Oracle VM Valuable Features

Rasika Sudasinghe - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director - Systems Architecture at MIT ESP

I like Oracle VM's vMotion and cloning features.

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Robin Saikat Chatterjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Solutioning Technology and Architeture at Tata Consultancy Services

The ability to live migrate VMs on the fly from one hypervisor to another has been very useful.The ability to pin cores to reduce licensing costs for our clients runnning core based oracel producs is also invaluable.One important factor to note is that to use live migration its important to create specifc pools devoted to certain products for exampel a pool for weblogic and a separate server pool for database. live migration is not permitted when using cpu pinnning to reduce license costs.

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Andre-Rocha - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Specialist at Deverg

VMware is user-friendly, with clear integration and detailed migration.

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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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Felipe Domingos - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT and Senior Site Reliability Engineer and IT Ops Engineer at Padrão do Fonseca

The Foundation is the most valuable feature of Oracle VM.

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Peter Karlsson - PeerSpot reviewer
System specialist at Savecore

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.

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Robin Saikat Chatterjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Solutioning Technology and Architeture at Tata Consultancy Services

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.

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Nur Hamdalah Kahfi - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead for research and development at HBM

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.

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ShitikanthaMohanty - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Managed Services Engineer at kyndryl

I found the mobile manager in Oracle VM a wonderful feature, in comparison with the command line interface.

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RK
Chief Executive Officer CEO at IT CROWD S.A.S

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. 

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RF
DBA at dbafox

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

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MK
Enterprise Architect at Assore

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.

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it_user410601 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Administrator at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AN
Senior Hyperion Systems Architect at County of Loudoun Virginia

The valuable features are the cost and the convenience of the physical machines, meaning that you can have multiple virtual machines that you can use for many other different tools, not just Hyperion. We work with different Oracle products such as EBS, OBIEE, and Hyperion and they're all integrated so we don't have to have different physical servers located in our datacenter. What you can do is create different virtual machines in the same physical server and use that for any of our products.

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MG
Auditor at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feature-wise, the solution's high availability to most servers is good. The virtual sellers don't have a host. I think that one is the most valuable for me.

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RS
Senior Manager at NCS Group

What I like best about this product is that it's free. It helps customers and end-users save money.

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BO
Director- Technical Services at Soft Alliance

I really like two features. The first one is the configuration of direct usage of logs on virtual machines. I don't need to create a repository to allocate storage to my virtual machine, rather I can just use store locally. The second one is the ease of migration or the ability to migrate VMs across hosts.

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SA
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at DHA

The live cloning within minutes is a great feature and live migration is very easy. It's the most reliable feature and it's not available in VMware or Hyper-V. Performance, scalability and flexibility are all good in this product. 

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SyedAbid Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Snr. Cloud Infrastructure Architect at LogicEra

Cloning is the best feature in Oracle VM.

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Fabrizio Bordacchini - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Systems Engineer at Cegeka

The solution's most valuable feature is live migration.

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SS
Computer Engineer at NITC: IT Agency of Government of Nepal

The product is simple and easy to use. 

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RV
Founder and President at a training & coaching company with 1-10 employees

The biggest advantage of Oracle VM is that you can separate your clusters to get your licenses agreement in scope.

Oracle VM has a bigger fence next to VMware in size, so when you install or migrate day-to-day services with Oracle-related applications, it will always look better, or be a better fit in an Oracle VM environment.

You will have a faster migration using Oracle VM because it is an Oracle product.

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DC
Manager, IT at a renewables & environment company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The solution is easy to use. You can spin one up when you need to and then shut it down. When it is shut down the cost is minimal. It makes it very easy to do testing and training, including 'what-if'' situations.

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JS
Senior System Administrator at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The solution has the exact features we need.

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it_user407490 - PeerSpot reviewer
UNIX Engineer Advisor at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It offers live migration. It is the best virtualization option for Oracle databases for Linux as Oracle recognizes hard partitions for their database licensing.

