Oracle VM Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

Senior Digital Technical Lead/Architect at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 31, 2016

We can have one VM to share with the team that has all development tools set up.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features for us are the large number of available network configurations and its high degree of scalability.

How has it helped my organization?

We've improved a lot as I use it for creating VMs for software development purposes for our team. We can have one VM to share with the team that has all development tools set up so that when a new developer joins the team, they can be ready to work just by copying the VM. So it's saved lots of time for each developer to set up their development environment. Also, it keeps the team aligned with the different tools they use.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see more improvements in the synchronization between the host machine and the VM especially in Mac machines. Also, more features around folder sharing would be an improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've used it for six years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have had no issues with the deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have had no stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

Customer service is very good.

Technical Support:

Technical support is very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I previously used VMware but switched because I got better support from Oracle.

How was the initial setup?

It depends on how deep I want to go, but normally the initial setup is straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

I used a mixed team of vendor and in-house personnel for the implementation.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I think the pricing is fair.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

flashdba

Consulting Manager (EMEA) at Violin Memory

May 17, 2015

VMware ESX vs. Oracle VM

This is a very simple post to show the results of some recent testing that Tom and I ran using Oracle SLOB on Violin to determine the impact of using virtualization. But before we get to that, I am duty bound to write a paragraph of text featuring lots of long sentences peppered with industry buzz words. Forgive me, it’s just the way I’m wired.

It is increasingly common these days to find database environments running in virtual machines – even large, business critical ones. The driver is the trend to commoditize I.T. services and build consolidated, private-cloud style solutions in order to control operational expense and increase agility (not to mention reduce exposure to Oracle licenses). But, as I’ve said in previous posts, the catalyst has been the unblocking of I/O as legacy disk systems are replaced by flash memory. In the past, virtual environments caused a kind of I/O blender effect whereby I/O calls become increasingly randomized – and this sucked for the performance of disk drives. Flash memory arrays on the other hand can deliver random I/O all day long because… well, if you don’t know the reasons by now can I just recommend starting at the beginning. The outcome is that many large and medium-sized organisations are now building database-as-a-service platforms with Oracle databases (other database products are available) running in virtual machines. It’s happening right now.

Phew. Anyway, that last paragraph was just a wordy way of telling you that I’m often seeing Oracle running in virtual machines on top of hypervisors. But how much of a performance impact do those hypervisors have? Step this way to find out.

The Contenders

When it comes to running Oracle on a hypervisor using Intel x86 hardware (for that is what I have available), I only know of three real contenders:

VMware vSphere (ESX)
Oracle VM Server for x86
Microsoft Hyper-V

Hyper-V has been an option for a couple of years now, but I’ll be honest – I have neither the time nor the inclination to test it today. It’s not that I don’t rate it as a product, it’s just that I’ve never used it before and don’t have enough time to learn something new right now. Maybe someday I’ll come back and add it to the mix.

In the meantime, it’s the big showdown: VMware versus Oracle VM. Not that Oracle VM is really in the same league as VMware in terms of market share… but you know, I’m trying to make this sound exciting.

The Test

This is going to be an Oracle SLOB sustained throughput test. In other words, I’m going to build an Oracle database and then shovel a massive amount of I/O through it (you can read all about SLOB here and here). SLOB will be configured to run with 25% of statements being UPDATEs (the remainder are SELECTs) and will run for 8 hours straight. What we want to see is a) which hypervisor configuration allows the greatest I/O bandwidth, and b) which hypervisor configuration exhibits the most predictable performance.

This is the configuration. First the hardware:

Violin Memory 6616 flash Memory Array

This is the configuration. First the hardware

1x Dell PowerEdge R720 server
2x Intel Xeon CPU E5-2690 v2 10-core @ 3.00GHz [so that’s 2 sockets, 20 cores, 40 threads for this server]
128GB DRAM
1x Violin Memory 6616 (SLC) flash memory array [the one that did this]
8GB fibre-channel

And the software:

Hypervisor: VMware ESXi 5.5.1
Hypervisor: Oracle VM for x86 3.3.1
VM: Oracle Linux 6 Update 5 (with the Unbreakable Enterprise v3 Kernel 3.6.18)
Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.4 (for Automatic Storage Management)
Oracle Database Enterprise Edition 11.2.0.4

Each VM is configured with 20 vCPUs and is using Linux Device Mapper Multipath and Oracle ASMLib. ASM is configured to use one single +DATA disgroup comprising 8 ASM disks (LUNs from Violin) with external redundancy. The database parameters and SLOB settings are all listed on the SLOB sustained throughput test page.

