Oracle VM Reviews

I'm usually working in the public sector or hospitals that have many critical systems, including the SKN information system or some emergency that are medical.

The main program to consider, from an improvement perspective for Oracle VM, is how to extract the existing VM or migrate it to Oracle KVM.

In the roadmap of Oracle, Oracle VM is finished, and this is the last year. Oracle KVM, which is Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager. In fact, I had to suppress my Oracle VM environment for Oracle KVM, which is Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager. I'm a certified partner for Oracle Database. Also, I'm certified in Oracle Exadata.

There are issues with the solution's stability since it crashes.

I have issues with its scalability since one cannot have many VMs. So, it reaches limits at an early rate. Hence, it's very difficult to scale. Also, you have a file system that is not supported. The file system is based on OCFS2, which is an open-source file system that is not very reliable. It is not a problem with Oracle KVM or XFS since you have many file systems, but this is not the case with Oracle VM.

The initial setup for Oracle VM is very difficult. The main problem is the stability and scalability of the solution. The drawbacks are the backup. There are no backup products certified with Oracle VM. This is not a problem with Oracle KVM. Another problem is when you patch your kernel, Xen is in the kernel, and Xen is not very reliable. In fact, you may have some crashes, so it's very difficult to maintain Oracle VM.

Oracle VM follows an annual subscription model. It's not a very expensive product. This is not the price of VMware.

I wouldn't recommend it to others since it is a final and old product. Also, the product is nearing its end.

Overall, I rate the solution a four out of five.

The solution is a suite of products so it depends on the needs of the client. 

Depending on which product specifically is being used for this solution there are different features. If we're running Oracle VM for SPARC, it has line migration capabilities, and performance, and can use hardware virtualization on network cards.

The solution is an outdated Xen-based application. They only perform maintenance support for it. The new version is Oracle Linux Virtualization, which is a re-skinned version of the over stack, basically the same as the one that Red Hat sells. They could harmonize management between their products better.

I have been working with Oracle's Virtualization for ten to fifteen years.

The stability is rock solid. We have a fairly large technical company running the solution on their production database which is used by the production machines to collect information. If the database is down, the production stops. There has not been a stop in the production for over three years.

The cloud appliance is easy to scale because it's built to scale. You just add a new machine into them and then it will automatically boot and install. The other solutions are easy to scale as long as they are set up correctly from the beginning. They require a shared file system, either NFS, the cluster file system, glossary, or something similar to that. That will allow you to scale your storage, and then scale the compute nodes. Basically, install Oracle Linux and a node then point the management to it and say, "This is your new compute node for you."

I have used the solutions customer service plenty of times. In most cases, the support is pretty good. They have knowledgeable people working for them.

Positive

It depends on if you are setting up a simple environment or a more complex one where you have to look at the Fiber Channel storage, high availability, and things like that. If you are looking at setting up a complex multi-site cluster of Oracle VM for SPARC, it is not easy. You have all of the clustering parts, multi-site parts, storage, and networking that come with the setup. It is still easier to set up these systems now compared to back when you had bare-bone systems and had to do everything yourself.

The implementation was done in-house.

The solution as a standalone product can not be purchased. When you purchase the hardware such as Oracle X36, and the support cost for the hardware, you get the support for the operating system and the virtualization stack included. It is part of either operating systemized on the Linux side or over on the slower side. I give the cost a seven out of ten.

I have evaluated several options such as Proxmox, Red Hat, and Overt. They all do the same things but in different ways. They all have similar feature sets. The interfaces have their own quirks. All of the options are fairly equal with some differences.

My personal favorite VM solution is Proxmox. It is a lower-cost solution, easy to install, and I also run it on my home system.

We use this solution For running our in house development work. As we work with Oracle packaged applications thius allows us to deploy a full red stack and prevents any application software vs hypervisor compatibility issues. We have also deployed this solution at many customer sites where we use it to reduce licensing impacts using cpu pinning to reduce the number of cores needed to be licensed for individual products such as oracle database and weblogic.

We are able to run many different solutions on a small number of hypervisors. We can shut down those solutions that are currently not of interest and can expand or contract the resources, such as memory, that are assigned to different solutions so that a developer may struggle a little, but a client demo will fly on the same instance when given 200% more memory. 

We also use the live migration facility to move VMs among servers in our farm so we can perform patching and other activities.

This is supported by Oracle and optimized for running its database and software. Among the benefits is the ability to create huge pages within a VM, which is very beneficial for databases. The other major benefit is the ability to use OVM as a partitioning mechanism to reduce licensing costs for Oracle software.

Currently, there are some cases when the GUI and the back-end go out of sync. For example, the GUI shows the VM as running whereas it is actually already shut down. This could be improved.

I've used it for over four years.

When we were previously using a dual-head storage with automatic storage pathing, we faced issues with compatibility since the shared storage kept getting re-mastered to different heads by the various servers which did not choose to access by the default assigned heads. 

We fixed this by replacing our storage with a supported/certified one. We have seen much better stability when using one of Oracle's purpose-built virtualization appliances, like PCA or ODA, to implement virtualization.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

The customer service ranges from average to exceptional. We faced an issue with HBA NIC drivers that we could not solve and, at this point, we were told it was driver issue and they left it at that.