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LF
Oracle VM SME at OneNeck IT Services

The way it plays with the Oracle Database; it's all about the Oracle Database. The way it plays with the Oracle Database; it's all about the Oracle Database. The virtualization product Oracle puts out just complements the performance of the database.

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it_user427425 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unix System Engineer / Oracle Pre-sales Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Diverse guest operating system support: 10/10
  • Secure live VM migration: 8/10
  • Storage live VM migration: 8/10
  • High Availability: 10/10
  • Advanced management for zero extra cost: 10/10
  • Faster software deployment with Oracle VM templates: 10/10
  • Virtual Appliance support: 10/10
  • Rapid VM provisioning and cloning: 10/10
  • Full Stack management: 10/10

It supports diverse guest operating systems: Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Modern, low overhead architecture based on the Xen hypervisor for leading price/performance. The Xen hypervisor has been improved and included with Oracle VM Server.

Speeds application deployment with Oracle VM Templates and virtual appliances

Full Oracle VM Manager command-line interface (CLI) and Web Services API (WS-API) allow greater automation and interoperability

Advanced virtualization features including:

  • Secure live migration
  • Storage live migration
  • VM high-availability (HA)
  • Distributed Resource Scheduler(DRS)
  • Distributed Power Management(DPM)
  • Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtualto-Virtual (V2V) conversion
  • Full Stack Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager
  • Ready for OpenStack
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NH
Oracle Techno Sales consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

It's a very flexible solution because you have all the commands that you can do yourself.

The OVM Manager is very extensive and very nice to use for those who don't have a 360 view of the hard coding of things. They can still use Oracle VM to run the show, especially in the SPARC version. I've done some deployment with Oracle SPARC VM, but using Connect to connect it to Oracle OVM Manager. We use the OVM Manager to provision the SPARC server rather than going through the hard work of writing the codes of SPARC VM yourself.

All these things make Oracle VM a kind of panacea solution for me.

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JK
President with 201-500 employees

Due to the fact that it doesn't have as many, let's just say, bells and whistles, it's less distracting. It's not that difficult to master. 

The documentation that the product has on offer is very good. 

Once you get it set up, you tend to set it and forget it, and there's not a lot that you have to do.

The biggest reason for using Oracle VM is the CPU fencing or licensing of CPU cores. Oracle makes the claim that if you run on VMware, you're getting value from the processors in the cluster over and above the processes that are associated with your particular VM. Due to that stance, companies wind up licensing basically the entire cluster for VMware. If all you're doing is running Oracle's database, and it's got a particular purpose and it's very focused, you can put Oracle's VMware or Oracle's VM on the server, create your virtual machine, and set the number of CPU cores that is going to use. Oracle finds that acceptable for licensing. That will control your costs, due to the fact that suddenly you don't have to license 24 cores when in fact you're only consuming four or eight. It is used at that level as a licensing mechanism, quite frankly.

Oracle is probably the best database technology out there. Arguably, it is. I've never found anything as complete in terms of feature and functionality and sophistication. You could make arguments with niche or smaller venues. DB2 is certainly a viable alternative. So is the SQL server. Nothing scales and nothing handles complexity like Oracle. 

That said, not everybody buys Oracle for the complexity. They buy it for a particular purpose, whether they're a state and local government, or whether they're in some particular industry vertical. I work with four or five different industries. I've seen it in very small companies, in which case it's almost part of the woodwork or the fabric, so to speak. You don't really pay attention to it. On the other hand, large organizations that use it have it as it's the only game in town for certain features.

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LL
IT Team Lead Planning & Assets at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

What I like the most is the failover and the quick restore of virtual machines.

The interface is quite user-friendly. They are easy to use.

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it_user437655 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Principal Engineer/Architect, Oracle ACE Director at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

There are many valuable features. I'm only naming a few here.

