Oracle VM Room for Improvement
Oracle VM is an obsolete product in that no new features are coming for it. The new version is called Oracle KVM. The only improvement needed for Oracle VM is the look and feel of the interface. When comparing the user console with vCenter, the interface used to control VMware environments, Oracle VM's user interface is not that rich in terms of user experience. If Oracle could improve that, it would be good.
Besides that, we don't know if the solution comes with a roadmap because it comes free of charge with Oracle x86. We can't expect something similar to vCenter in KVM, but at least if you can improve what users can experience, then it would be good.
View full review »- ability to use live migration and cpu pinning together would be very useful. for example reserving certain physical cpus on the target system prior tothe live migration for example.
Oracle VM is not very stable. When you encounter any issue, it's unclear what is happening. Many websites offer various products with the same name, which can be confusing.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Oracle VM
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Oracle VM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
DK
Dimitar Kavrakov
CEO at iSolute Ltd
The automatic start of the product to work as a background process has shortcomings and needs improvement. If you restart the machine to implement a feature through auto-start, you should get a tray icon or a service without the need for any additional tuning or scripts.
The documentation for implementation could be improved because we were not able to find an easy way to implement our company's features due to a lack of understanding.
View full review »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.
View full review »The solution is an outdated Xen-based application.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.
View full review »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.
View full review »The integration aspect may benefit from some enhancement. Incorporating analytics related to performance, particularly within the dashboard interface, would be beneficial.
View full review »There's room for improvement in terms of productivity in Oracle VM, because I find Nutanix has better productivity.
Oracle VM can have future improvements through the addition of newer features.
I'm also looking forward to a newer product version for Oracle VM, including making it compatible with Kubernetes and other modern technologies.
View full review »RK
RaviKasibhatla
Chief Executive Officer CEO at IT CROWD S.A.S
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.
RF
Ray Fox
DBA at dbafox
Snapshotting could be easier. And there could be more intuitive ways for cloning of virtual machines.
View full review »MK
Mauritz Kloppers
Enterprise Architect at Assore
The pricing could be cheaper. It is very pricey.
This tool isn't for every company. It's very complex.
View full review »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.
View full review »AN
Adnan Nasir
Senior Hyperion Systems Architect at County of Loudoun Virginia
Initially, you did not have an option in Oracle VM to build an image and just restore into a different physical or virtual environment, but now the option is included. That's one thing I thought wasn't there and wanted to have, because we are planning to move our Essbase database server from physical to virtual, and I thought it's not going to be easier because you can't just export the physical server and just import everything into the virtual machine. Now the integration is there. You can export the physical server's configuration, their registries and everything, the databases and then just import them to virtual machines. That's the only lacking feature I thought was with VM, but they have included it.
It still takes some time and the valuations have to be done by the admin, so it still is taking more time. That's, I think, one of the challenges that we recently had when we were talking to our administration team. The Windows and Linux admins took some time, like a couple of days, to build servers for us, which as far as I think being an IT person, it's a virtual machine. Once you have the image it should be easy enough to import it into the new virtual machine, built up like a snapshot.
I think they could make the implementation faster. It's still taking some time, which should be eliminated in the future, I think, and it will be because I've seen a lot of improvement already.
View full review »If there are issues with the storage, then all the machines go down, even if I have a backup solution in place. So I have to restart the server, and then it starts working again. It has happened a few times, and it wasn't very comfortable.
Apart from that, it's an okay solution for deploying VMs or switching them to another server if you have availability installed, and so on.
I'm not familiar with the latest version. There might be some new functionalities that we would like to have in our current solution. For example, having better backup options for virtual machines, such as online backup, would be cool to have.
This is something that I would like to see in our virtualization solution.
View full review »MG
reviewer2142180
Auditor at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
I know they moved from OVM, and I think right now, they are moving into KVM or something else. I don't have much to say about the improvement if they are already shifted to the KVM.
The configuration can be more flexible. It is a necessity.
View full review »RS
Rozaino Sarbini
Senior Manager at NCS Group
I would like to see better orchestration, as it would help in terms of setup.
Better automation would help in terms of provisioning and configuring new VMs.
Oracle VM should be more feature-rich.
Using this product should come at no charge, regardless of the platform.
View full review »BD
Bogdan Dumitrache
Database Specialist at SIVECO Romania SA
Oracle VM needs to add a backup feature.
View full review »BO
Babatunde Ojumu
Director- Technical Services at Soft Alliance
An expanded data transfer option is one of the features I would like to have added. It should allow virtual machines in one site, and replicate them to a different side.
SA
Syed Abid Hussain
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at DHA
All features are ok. just need to add performance monitoring tools for all running VMs & reporting facility as well.