Results: Bare Metal (Baseline)

First let’s see what happens when we don’t use a hypervisor at all and just run OL6.5 on bare metal:

IO Profile	Read+Write/Second	Read/Second	Write/Second
Total Requests	232,431.0	194,452.3	37,978.7
DB Requests	228,909.4	194,447.9	34,461.5
Optimized Requests	0.0	0.0	0.0
Redo Requests	3,515.1	0.3	3,514.8
Total(Mb)	1,839.6	1,519.2	320.4

Ok so we’re looking at 1519 MB/sec of read throughput and 320 MB/sec of write throughput. Crucially, the lines are nice and consistent – with very little deviation from the mean. By dividing the amount of time spent waiting on db file sequential read(i.e. random physical reads) with the number of waits, we can calculate that the average latency for random reads was 438 microseconds.

Results: VMware vSphere

VMware is configured to use Raw Device Mapping (RDM) which essentially gives the benefits of raw devices… read here for more details on that. Here are the test results:

IO Profile	Read+Write/Second	Read/Second	Write/Second
Total Requests	173,141.7	145,066.8	28,075.0
DB Requests	170,615.3	145,064.0	25,551.4
Optimized Requests	0.0	0.0	0.0
Redo Requests	2,522.8	0.1	2,522.7
Total(Mb)	1,370.0	1,133.4	236.7

Average read throughput for this test was 1133 MB/sec and write throughput averaged at 237 MB/sec. Average read latency was 596 microseconds. That’s an increase of 36%.

In comparison to the bare metal test, we see that total bandwidth dropped by around 25%. That might seem like a lot but remember, we are absolutely hammering this system. A real database is unlikely to ever create this level of sustained I/O. In my role at Violin I’ve been privileged to work on some of the busiest databases in Europe – nothing is ever this crazy (although a few do come close).

Results: Oracle VM

Oracle VM is based on the Xen hypervisor and therefore uses Xen virtual disks to present block devices. For this test I downloaded the Oracle Linux 6 Update 5 template from Oracle’s eDelivery site. You can see more about the way this VM was configured here. Here are the test results:

IO Profile	Read+Write/Second	Read/Second	Write/Second
Total Requests	160.563.8	134,592.9	25,970.9
DB Requests	158,538.1	134,587.3	23,950.8
Optimized Requests	0.0	0.0	0.0
Redo Requests	2,017.2	0.2	2,016.9
Total(Mb)	1,273.4	1,051.6	221.9

This time we see average read bandwidth of 1052MB/sec and average write bandwidth of 222MB/sec, with the average read latency at 607 microseconds, which is 39% higher than the baseline test.

Meanwhile, total bandwidth dropped by 31%. That’s slightly worse than VMware, but what’s really interesting is the deviation. Look at how ragged the lines are on the OVM test! There is a much higher degree of variance exhibited here than on the VMware test.

Conclusion

This is only one test so I’m not claiming it’s conclusive. VMware does appear to deliver slightly better performance than OVM in my tests, but it’s not a huge difference. However, I am very much concerned by the variance of the OVM test in comparison to VMware. Look, for example, at the wait event histograms for db file sequential read:

Wait Event Histogram
-> Units for Total Waits column: K is 1000, M is 1000000, G is 1000000000
-> % of Waits: value of .0 indicates value was <.05%; value of null is truly 0
-> % of Waits: column heading of <=1s is truly <1024ms, >1s is truly >=1024ms
-> Ordered by Event (idle events last)

% of Waits

Hypervisor	Event	Total Watts	<1ms	<2ms	<4ms	<8ms	<16ms	<32ms	<=1ms	>1s
Baremetal	db file sequential read	5557	98.7	1.3	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0
VMWare ESX	db file sequential read	4164	92.2	6.7	1.1	0.0	0.0	0.0
Oracle VM	db file sequential read	3834	95.6	4.1	0.1	0.1	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0

The OVM tests show occasional results in the two highest buckets, meaning once or twice there were waits in excess of 1 second! However, to be fair, OVM also had more millisecond waits than VMware.

