Key Features and Benefits of Oracle VM

• Virtualization and Management: Oracle VM is a free, next-generation server virtualization and management solution from Oracle that makes enterprise applications easier to deploy, manage, and support.
  

Users can create and manage Virtual Machines (VMs) that exist on the same physical server but behave like independent physical servers. Each virtual machine created with Oracle VM has its own virtual CPUs, network interfaces, storage and operating system.

The components of Oracle VM are:

• Oracle VM Manager: Provides the web based user interface to manage Server Pools, Oracle VM Servers, virtual machines, and resources. As a part of Oracle VM, Oracle VM Manager not only provides life cycle management of virtual machines such as creating and configuring guest VMs, but also performs advanced functionality to load balance across resource pools and automatically reduce or eliminate outages associated with server downtime.

• Oracle VM Server: A self-contained virtualization environment designed to provide a lightweight, secure, server-based platform for running virtual machines. Oracle VM Server is based on open source technology (Xen hypervisor for example) tailored by Oracle, and includes Oracle VM Agent to communicate with Oracle VM Manager for management of virtual machines.

Introduced in Oracle VM 2.1.5, Oracle VM Manager provides a web services API to enable integration of third-party products with Oracle VM Manager. You can use the API to perform any of the operations in Oracle VM Manager, for example, to create a server pool, add servers, and create virtual machines. You can use any language that supports web services to access the API, for example Java or Python.

Furthermore, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 introduces the Oracle VM Management Pack, which provides a comprehensive management solution for managing both the virtual machines and the operating systems and software running inside the virtual machines from a single product. The Oracle VM Management Pack provides integrated in-depth health and performance monitoring, configuration management, and lifecycle automation for both virtual- and physical infrastructure for maximum operational efficiency.

• Faster Application Deployment with Oracle VM Templates – Download and import pre-configured virtual machines containing pre-installed Oracle enterprise applications or other software to get up and running in hours not weeks.

Oracle VM Templates are complete, pre-installed, pre-patched, and pre-configured Oracle product instances packaged as Oracle VM virtual machines (VMs) complete with an OS (Oracle Enterprise Linux). An Oracle VM Template may include a single VM, with a single Oracle product such as a single-instance database or WebLogic Server or multiple VMs with multiple Oracle products to facilitate rapid deployment of even the most complex composite applications such as Siebel CRM or the Oracle SOA Suite. Oracle VM Templates are licensed for production deployment and thus can encapsulate best-practices and used by customers to deploy to production as "golden images". Oracle VM Templates can also be used in sales demo and proof-of-concept scenarios so customers can focus on evaluating the features of the product rather than spending days or weeks just trying to get the product installed and configured properly.

Once deployed, Oracle VM Templates result in an instance that is identical to any other instance that would have been deployed manually from scratch by the customer. For example, the patch inventory is completely correct and up-to-date, the Oracle homes are all identical and in the standard locations / with the standard directory structure, etc. This allows customers to update and customize the deployment using their normal processes.

Oracle VM Templates are downloaded from Oracle's E-Delivery website: Just download and copy the software images onto your server that has Oracle VM installed on it, import and deploy the Template VM(s) and, after answering some one-time queries relating to the customer's desired environment (DHCP or static IP, passwords, etc.) within minutes you will have a fully installed and configured Oracle environment that you know is completely correct without having to install products from scratch. In most cases, deployment times for complex applications can be reduced from weeks to hours.

Oracle's E-Delivery site has an updated license that allows bundling of Oracle products on Enterprise Linux with a production usage license (90-day trial).

• Oracle VM Templates Download
• We provide a pre-packaged, small foot-print Oracle Enterprise Linux image (either OEL 4.7 or OEL 5.2, Oracle Enterprise Linux for building Oracle VM Templates) for x86 and x86-64, along with a script to customize the image. This minimal install of Oracle Enterprise Linux is also known as JeOS (Just Enough OS). It's the same Oracle Enterprise Linux that is freely re-distributable and backed by enterprise-class support, but has been secured and minimized to facilitate Oracle VM Templates creation.

For additional information about Oracle VM Templates, see Oracle Technical White Paper:

• Feb 2009, Creating and Using Oracle VM Templates: The Fastest Way to Deploy Any Enterprise Software
• Feb 2009, Oracle VM Templates Developer's Guide: Creating Pre-built VMs for Rapid Software Deployment
• Feb 2009, Oracle VM Manager Template

• Leading Price/Performance – Low-overhead architecture provides scalable performance under increasing I/O workloads with no license costs, to meet the most aggressive price/performance requirements.

Oracle VM’s next generation architecture supports the use of virtualization-aware paravirtualized guest operating systems to allow more efficient, lower overhead operations in areas critical to performance such as memory and I/O management. This not only enables higher performance, it also supports excellent scaling as workloads increase, due to the addition of virtual machines, or an increase in workloadload on existing VMs.

