Oracle VM Reviews

We generally recommend this solution to our customers and we deploy it for them. The solution runs on the exologic environment with multiple VMs and multiple abbreviations. In this case the solution is being used in a telecommunications company. Most of our clients are big enterprise. We partner with Oracle and I'm a senior systems support engineer. 

The previous version was full of bugs but they seem to have resolved all the issues on it so it's a good solution. Oracle VM is a good visualization hypervisor, like VMware and Hyper-V. We can create clusters, and primary file takeaways.

They could improve deployment by making the documentation easier. Also, I always find it difficult to mount the image on the Oracle VM. There are a few things that could be improved, features such as mounting and unmounting the images on Oracle VM.

I've been using this solution for around five years. 

This is a stable product. 

Scalability is good, we're able to deploy the solution to big environments.

The initial setup is straightforward, deployment time really depends on the client's needs. Sometime it takes two to three days and sometimes it can take months. We also do the maintenance for them. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

• 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.

Stability has proven to be satisfactory. The deployment is simple, a lot of the configurations, particularly the network related ones, have been made much simpler and cleaner in the latest releases (3.3.2+), and the GUI has become more responsive. 

At the moment the discovery of hosts and configuration can be performed only via the GUI and not by a command line on the hosts. To resolve some other issues, we decided to install Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud 13c to add monitoring capabilities, which OVM Manager lacks completely.

Oracle claims "whatever you can do via manager, you can do via EC", but in my opinion that's not true because a lot of tasks are simply too slow via EC than via the manager.

My first attempt with Oracle VM was around two years ago. I was asked to set up a four-node cluster with 3.3.1 release on top of Fujitsu hardware (Fujitsu Primequest 1800E).

v3.3.1 was pretty much disappointing in terms of performance, especially when it came to migration. It took minutes for a VM with a lot of memory to migrate across different hosts. This led us to upgrade the environment to 3.3.2, and changing the underlying hardware. Fujitsu Primequest was dismissed in favor of Fujitsu RX 300 S8 due to a compatibility issue as Primequest were not certified on 3.3.2.

3.3.2 was a bit faster but it didn't take long for us to experience one of its major bugs - the migration of any VM with 64GB plus RAM failing with an OpenSSL error.
This was fixed in a short time with the help of Oracle support who suggested to upgrade the OpenSSL packet.

We only had a single crash on one host in more than two years as the kernel panicked. An SR was opened to Oracle, but it led to nowhere.

We've had no issues scaling it to our needs.

It's fairly straightforward.  All you have to do is to install via script the so-called "OVM Manager", which is basically a Java administration GUI run on a WebLogic server with MySQL underlying it as a metadata repository. At the time, Oracle Database was a choice too, but it's no longer the case because, as an Oracle guy revealed, the Database engine has a major bug which corrupts lob data which prevents the the manager from working properly.

While the software is still missing a lot of capabilities which its major competitor (VMware) has and a performance boost is highly recommended, it could still be a choice if you have to virtualize Oracle software.

For most customers we have is the main reason avoiding license issues with Oracle. Most customers already have VMware vSphere running. Another reason is to have the complete stack from the same vendor, if any issues occur then only vendor has to be contacted for support to help fixing the issues.

It’s helped to decrease hardware and software license costs to use Oracle VM as most of our customers are running a lot of small applications and databases. They use Oracle VM to create small VMs to install Weblogic and the Databases on seperate servers. Also, to split the OTA database and application servers from the production databases and applications. Advantage: less hardware to buy, and most software licenses are CPU based, by using hard partitioning you can save on license costs.

Backup: It's possible to clone a VM (Virtual Machine) or make a template from it, but the option to create a snapshot backup from OVM Manager is missing. This option is available in VMware vSphere If you want to make snapshots using Oracle VM then it must be done by the storage product.

Jobs, the OVM manager handles only one job at the time. For a lot of actions, for example, starting or stopping a Virtual Machine, a job is created. If I start a couple of VM's at the same time I only see one job for starting the first VM. The other five jobs are in an invisible queue, after finishing the first job the second job starts and becomes visible at that moment. What to improve: make at least visible which jobs are in the queue and make it possible to run multiple jobs at the same time.