We chose this product because of the compatibility with other Oracle software and the ability to reduce license costs.

The initial setup was a little challenging at first as when we first started the hypervisor, we did not have support for our raid controller card so we had to learn to compile a custom kernel. However, the latest versions are much better.

We did it in-house as we wanted to gain the skills since we are a vendor for other clients. Having gone through the experience and gained a lot of knowledge in the process, we would recommend that it can be a little challenging.

We have recieved major beefits due to reduction of licensing costs for our customer due to the ability to use hard partitioning or trusted partitions.

OVM support licensing is included in the price of any Sun x86 servers. Since we can use the software for partitioning, it helps save on the licensing of other Oracle products that are licensed on a per-core basis.

We looked into KVm and Vmware however these options did not give us benefiits of hard partitioning and there were issues with certification and compatibility with oracle cots products.

We have seen stability challenges if the storage and network is not rock solid. In fact, the most robust solutions are those where the integration is already done, namely Oracle PCA, Oracle ODA, and Oracle Exalogic. These can be a little expensive for smaller setups, though the ODA is a very interesting choice in such constrained budget scenarios.

It is designed for enterprise-level virtualization, offering features such as live migration, high availability, and centralized management.

It is highly esteemed for its ability to efficiently optimize and enhance the operational speed and responsiveness of virtualized environments. It offers exceptional performance benefits.

The integration aspect may benefit from some enhancement. Incorporating analytics related to performance, particularly within the dashboard interface, would be beneficial.

I have been using it for two years.

I would rate its stability capabilities eight out of ten.

Scalability abilities are impressive, I would rate it nine out of ten.

They provide excellent support services, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

The installation takes just a few minutes, it is very prompt.

I have heard from my colleague that it comes with a high price tag. I would rate it five out of ten.

Overall, I would rate nine out of ten.

Clients who have two or more servers and want to virtualize their processes can deploy Oracle VM, the Virtual Machine. It's comparable with something called hard partitioning so that they can comply with Oracle's licensing policies.

There are other products in the market from other vendors, however, those virtualization technologies are not certified with Oracle regarding their licensing policies. Oracle VM comes with something specific called hard partitioning, which has to physically update the CPU core to virtual machines. This is very important. It allows virtual machines to comply with Oracle licensing policies. Otherwise, we can have big issues regarding product licensing.

Oracle VM as a product is very complete. All the features that come with Oracle VM are available within a single subscription. There are no hidden costs. Every feature that you want to use can be used without any hesitation. For example, if there are other products in the market, other virtualization products, they start selling only the basic module, then, if you want some feature they tell you, "No, you have to purchase another module for this feature". In Oracle VM, that is not the case. There is one subscription, one product, and it's everything you need. 

One of the features that we like in Oracle VM is live virtual machine migration. A virtual machine is either running on one physical server and can be moved from that physical server to another physical server live without shutting it down. That is the best part for us.

Apart from that, the graphical process that happens in the Oracle VM environment is also a great feature.

It's a very mature product.

The setup process is easy.

We find the solution to be stable. 

The pricing of the product is great.

Technical support is always helpful and responsive. 

The solution is at its end of life and is about to be discontinued. Whatever it is there today, version 3.4.7, that's the last version that will be issued. They are now done with it completely.

The stability on offer is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. It's very mature.

It is the best virtualization platform hypervisor that is out there. Oracle itself has used Oracle VM in all its engineer systems, as well as in the past generation of Oracle Cloud. It's very stable and very robust.

It's a highly scalable product. They have deployed a server form of 1,000 servers with Oracle VM. 

It's totally scalable. For example, today you have some generation like Intel generation processor, and after three, four, five years, you want to add new servers to the same Oracle VM environment. However, you now have the next generation, like maybe Intel servers, Intel processors, Generation 10, whatever it is. You can still mix different Intel generation processors in the same Oracle VM consideration. From that point of view, it is totally scalable. It allows different CPU generations.

At this time, we have more than 100 to 200 clients that have installed Oracle VM. The solution likely has millions of clients. 

Regarding the support from Oracle, it's the topmost quality and leading the market of VM products. It's always very good. We've been very happy with their capabilities and support.

The implementation process is very straightforward. It is very user-friendly and it is very well-documented. 

The deployment process can be handled by one or two people. It's a total single product. It's a single product that needs to be installed on the physical servers. On the station side, just you have to install Oracle VM Manager, and that's it. 

Clients who use the solution pay for a subscription. Oracle VM and Oracle Linux, they're not sold as a license. However, they have support subscription. It is so cheap. It's almost 3% cheaper than any other virtualization product that is there in the market. There are many clients who use it exclusively for virtualization; they have converted their existing virtualization solution to Oracle VM.

We're a partner, a reseller, of Oracle VM.

Oracle VM is basically an infrastructure product. It needs to be installed on-premise. For the cloud, Oracle VM is not applicable as Oracle itself virtualizes everything and provides for the clients. With Oracle VM, we have deployed it to our client infrastructure on-premise in all instances.