Anyway, for now – and for this setup at least – I’m sticking with VMware. You should of course test your own workloads before choosing which hypervisor works for you…

Thanks as always to Kevin for bringing Oracle SLOB to the community.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: I work for Violin Memory

it_user410328CISO at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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May 4, 2016

On OVM, you just need few tunable parameters on PVM virtualmachine to make it almost as fast as bare metal is. Perhaps someday I share those to global world for free.

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it_user436146

President at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Jun 20, 2017

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We've noticed that when working with Citrix with our Oracle clients who also use Oracle Linux, the monitoring and testing is simpler and easier for us to do.

Pros and Cons

"We've noticed that when working with Citrix with our Oracle clients who also use Oracle Linux, the monitoring and testing is simpler and easier for us to do."

"It doesn't monitor everything, which is a little bit more difficult. It doesn't seem to have as many features or metrics to monitor as some others do, so you have to make some homemade scripts to do it."

How has it helped my organization?

It's similar to being Citrix-based with a little bit of difference on the technology side. It seems to handle some of the database mechanics better. Again, that's probably just the sampling size we've done, which may not be big enough, but it does seem to work with those a little bit better in our experience.

What is most valuable?

We've noticed that when working with Citrix with our Oracle clients who also use Oracle Linux, the monitoring and testing is simpler and easier for us to do.

What needs improvement?

It doesn't monitor everything, which is a little bit more difficult. It doesn't seem to have as many features or metrics to monitor as some others do, so you have to make some homemade scripts to do it. There are richer APIs out there that are able to pull the data back.

Also, finding files and downloading them and installing them can take a little bit of time. Once they've got it installed, it seems to work pretty good.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Operationally from a stability perspective, it has been pretty good. Some of the monitoring that we do will show when it starts getting stress, but then creating new ones has been effortless and it hasn't really been a problem.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have been able to scale using it just fine.

How was the initial setup?

It's a little bit cumbersome. To know exactly how to install it and the management pieces wasn't as straightforward as some of my admins have said.

What other advice do I have?

Try it our and test it, and make sure it's going to be exactly what you need first versus the other options because they all have their own little idiosyncrasies, and you want to make sure it's going to be a fit for your organization.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're partners.

it_user521604

Manager, ERP Technical Support at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 1, 2016

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You can scale VMs without affecting the software applications. You can still reconfigure the hardware.

What is most valuable?

Virtual machines are much cheaper than having physical machines. They are rolling out new machines very quick and fast. It saves time and saves cost, that’s how we feel; and also the systems are more reliable.

How has it helped my organization?

Saves time for procuring the new hardware. No more physical space sitting on the data centers.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's stable. There are still ways you can break the system, but it's very minimal, compared to a physical system.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

For real hardware, scalability is challenging. But with virtual, you can scale without affecting the software applications, you can still reconfigure the hardware. Whenever we ask them to increase the RAM or other things, they can do it, and never come back and say well, it's VM's role. But every two years, we need to update the VM build; that we know. After four years, our VMs get old, so we need to replace them.

How is customer service and technical support?

So far the response is good. Our team never comes back and says Oracle is giving us a hard time.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's a challenge for us to keep investing in it. We are a manufacturing company, not an IT company. Whenever Oracle comes, say every three to five years, and says everybody change the system, you need to find the budget for that. And in a year, it’s going to be outdated again, right? After four years, my system has become completely outdated.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I'm sure there is one product, Oracle Data Integrator for loading bulk data from one system to another. We just starting using it. It’s a very good product, but we haven’t used all the features. Once we explored all the features, we got feedback from the company. I know so far that it’s good.

What other advice do I have?

I know that everything is on the cloud; but eventually, if you are a new startup company, go to the VM. You have control over what you have, while at the same time, not dependent on the hardware.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Robin Saikat ChatterjeeHead of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Solutioning Technology and Architeture at Tata Consultancy Services

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May 4, 2017

Currently looking into Oracel Private Cloud Appliance which is built on OVM technology. For those of you with OPN access there is a beta exam available that ends on the 6th of May . eventreg.oracle.com for details and to request a voucher

it_user436065

IT Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

May 29, 2016

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We can run software on a host separate from other hardware resources, which is important when we need to take a snapshot and restore it later on another VM.

Valuable Features:

With Oracle VM, the most valuable feature is the virtualization of the hardware, making it easier to maintain and support than actual OS's and networks resources.