First, it provides the enterprise-level hypervisor that supports virtual machines to run enterprise applications. It allows virtual machines to use a specific number of physical processors and cores to handle complex application. It also provides a high-available virtual infrastructure for applications as the virtual machines can be migrated or failed over to a different physical server to avoid a system down time.

Oracle VM simplifies the application deployment with a large number of predefined VM templates. Oracle has published VM templates for most Oracle products, and you can also build templates by yourself.

Oracle VM allows application users to pay for the software license by virtual CPUs instead of the physical CPU.

Oracle Enterprise Manager can manage and monitor the entire Oracle VM virtualization stack.

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it_user437253 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Database Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Live migrations work as advertised and, if set right, it moves VMs around to balance out the resources.

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it_user273945 - PeerSpot reviewer
ATS - Database Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

When deploying the Oracle database, you can license only the processors used for the database rather than all the processors on the box, as with VMWare. Plus, it’s free.

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EA
CTO at Datacell

Its ease of management and simplicity are most valuable. It is free, and you can provision an unlimited number of VMs at no cost for clients. They also provide perfect support.

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it_user769614 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at Mythics Inc

Oracle VM is a great free product from Oracle. I love that, when I can say "free from Oracle." It’s a full feature hypervisor. It competes well with other hypervisors in the market. However, it’s free. You don’t pay anything to use it. You can, however, pay for support if you need support. 

It offers all the features you expect in a hypervisor, using technologies that they call Live Migration. It allows me to move VMs from one machine to another. I have a technology called Site Guard which is an automation tool for automating failover to disaster recovery sites. Feature for feature, it does almost everything VMware does but cost a lot less.

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it_user429384 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I think the most intriguing thing about Oracle VM is it's an enterprise-grade hypervisor. So it handles all the virtualization, and it's free. You don't hear the word Oracle and Free a lot, but there's a lot of stuff at Oracle that is free and Oracle VM is one of those.

It does most everything that you need in the enterprise for a hypervisor for virtualization. I can run VMs in it, I can do farms of VMs, I can run Linux, I can run Windows, I can run Solaris, I have a lot of choices of operating systems. It does everything that you need it to do for most of your needs for hypervisor.

There's a lot of benefits with Oracle VM that I like. I've been working with 3.4.1 which just came out. I've been working that prior to release. There's some features there that they added like Live Storage Migration that is really a key feature for that enterprise ability in the environment. The other thing is how it handles what are called partitions, from a licensing aspect. When I have Oracle licensing challenges that I have with some of the other hypervisors, Oracle VM is able to be configured so I don't have those challenges.

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it_user100257 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Consultant & DBA - Cloud Support Engineer at Amazon Web Services

Oracle license compatibility was the deciding factor for us. It's the only way to fulfill the Oracle license policy if you want to virtualize in a x86 environment.

Also, Oracle VM performance is one of the best that I've experienced. And the pre-seeded images that Oracle puts at your disposal makes your life really ease, i.e. you can have an Oracle RAC up and running within two hours with the OVM images.

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SS
Works at hadafq8

I think the most valuable features are:

  • Excellent support team
  • Compatibility with: Linux, Windows, Ubuntu and Solaris
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it_user521613 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Unix System Administrator at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oracle VM allows you to control your licensing costs for Oracle because Oracle allows hard partitioning to control the number of cores you’re licensing.

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Suresh Bora - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Lead at iConnect IT Business Solutions DMCC

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the resource management from the OVM Manager. It makes document management very smooth. The performance is excellent.

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it_user418149 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Projects Director at a non-profit with 5,001-10,000 employees

I find the VM server features useful for moving VM’s while keeping the most important ones available.

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it_user212205 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Bare metal virtualization
  • SR-IOV
  • Live migration
  • Hardware compliance
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it_user414615 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Digital Technical Lead/Architect at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user96432 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

We were curious and wanted to test the product since we were standardizing our virtualized environment. 

We knew that VMware was feature-rich, and we wanted to look as others as well to avoid vendor lock in.