Oracle VM should have centralized storage, without which you can't clone or move one VM to another. If you have two Oracle KVM hypervisors without central storage and want to replicate a clone from one hypervisor to another, there is no technology to do that.
Oracle VM needs to change or refine its partition system. Oracle OVM takes five minutes to one hour to clone a system.
View full review »The solution's management, hardware, and backup recovery features could be better.
View full review »SS
Sumitra Subedi
Computer Engineer at NITC: IT Agency of Government of Nepal
The tool's price and stability could be better.
View full review »EF
Emmanuel FOMUDE
Senior Oracle Database Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
I would like to simplify the processes to implement. When you want to implement Oracle, the steps that you perform could be simplified.
The usage could be easier, and more user-friendly.
View full review »RV
reviewer996648
Founder and President at a training & coaching company with 1-10 employees
The performance could be better because I need to purchase a lot of CPUs to perform in the workbench.
View full review »DC
reviewer1029540
Manager, IT at a renewables & environment company with 5,001-10,000 employees
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.
View full review »JS
reviewer1395378
Senior System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The solution lacks a lot of extra key features.
If you do a gap analysis between VMware and Oracle VM, you can't do VM Snapshot. That's one thing you can't do. It's a sort of a snapshot, but it's not really Snapshot technology. It requires that you're running on CFS-2.
There's an overall lack of integration with other software and there is also a lack of integration with backup solutions.
Oracle has stated that they intend to improve the solution. I'm not sure when this will happen, however. It may have been declared end of life, therefore, I can't imagine that they'll actually add to it at this point.
View full review »There are several VMware features missing. I haven't done an in-depth analysis to understand which exact ones they are.
View full review »LF
Luis Fregoso
Oracle VM SME at OneNeck IT Services
I would say third-party plugins to other storage vendors. There are a lot of converged infrastructure setups; one that we have, multiple different hardware vendors. So that would be something we could definitely be looking for.
Also, the monitoring aspect. Right now, there's a hook in to OEM, but I would like to see that part a little bit more mature so that it's a standalone.
The only improvement that I want to see is more flexibility in configuring and managing Oracle VM server with a CLI if there is no Oracle VM Manager. Oracle restricts you to managing the Oracle VM server via Oracle VM Manager and not through a CLI on Oracle VM Server.
View full review »NH
Ngole Ngole
Oracle Techno Sales consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Something that could be improved are the snapshots that go in the ZFS Storage. If you want to enjoy Oracle VM, you will definitely want it to go together with ZFS Storage to maximize on the snapshot facility.
In other virtualization like VMware, you can do the snapshot right at the level of VMware itself. You'll get customers complaining that, "We can't take a snapshot just like we do on our normal VMware solution."
I always advise my customers to go with ZFS Storage. If you maybe had a snapshot on the Oracle VM itself, it would make sense.
View full review »JK
reviewer1184424
President with 201-500 employees
I've found that using Oracle VM is like stepping back in time. It's not kept up with technology. The only reason anyone uses it is that they're afraid of Oracle's licensing. Oracle has a tremendously bad licensing approach.
VMware, in comparison, has got so many different features that you can use in ESXi for example. Oracle is a lot simpler with fewer features.
I find their VM backup features to be somewhat difficult. I wish it was a little easier to back up and clone.
It would be ideal if Oracle could grow to take on VMware directly, in order to foster more competition.
View full review »LL
reviewer1425744
IT Team Lead Planning & Assets at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Based on my experience, I don't do enough to actually dislike any of the features that I use.
When deploying machines, we had a couple of issues, where it took up two to three times before it ran with no issues.
Integration with cloud products would be beneficial. At the moment, a lot of companies actually have that available with on-premise.
The security improvement around it, to integrate it with the cloud. It's something that every company is now focusing on. That would be the way to go.
View full review »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.
View full review »Development of the product seems slow, but then again, I do not want a rushed product. Oracle states that this is their solution for their products, but Windows is fully supported. It may not have all the features of VMware, but those features come at a cost (monetarily and performance-wise). I want a rock solid foundation, and I don't want a bunch of hooks into the foundation of my Windows infrastructure.
View full review »I’d like to see an improvement in read latency and write bandwidth to meet or exceed VMware's performance, and also smooth out the variance in both. People are choosing VMware over OVM left and right despite the licensing issues. OVM needs to be faster than anyone else, especially with Oracle’s own products.
View full review »EA
Eric Addo
CTO at Datacell
The user interface of the version that we have requires improvement. They have already improved the user interface by moving away from OVMM to OVM or KVM which uses the oVirt engine and has a completely new feel for the user interface, but we are yet to migrate to that. The new UI is much better and more intuitive.
I would like it to be simple. It is serving all of our needs, and I don't think it is necessary to keep adding. We are able to provision a VM in ten minutes, and provisioning it in five minutes will not have any added benefit.