The Tolly Group, a leading third-party information technology testing, research, and certification organization, performed a comparison test between a bare-metal server running an instance of Oracle Enterprise Linux and an Oracle VM Server, hosting an identical single Oracle Enterprise Linux virtual machine (VM). During the test, the Oracle VM Server achieved 94 percent of the bare metal server transaction level using an Oracle Database 11g instance supporting 50 concurrent users. This result indicates an exceptionally low six percent performance overhead, even under heavy workload, demonstrating Oracle VM’s leading performance amongst available server virtualization solutions, where 20-30 percent performance overhead has previously been considered typical.

Tests also showed that Oracle VM continued to scale strongly as additional VMs were added to the server to increase the load. When adding a second, identical virtual machine with 50 users to the same Oracle VM Server, the throughput reached 160.9 percent of the single virtual machine result with 72 percent more database transactions on two virtual machines under heavy workload compared to a single virtual machine.

The tests were conducted using freely available Swingbench and LMbench testing tools, allowing customers to easily validate the results using their own workloads and to compare Oracle VM’s overhead with other available server virtualization products in their environment. For details about Performance Evaluation of Oracle VM by The Tolly Group, see the report here.

• Advanced VM High Availability (HA) Features – Minimize or eliminate planned and unplanned downtime through advanced functionality included at no extra charge.
  
• Guest VM HA
  
• Secure Live Migration
• Server Pool Load Balancing
• Oracle VM Manager HA
  

For details about Advanced VM High Availability features, see Oracle Technical White Paper:

• Sep 2008, Oracle VM – Creating & Maintaining a Highly Available Environment for Guest VMs
• Apr 2009, Oracle VM High Availability--Hands-on Guide to Implementing Guest VM HA

• Guest VM HA Feature – Minimizes unplanned outages.
  

In order to assure predictable, reliable, and accurate restarting of failed VMs, it’s critical to have a very tightly integrated HA management system to orchestrate everything from the VM failure detection all the way through to the successful restart of the guest VM. It’s equally important to insure that there is no opportunity for data corruption anywhere during the process.

Leveraging its deep expertise with OCFS (Oracle Cluster File System), Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), and the associated Oracle Clusterware, Oracle VM’s Guest VM HA functionality provides a powerful, easy-to-manage solution for maximizing up-time for virtually any guest VM workload, without requiring any tailoring inside the VM, making it simple to set-up, use, and maintain.

Oracle has developed an advanced architecture for managing guest availability that goes beyond reliance on simple network “pings” to determine whether a guest is running or not. The result is a solution that is more reliable and dramatically reduces the opportunity for false positives/negatives when determining whether a VM has failed. It also assures that a VM is restarted correctly without any risk of shared data corruption.

Although transparent to the user from an installation perspective, Oracle VM has incorporated Oracle OCFS2 cluster stack into the core product as part of its infrastructure to, in effect, transform server pools into clusters from a high availability perspective. This allows guest VM HA to be managed at a level that is more robust and reliable as compared to competitive HA schemes that rely on simplistic network pings combined with time-outs to determine if a VM or Server has failed. Because those solutions are too basic, they have a greater potential to result in falsely declaring VMs or servers to be failed, or, worse, end up actively shutting-down healthy VMs and/or not restarting them when needed. Oracle VMs architecture essentially eliminates these scenarios as a concern.

Oracle VM Guest HA functionality provides the following benefits:

• Secure Live Migration Feature – Most migration products don't encrypt your migration traffic, creating vulnerabilities. Oracle VM encrypts migration traffic using SSL to protect sensitive data from exploitation and eliminate the requirement for additional hardware and dedicated networks.

Oracle VM’s Secure Live Migration eliminates outages associated with planned downtime by allowing quick and easy migration of running VMs from one physical server in another. No need to take a service outage and service users won’t even notice the change unless they notice how much faster things are once you’ve migrated to larger hardware.

Oracle VM is designed specifically for the production enterprise running critical workloads and Secure Live Migration uses native SSL encryption by default, and without any requirements for additional hardware, to eliminate the vulnerability that exists today in nearly every other major product on the market. The ability to encrypt the traffic also enables the use of shared networks for migration traffic without fear of exposing sensitive data to exploitation.

• Server Pool Load Balancing - Guest VMs are automatically placed on the server with the most resources available in the pool.

The physical host for a guest VM is automatically selected from the pool of healthy, available servers by Oracle VM at guest VM power-on based on a pool load balancing and availability algorithm.

Oracle VM's server resource pooling and shared-storage architecture assures that a down server does not block guest start-up, to help maintain predictable service levels.