Improvements to My Organization:

We can run software on a host separate from other hardware resources, which is important when we need to take a snapshot and restore it later on another VM.

But it also comes down to the fact that it's a product by Oracle, the industry leader. We know we can rely on it and that it'll be supported by an established company.

Room for Improvement:

The fact that it cannot do a hot snapshot is a problem for us, but we work around it. We need to have good backups, while the system is up, which don't don't right now with Oracle VM. Our workarounds are fine for now, but we'd prefer to be able to just do hot snapshots when we need to.

Deployment Issues:

We've had no issues deploying it.

Stability Issues:

I think it's fine, there are no issue there. We haven't had any big issues with it being unstable.

Scalability Issues:

The scalability has been there for us as well. We've been able to scale as needed.

Initial Setup:

It's implemented just fine. The setup was pretty easy and straightforward. It was a combination of an easy product to install and technical expertise as well.

Implementation Team:

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

Other Advice:

Study ahead of time so you know what you're working with. Also, plan your implementation.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're partners.

it_user427392

Oracle Database Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Apr 28, 2016

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Quick and easy way to deploy new virtual machines from Oracle VM templates and your own templates.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of this product is the quick and easy way to deploy new virtual machines from Oracle VM templates and your own templates. That is very useful to deploy new virtual machines in a few minutes with different Oracle products already installed and configured. For example, we can deploy a new virtual machine with Oracle Database installed and another virtual machine with Oracle WebCenter installed.

How has it helped my organization?

It reduced the time to deploy new machines and reduced the cost of licensing.

What needs improvement?

It would be very nice to improve the way to get hot backup clones of virtual machines and to schedule this jobs from Oracle VM Manager.

For how long have I used the solution?

We used it for three years and we stopped last year.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

I encountered some issues with virtual networks and live migration feature in v3.2.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We had no issues with the stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We've had no issues scaling it.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

7/10

Technical Support:

7/10

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The company where I was used VMware solutions for virtualization of environments, and we migrated all Oracle products to an Oracle VM infrastructure.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was a little complex because no one in the company knew about this product as it was something new at the time. My team and I did a successful installation of our Oracle VM environment and migrated all Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic application servers to this new infrastructure, which are now in our production environment for client deliveries.

What about the implementation team?

The implementation was done by a local team of the company with some issues but finally with success.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

This aspect was done by another team in our company.

What other advice do I have?

I think it is a good Oracle product, but it is necessary to have a dedicated team with the correct expertise for this task because it is different from other virtualization solutions. The team should include people who know about storage, networking, Oracle Linux OS, Xen Server, Oracle Database, etc.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user410328

CISO at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 28, 2016

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It allows hard partitioning platforms, thus keeping the licenses intact.

Valuable Features

It allows hard partitioning platforms, thus keeping the licenses intact.

Improvements to My Organization

We have two datacenters, holding less than 15 physical servers and still running over 300 virtual ones.

Room for Improvement

With v2.X it was possible to do everything in the CLI or the shell. Now, on v3.X everything must be done either in the GUI or CLI, and there's no option to use the shell. I am old school, so I hate GUI. CLI is working well and I wish it to be that in future.

Use of Solution

We have been using it for the past seven years, and have created 10 different environments.

Deployment Issues

There have been no issues with the deployments.

Stability Issues

There was nasty bug on DomU UEK3 kernel year ago, which wiped virtual machine disks if a certain combination was used. Now, it's fine.

Scalability Issues

We have had no issues scaling it as needed.

Customer Service and Technical Support

I've never had to contact them.

Initial Setup

The initial setup is as easy as walking. After that, it gets a little complicated, but if one knows what one is doing, it is still easy.

Implementation Team

In-house. If you know Linux and Xen, you are good to go. If you don't, get a partner to do this for you.

Other Solutions Considered

As it's Oracle, there was no need to evaluate anything else.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user9279

Engineer at a local government with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 22, 2016

You get what you pay for

Oracle database licensing rules make licensing on VMware cost prohibitive. Instead Oracle prefers that you use their "enterprise" virtualization product, Oracle VM. Avoid it at all costs. Threaten to migrate to MS SQL... just don't use this thing.