This product now is more than 12 to 15 years old. It has been in the market for a long time. Oracle has announced the end of life of this product. Soon, it is going to be finished. Next year, they're not going to launch any more versions of Oracle VM.

Right now, there is no advice that I can give as the product is at the end of life. If a company has Oracle VM in their environment, it is good to have an Oracle VM patch to the latest version and to keep it stable, and that's it. It's not going to be distributed anymore after next year.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

We are building a private cloud with Oracle VM. We want to implement Oracle RAC with Clusterware releases 12.2 and 18c, and with Oracle Database releases 11.2.0.4 to 18c.

We will implement a full dev/test environment with Oracle RAC and standalone databases. We will be able to fully use our ULA license agreement with Oracle and provide flexibility to our development teams.

Oracle virtual machine templates for rapid deployment are very useful. This allows us to deploy already-implemented and optimized virtual machines.

Snapshotting could be easier. And there could be more intuitive ways for cloning of virtual machines.

We primarily use it for ERP in virtual environments.

The solution is very scalable. It's easy to adjust the size up and down.

It's stable. 

It's a great tool for complex organizations.

The pricing could be cheaper. It is very pricey.

This tool isn't for every company. It's very complex. 

I've been working with the solution for nine years, more or less.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It has been reliable. I would rate the scalability at an eight out of ten. We have external partners and an internal technical team that constantly works to stabilize everything. 

The scalability is very good. You can adjust it up and down. The scalability I would rate at a ten out of ten. It's great.

We have 250 users on the solution right now. Their job titles vary from senior to middle management. It's pretty static. We do not have plans to increase usage.

We've worked with technical support. We supplement it with our technical expertise. 

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The setup is pretty straightforward. It doesn't require any maintenance once it is up and running. 

It took about three weeks to set up the VM itself, however, Oracle in general takes a long time to implement - maybe six months.

I wasn't directly involved in the deployment process and cannot speak to how it was done. 

We have 36 technical staff that help handle the deployment and maintenance. 

We had an integrator install the solution for us. 

There may be an ROI, however, it may not be a lot. It's a very expensive tool.

We currently pay yearly licensing for the solution. 

it is an expensive solution. 

We currently are in the decision-making process of whether we're going to remain with Oracle or whether we're going to look at a different ERP.

We use an older version of the solution. While the solution started as an on-premises deployment, we've since moved to a private cloud. We did that in the last 18 months. 

This is a very complex system for complex organizations. It is not something I would recommend to everyone. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We are using Oracle VM as the platform for running our Oracle databases. The templates that are available for provisioning database nodes are very helpful. Using these pre-configured templates makes the deployment process quick and efficient.

By virtualizing our database tier on generic x86 hardware, it lowered hardware costs, improved performance, scalability and maintainability. We now have more redundancy than we had with proprietary hardware.

Ease of upgrades is certainly a strong candidate for improvement. I started looking at an Oracle 12 template and I have to say I liked the Oracle 11 template better, not from a database perspective but from an OS perspective.

We initially implemented version 2.2.1 in 2010 but never took it in to production. We had issues with stability that were ultimately traced to how the LUNs were presented to the guests. We went live with version 3.0 in 2011. We're currently on version 3.2.1.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability was a major issue initially and it was traced to how the LUNs were presented to the guests. Once that was resolved, the system was pretty solid.

I did have an issue with the guests running out of swap space and located a procedure to expand swap space without having to disrupt the LUN numbering convention.

It was initially subpar.

It was initially subpar. The issue with LUN presentation was discovered by us and not by tech support. I would think tech support would have been able to at least point us in that direction. Lately, it has been difficult to route issues to the correct group. Once there, however, support has been adequate.

For our database tier, we used proprietary hardware that worked well but we were limited to that type of hardware and it was reaching end-of-life. At the time, Oracle was adamant about their hypervisor being the only one that was license-compliant, so that took us in the direction of Oracle VM. I understand Oracle has backed away from that stance for other hypervisors, but at the time we didn’t want to double or quadruple or database licensing costs.

Unfortunately, I used my VMware experience and applied it to the Oracle VM setup. Looking back, that was probably not the right approach as some things in Oracle VM are very different. The LUN presentation issue came down to poor documentation as there were two ways to present the LUNs and the documentation made it seem the improper method was the way to go.

We did it in-house, but ultimately had to get Oracle involved for the initial implementation. The version we are currently on is very stable. I should probably consider upgrading, but it’s a lower priority task right now.

The ROI was very low considering that the initial license was free.

Support costs are manageable.

As a hypervisor, it is effective, however the functionality is a step down from VMware. Upgrades are getting easier to do, but still not as easy as VMware.

The current versions seem much more stable than the earlier ones. The best advice I have is to understand the documentation and don’t take prior experience with other hypervisors in to account.

A typical database node-guest configuration:

The disks for the O/S and swap are configured as Virtual Disks while the LUNs for ASM are configured as Physical Disks.

The environment was configured primarily to host our PeopleSoft implementation as well as several smaller databases. However, PeopleSoft is being replaced with another ERP solution so this environment will be used for historical purposes. The future of the other databases is yet to be determined.