Optionally, for each individual guest VM, users can specify a unique list of named servers, called Preferred Servers to be used for hosting that guest VM to further tailor to unique performance and availability needs.

• Oracle VM Manager HA Feature - a distributed architecture and optional clustering of Oracle VM Manager maximizes management uptime.
  

Oracle Enterprise Linux management servers with an Oracle Unbreakable Linux support subscription can be clustered with no additional license costs using Oracle Clusterware to permit automatic management service fail-over and recovery to minimize down-time without requiring manual intervention;

A distributed management architecture allows most VM operations including Secure Live Migration and Guest HA Auto Restart to succeed even if the management server is temporarily unavailable.

For details about Oracle VM Manager HA feature, see Oracle technical white paper:

• Sep 2008, Using Oracle Clusterware to Protect Oracle VM Manager

• Virtual Machine I/O Resource Management Features - Set bandwidth cap for each virtual network interface and prioritize the virtual disks

With network I/O traffic management, you can set bandwidth cap for each virtual network interface. All the virtual network interfaces (VIFs) share the physical network interface card (NIC) to communicate with the outside. If you have several VIFs, and you want to control how much bandwidth is granted to each VIF, you can configure the rate limit from Oracle VM Manager. The network traffic through the virtual network interface will not exceed the limit. The change will take effect without restart.

With storage I/O prioritization, you can also prioritize the virtual disk and enable disk priority, and select an appropriate priority class. The priority class ranges from 0 to 7. The priority class 0 has the highest priority, and 7 the lowest. Rather than being confined to a particular virtual machine, the priority of a virtual disk is global on the entire Oracle VM Server. Virtual disks of the same priority class take the same priority on the Oracle VM Server, even if they belong to different virtual machines.

I/O resource management features help assure that your I/O bandwidth usage is being used according to the priorities you want them to be and help assure that low priority tasks are not stealing disk or network bandwidth from higher priorities.

• Physical-to-Virtual / Virtual-to-Virtual Machine Conversion – Quickly convert existing Linux or Windows physical servers or VMware virtual machines to Oracle VM virtual machines to reduce license expenses.

The P2V conversion utility allows administrators to perform an off-line conversion of any physical machine running supported versions of Windows or Linux to an Oracle VM hardware virtualized guest virtual machine. The P2V utility is integrated into the install program on the Oracle VM Server CD. It can be run in interactive mode prompting for necessary parameters, or in an automated fashion using a configuration file with syntax very similar to kickstart install files.

This conversion will create a VM configuration file (vm.cfg) and allow you to make some modifications in terms of sizing the virtual hardware, and then replicate the physical image and transfer it over the network to the resource pool using Oracle VM Manager. The image on your physical server is not changed in any way.

The virtual to virtual (V2V) conversion allows customers to migrate existing VMware (VMDK) images to Oracle VM images. Oracle VM Manager automatically converts a VMware image to an Oracle VM image when you import it into Oracle VM Manager, enabling customers to reduce licensing expense "at the flick of a switch" for Windows and Linux virtual machines.

For details about Physical to Virtual and Virtual to Virtual machine conversion, see Oracle technical white paper:

• Dec 2008, Converting Linux and Windows Physical and Virtual Machines to Oracle VM Virtual Machines
  

• Linux and Windows Support – Linux and Windows guest operating systems for 32-bit and 64-bit.
  

• Both paravitualized- (“virtualization aware”) and hardware-virtualized kernels:
• Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 (from Oracle or RedHat).
• Hardware-virtualized kernels only (Virtualization support in hardware required):
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 (32-bit PV drivers available)
  
• Windows Server 2008 SP1, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows XP Pro (32-bit and 64-bit PV drivers available).
• Windows 2000
  

• Official Certification Based On Real-World Testing – Supported for use with the most sophisticated enterprise workloads under real-world conditions.

Oracle VM is the ONLY Oracle certified server virtualization solution for x86/x86_64 platforms to allow for the highest product quality and best support. Oracle products such as Oracle Database, Oracle RAC, Enterprise Manager, Application Server, Hyperion, JD Edwards, Berkeley DB, TimesTen, Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail, Oracle Financial Services Software Limited, Oracle Weblogic Platform and so on are officially supported when running in Oracle VM-based environments based on real-world testing.

For a complete list of certified software on Oracle VM, see Metalink Note 464754.1.

• Affordable, Full-Stack Enterprise-Class Support – Worldwide support from Oracle for the entire virtualization environment and workloads together.

Customers who obtain paid support for Oracle VM receive access to patches, fixes, and updates via Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and 24x7 global support.

• Purchase support at Oracle Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM Store
• My Oracle Support (Metalink)
  
• Pricing for Oracle VM support is calculated on a per system basis: Consult Oracle’s pricing guide for further details.
  
• Enterprise Linux Training and Certification