Pros:

Free
Relatively inexpensive support

Cons:

Poor and buggy Windows client support. PVM network drivers have a serious performance bug that has not been resolved in more than a year (and three versions updates!). Luckily, there is a workaround where you can disable some features of the virtual NIC to get it working.
"High Availability" in the OVM world means that if you shutdown a VM from within the OS, OVM automatically restarts it. If you want to actually shut down a VM you have to disable high availability, in which case you lose the ability to automatically migrate a VM if a host fails. It also means that you need to give your server admins access to the OVM Manager. For example, our DBAs can admin their Oracle servers... people who wouldn't normally have access to that level of enterprise management.
It took three weeks and a set of consultants who knew little more than us to get storage and network working properly in a fault-tolerant manner.
Non-existent best practices and no real community of support. Some Googling will find you the occasional blog or commercial site with tips and tricks, but they are few and far between.
Poor management interface. In order to see the status of an individual VM you have to drill down to the correct host. There is no way to see the status of all VMs on all hosts.
P2V is a multi-step process. Boot the server from a CD to turn it into a web server. Import web server into an OVM template. Create VM from template. Delete template. Essentially you need double the storage to get through the process.
Minimal troubleshooting or diagnostic information without diving into the Linux OS.
Training (virtual classroom only) was sub-standard and inconsistent. One member of our team was taught only to use the command line and was never shown the GUI. I was taught the GUI and some command line. And if you mention VMware in order to clarify concepts, prepare to get your head bitten off.
Migrating VMs to different storage is an adaptation of the process for deploying from a template. Some inputs are ignored, and yet you are prompted for them anyway.
You need an Oracle database to run the OVM Manager, which you install on the OVM Manager. So a key part of the infrastructure is a single point of failure.
The SAN disk for the server pool is a single point of failure.
If the OVM Manager goes down there is no way to manage the individual OVM hosts short of the Linux command line. The database (even when using Oracle Enterprise instead of the included Oracle XE) is prone to corruption, leaving you dead in the water. This has already happened to us once and the only solution from Oracle was to rebuild. Apparently this corruption is rather common. I know of other installations at my employer that have run into this corruption three times in the past nine months, requiring a rebuild each time. I do not feel that I can trust this product for a mission-critical production environment.
Oracle is aware of these corruption issues but does not know the source and has no fix. They have reduced the incidence of corruption in version 3.2.3, but it is not a question of if corruption will occur, but when. The difficult thing is that the OVM manager will appear to run fine with this corruption.... until you restart the OVM manager, at which point it fails.
The whole networking / storage / repository / configuration setup is needlessly complicated. I know this is an Oracle flavor of XEN, but... Citrix based their virtualization product on XEN and it isn't nearly as painful. Maybe Oracle should buy Citrix so they can drop OVM.
Configuring storage that does not support their management plugins (entry-level EMC products) is an exercise in trial and error.
If you already have another VM environment (VMware, Hyper-V) you are essentially setting up a parallel VM environment to manage.
Cloning a VM (or cloning from a template) duplicates *everything* so be sure you don't have any ISO images attached, as they will be duplicated as well, chewing up storage.
When you clone a VM the new files use the same name as the old with a number after it. If you don't think to rename them you will end up with a lot of files named "Windows 2008 Template (1)" "Windows 2008 Template (2)" and so on. The properties of the file will tell you to which VM it is linked, but (trust me) renaming them will save you a LOT of confusion. Things like this VMware just handles for you under the covers.

In summary: Do not use Oracle VM. If you must run Xen there are much better and manageable implementations (Citrix XenServer). If any reviewer has given Oracle VM more than two stars I seriously question whether they really have hands-on experience with the product (or have experience with a real virtualization product as a basis of comparison).

Update: After talking with other enterprises we are dropping OVM and setting up a separate VMware cluster in order to meet Oracle licensing requirements. While we will incur the expense of VMware licenses it is well worth it.

The licensing argument you will hear from Oracle regarding VMware is a scare tactic. You CAN run Oracle on VMware without breaking the bank on Oracle licensing if you plan carefully. VMware also guarantees that they will work directly with Oracle on your behalf to resolve any issues that may be linked to running on VMware.

Further update: When we gave up on Oracle VM about 9 months ago the central office tried to stick with it due to the Oracle DB licensing issues. Last week they got fed up and ordered the hardware to create a new VMware cluster dedicated to Oracle instead.

Another update: While I have not used Oracle VM since I posted this review, it is interesting to note that they have not released a new version since 2014. The latest version 3.3, did not fix any of the issues I don't think they are really serious about advancing or enhancing this product.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.