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Tanvir Siddique - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Officer at ADN Telecom

I really appreciate the stability of the solution. It's quite reliable.

There's a lot of space to customize the solution if you need to. 

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IW
‎Solutions Consultant

The Oracle VM template is the most valuable feature. 

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it_user247422 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO/Architect at Viscosity North America

Although not necessarily a feature, but rather a capability of virtualization, is the possibiltles to have high consolidation density and to take new or legacy applications and put them on high-performance computing platforms.

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it_user521604 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, ERP Technical Support at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user521643 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager & PeopleSoft Administrator at CMPA

Quick provisioning is the most valuable feature. It comes bundled with Oracle Database Appliance and we use it for our PeopleSoft instances. You could basically create an instance for your dev environment, QA, UAT and production, and do it quicker than doing it from bare metal.

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it_user436065 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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. 

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it_user522204 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Temperies

First because of the virtualization for Linux, I use just Linux basically in all VMs, a few with Windows. For Windows we decide to use a virtual box. In Linux, we choose to manage by the Command Line because my history is more Command Line.

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it_user436146 - PeerSpot reviewer
President at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

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.

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GO
Sr. Linux Systems Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The integrated web-based management console manages resources, virtual machine templates, and virtual machine images.

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AQ
Sr System Support Eng at Techaccess Pakistan

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

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it_user1017 - PeerSpot reviewer
eCommerce Expert at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
  • It provides enhancements for network and storage configuration, policy-based management for delivering application resource flexibility, and a GUI.
  • Distributed Resource Scheduling for capacity management, providing real time monitoring enabling re-balancing of a server pool.
  • Distributed Power Management for reduction of powered-on servers.
  • Centralized network configuration and management, using Oracle VM Manager
  • Storage connect framework enabling direct leveraging of resources and functionality of storage systems from Oracle VM Manager.
  • Plug ins are available for Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp and are  in development for SUN ZFS Storage Appliances and the Pillar Axiom 600 SAN storage system
  • Supports up to 160 CPUs and 2 TB memory for physical servers
  • Supports up to 128 vCPUs for Virtual Machines
  • Browser based Oracle VM Manager GUI
  • Job management framework
  • Extensive event logging
  • Performance statistics for CPU, memory, disk, and network for physical server and VMs
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it_user219747 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user448731 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle DBA at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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

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it_user181395 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems administrator - Microsoft, Redhat, VMWare, Oracle VM at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

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

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DB
Infrastructure and Security Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The interface on the newest version is good.

Oracle VM integrates well.

The network capabilities are good.

It is easy to migrate and clone VMs.

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it_user446694 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Apps Database Administrator at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Scalability
  • Administering/managing
  • Simplified network/storage operations.

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

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it_user427392 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Database Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user410328 - PeerSpot reviewer
CISO at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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

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AC
‎Senior Presales Engineer of DataCenter and Digital Transformation at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

It is easy to use, and easy to start.

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it_user448686 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Middleware Specialist at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The CPU pinning feature that allows to link a virtual CPU (VCPU) to a physical CPU core. This feature is very useful in a virtualized environment who has on premise applications licenced by restricted number of CPU cores.

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it_user436125 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Product Dev at a tech company

We use Oracle VM in our datacenter, which helps us run some hard core stuff. It's essentially Xen technology that runs on Oracle VM Server for SPARC, all of which runs on a base supported by Oracle, which is great.

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it_user1077 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
1) It allows deploying operating systems and the application software’s within supported platforms and environments.2) It includes VM Server which is designed to provide a secure, lightweight, server based platform to run and execute virtual machines. And also includes VM Manager which manages VM Servers.3) The product is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). View full review »
it_user3894 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Oracle VM is open source so it is free and readily available for downloading. It saves a lot of money instead of purchasing multiple servers, and can allow you to load more than one operating system at a time. Use of Oracle VM and installation is quite simple. It has high security and works well with a wide range of hardware. 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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.