the operating system and hardware.

Desktop Virtualization: Oracle's comprehensive desktop virtualization solutions, from secure thin client devices to highly optimized virtual desktop infrastructure software, offer ease of administration, higher security, and better access.

I really appreciate the stability of the solution. It's quite reliable.

There's a lot of space to customize the solution if you need to. 

The solution needs more features and flexibility in terms of communicating with other platforms. If it had that, it would be the perfect product.

If there was an option that made customization easier, it would make for a better solution.

The solution needs to be more integration capabilities overall.

I've been using the solution for about one year. I don't have too much experience with the solution, personally.

The stability is quite good. It's reliable. There aren't glitches, nor are there bugs. It doesn't crash or freeze. It works well for us.

The solution is not very scalable. We are using Oracle CC, and it's not very flexible. It can't merge or communicate with other systems, which limits things quite a bit.

In our company, more than 100 people are currently using the solution.

We've reached out to technical support in the past and have been very satisfied with their level of response. We don't have a problem with them at all. We've had a good experience overall.

We had to switch from a different solution to Oracle. We're an Oracle partner in our country. We have a sister company, which is also a partner of Oracle. Previously, we were on Citrix. It is an open-source platform.

I didn't handle the implementation. I don't know if the initial setup was complex or straightforward. Other people on my team handled that part of the process.

I'm on the technical side of things, so I don't deal with the licensing part of the business. I'm not sure what the costs are. It doesn't concern my day-to-day.

We're partners with Oracle.

We are actually an IT service provider and an internet service provider. We have a lot of experience with VMware.

I'm not the person who updates the solution, so I'm not sure what version it is that we are on, but it is most likely the latest.

While the solution is okay, the flexibility is lacking. I would much rather recommend VMware over Oracle VM at this time due to the greater flexibility in that other system.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. If it offered much more flexibility or was closer to offering features that were closer to what VMware offers, I would rate it a bit higher.

I primarily use this for server virtualization. I also use it for application deployment. 

Oracle has a lot of templates for most of the enterprise application that they sell the market. So, it is easier to deploy those application using one Oracle VM template than actually setting up a server from scratch. Oracle VM is very handy in that a user can easily deploy the templates, pre-configures and does a few customizations within a short time-span.

Oracle VM is a solution that grows with your business. It can easily be scaled up, and it is a great storage platform. 

The Oracle VM template is the most valuable feature. 

I do not think this solution is as stable as other solutions in the market. But, Oracle has really been trying to update the solution with the most recent release, and I find it is less buggy than it had been.

In addition, I think Oracle VM should integrate its own backups rather than relying on other Oracle tools for virtual backups. 

This solution supports up to 254 virtual machine servers. So, this is a huge capability for scalability. Any company can start with whatever it has, and grow as its budget grows. 

Initially, the tech support was horrible. But, over time, the support engineers have improved. I find the tech support extremely helpful recently. They are currently giving very solid support. 

I have prior experience with VMware, Bhyve and FreeNAS. Bhyve and FreeNAS are open-source VM solutions.

It is very simple to setup and deploy. But, it should be noted that a systems architect or systems engineer must be at the helm of the deployment. The setup must be conducted by someone well-versed in Linux. 

Initially, when we setup we had to make sure we had a staff architect that was knowledgeable with storage skills and Linux. Those were our requirements for proper deployment. 

The cost of this solution is cheap. It is one of the reasons we chose Oracle VM. It is truly "pocket- friendly."

In regards to the licensing, Oracle VM is definitely a good choice for a customer that is already using Oracle solutions. 

Nothing is simple about virtualization software products anymore. They are becoming more complex by the day. Now, with the advent of containers, the complexity has increased. Nothing is simple. Users must be dedicated to understand these VM solutions. 

I manage the Oracle Cloud infrastructure, including all our VMs, firewalls and load balances.

The solution is easy to use. You can spin one up when you need to and then shut it down. When it is shut down the cost is minimal. It makes it very easy to do testing and training, including 'what-if'' situations.

I would like to be able to take all our logs and ship them to a corporate site. However, this feature could exist and I just haven't had the chance to explore that.

Stability is good, I would rate it an 8 out of 10 in this area.

Scalability is good.

The price compares well with other solutions. Oracle has flexible payment and cost methods. We use an annual credit plan by committing to one year in the Oracle environment. By making this commitment they provide deep discounts for what we do. They also offer a pay as you go and monthly plans.

I would rate Oracle VM a 9 out of 10.