Just keep it simple.
View full review »One is the hypervisor. Right now, it’s all using Xen. What would be really helpful is to have some choice, and the underlying hypervisor technology use KVM which is very popular with certain workloads.
There are also some features around it, extracting virtual machines and managing it, that could show some improvement.
There’s still some area for improvement with some of the newer technologies.
View full review »What features would I like to see in Oracle VM in future releases? I can think of a ton of them. Some of them are just coming out. Better disaster recovery, though they just introduced a new technology called Oracle VM Site Guard that's helped a lot in disaster recovery. I would like to see better integration to Oracle networking hardware, so that would be nice, the integration between the Oracle physical networking hardware, the S2 switches would be nice for that integration.
View full review »The product needs to improve the backup and snapshot functionalities. This is the main disadvantage compared to other hypervisors on the market.
View full review »SS
Sandeep Shenoy
Works at hadafq8
The management can be improved more, and become more agile. It would be nice for it to become more rich in terms of UI. In addition, the replication to disaster recovery needs improvement.
View full review »I would like them to include greater flexibility. I would like them to include multitudinous users and permissions capabilities. I would like them to design the system so that it is optimized for 10GB Ethernet at a minimum as opposed to 1GB Ethernet.
Oracle VM does not have what is commonly called role-based user permissions.
Everyone logs into the management console as an ‘admin’ and has full control over everything, as opposed to VMware, where you can (for example) give a particular user control over a certain virtual machine but no others. You can even give different grades of control, so a user would be able to reboot ‘his’ virtual machine but could not add disk space to it; or a storage administrator might have the right to add and delete storage but not affect any virtual machines at all.
I had a problem with Ethernet timeouts on my 10gb Ethernet connections and when I contacted them, they informed me that they had optimized their settings and values in the operating system kernel for 1gb Ethernet as was standard at the time. They gave me a listing of changes to the operating system that might optimize it for 10gb, but that might cause problems if and when I were to upgrade the system. The Oracle VM Server is not meant to be modified by the user; it is the hypervisor, and I didn’t wish to engage in the danger of modifying my base system.
I also am skilled in VMware. VMware costs about 10 times as much but also is about 10 times more usable. If they could learn that usability that VMware has, that would be wonderful.
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.
View full review »I would like to see a proper and stable client to access Oracle VM Manager. Installation documents should be improved regarding storage details and shared cluster disks.
View full review »- 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.
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.
View full review »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.
View full review »IW
Isaac Nelson Walulya
Solutions Consultant
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.
View full review »I think it needs a more simplified way of provisioning external storage networks. Those areas in performance, especially triaging performance at the hypervisor layer, need some improvement.
View full review »We're using NFS, which I've been informed might not be the best file system to be using. However, with the latest version, apparently, there are supposed to be some updates that will help with the drivers to use NFS; it would make it more stable and better, performance-wise, as well.
View full review »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.
View full review »I think more Command-Line options for the product, for deployments. I know that the latest version includes OpenStack support so you can manage things in any kind of OpenStack-certified solution. But I prefer to use Command Line traditionally with shells.
View full review »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.
View full review »GO
SrLinuxS2a6c
Sr. Linux Systems Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
With our current OVM Manager version, migrating a VM from one repository to another repository was really complicated, especially editing and manually matching the configuration.
View full review »AQ
Awais Kazi
Sr System Support Eng at Techaccess Pakistan
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
View full review »MS
reviewer613782
Manager-Data Center at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »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.
View full review »DB
reviewer1259991
Infrastructure and Security Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
There have been some security issues in the past.
Having even more integration with other products would be an improvement.
View full review »There are some minor bugs with the manual admin from Hyp versus GUI Admin.
View full review »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.
View full review »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.
View full review »Resizing of Virtual disk needs to be improved, as does hot swap for VCPU and RAM.
View full review »Xen running on Oracle VM differs greatly depending on whether you're using version 2 or version 3 in terms of directories, images, etc. So it takes some getting used to because they weren't release with consistent interfaces.
View full review »
1) Drag and Drop feature is not stable, at times the UI becomes inconsistent, when using this feature.2) Connecting VM Manager in a web browser twice in a different tab or window provides unexpected display issues.3) When upgrading the VM server to newer version from ISO image and CD, though new entries are created in Oracle Linux grub menu, however entries from previous installation are not removed.All and all the product offers number of benefits to the users who often use multiple platforms. Though there are some disadvantages of the product which can be fixed with some workarounds.
View full review »
Oracle VM has some of its versions supporting only English language. So you can think of what happens to non-English speakers. Using it on Web services APIs -- standard access is enabled by default, which is a security flaw.Although open source, downloading some of the applications is very tedious because they are too large.
View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Oracle VM
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Oracle VM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.