Security: there is no role based access control available in OVM Manager, if it’s needed then you have to use Oracle Enterprise Manager with the right plugin.

I've been using it for years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

The product is good for the things we want to do with it, but there is room for improvement.

My primary use of this product is for a database. I use this solution because it can work together with our other Oracle solutions.

There is no memory over-subscription and CPU over-subscription. That has to be improved in terms of Oracle VM perspective. The other leading VM software solutions have this feature.

For me, the stability is fine. But, I only primarily use it for the database role. 

There is a huge gap that Oracle VM needs to tighten in order to be more scalable, as well as more competitive with other VM products currently on the market. 

The technical support is not perfect. 

I previously used VMware products. I have found VMware vs Oracle VM to be far superior in provisioning and deployment. Additionally, there is more storage availability with VMware products. 

It's slightly more complex to set up than other VM software. 

It reduces the licensing cost for other Oracle products, and because it's based on Xen, it has no performance problems.

We've been able to use it successfully for deployment of our online application.

It needs automatic migration that's similar to VMware vMotion. The DRS feature in VMware migrates virtual machines based on the load on the hosts. Oracle VM does not have this feature, and I don't want users complaining about the performance bottleneck due to the load on the host.

We've been using it for three years.

I deployed it within a week and didn't have any issues with it.

Thankfully, everything was stable in spite of my limited knowledge.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The customer service was good.

We also use VMware products, which I personally prefer. VMware products are an administrator's dream. They have thought of everything, including DRS, HA, templates, and virtual machine deployment. It is very easy to do all these tasks.

The initial setup was a bit of both straightforward and complex, but it's easy if you know VMware.

I carried out the implementation.

It reduces the licensing cost for Oracle products, though I still prefer VMware.

Oracle VM was chosen mostly due to licensing issues and it is based on the stable KVM product of Red Hat.

VMware is the best, but for saving license costs for Oracle products, Oracle VM is good and stable.

We are a consulting company and one of the solutions that we assist our clients with is Oracle VM. I work with several different clients and they have different use cases.

My client using the Oracle VM says that it is working well.

I can use Oracle VM to manage my VMs and databases.

The interface on the newest version is good.

Oracle VM integrates well.

The network capabilities are good.

It is easy to migrate and clone VMs.

There have been some security issues in the past.

Having even more integration with other products would be an improvement.

The current version, 3.4.6, is usable. However, I had many problems with the Java console in previous versions, such as 3.2. It is easy to access now but prior to this, you had to install different versions of Java. The stability has improved over time.

This is a scalable solution. I can use many nodes inside of a cluster. Also, I can create one group and put several servers in it.

The Oracle technical support is very good.

I have also used KVM and it is a good tool.

VMware is another good tool but it is difficult to compare them. VMware has a better hypervisor but Oracle VM does many things, and it costs less.

Oracle VM is easy to set up. It can be deployed with one person.

We have five analysts for support and that work with it.

The price of the license is expensive.

Another one of the jobs that I do is assist my clients with migration to Oracle VM. For example, some migrate from VM to Oracle VM, and others migrate from Hyper-V to Oracle VM.

Overall, this Oracle VM works well for us. It is a good product, although Oracle is now recommending that we transition to Oracle KVM.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• Scalability
• Administering/managing
• Simplified network/storage operations.

Having these features in place, a DBA admin can easily able to build VMs, migrate on the fly, assign network ports, and segregate the networks according to levels.

It's improved our licensing. When we migrate physical servers to virtual ones, it reduces the amount of licenses needed. Not only that, Oracle Linux on Oracle VM are certified to run, also UEL is tuned to provide fast performance compare to other Linux.

There are some minor bugs with the manual admin from Hyp versus GUI Admin.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

It's scaled for our needs.

I personally like working on Oracle VM rather than other virtualization, because of the simplified setup, and probably I am attached to Oracle products maybe, as being an Ex-Employee of Oracle Corp.