Oracle VM (Virtual Machine)

Recently oracle announced Oracle VM (Data sheet), a server virtualization product. According to what i’ve read it’s based on Xen. This shouldn’t be a big surprise as RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 includes Xen, and Oracle’s Linux is, let’s put this nicely, based on RedHat Enterprise Linux.

The good news is that Oracle is supporting their products in virtualized servers. In the past we’ve had problems getting support for vmware based virtual servers. At least now we have a supported solution, which makes it a lot easier to roll out virtual environments.

The Oracle VM FAQ contains some surprising info. For one, Oracle claims that their virtualization product is three times more efficient than existing x86 server virtualizing products. This means that they’ve been improving Xen, as i thought that vmware had a better performance than Xen.

Oracle VM also supports moving live virtual machine from one physical host to another. I didn’t know Xen could do this, but Xen’s wiki page tells me differently.

More info, and a screenshot of the management console on Rittman’s blog.

Update:
Xen in Oracle Enterprise Linux must be different from Oracle VM, as virtualization is only supported for products running on Oracle VM. Running Oracle RDBMS, Oracle Application Server or any of the other products on Xen in Oracle Enterprise Linux isn’t supported. Weird. Do you think that there is a reason why these products could be supported when running on Oracle Enterprise Linux as a virtualization host?

Btw, the Oracle VM press release confirms that Oracle VM is based on Xen. Which makes you think, what did Citrix buy?

Here’s a screenshot of the Oracle VM manager interface taken from the Data sheet: