What is Oracle VM?
According to Oracle, Oracle VM is a free virtualization platform that will speed up your delivery and productivity time, and make managing your virtual machines oh so easy. Our tests revealed that it is more along the lines of a painstakingly irritating installation on more machines than necessary, which yield laughably bad results.
What’s Wrong?
For those of you that know Oracle, you will know them for their database products. Why they ever tried to get into an already competitive virtual machine market with a product that doesn’t work, we will never know.
What’s Right?
Um, we’re…still…trying…to…find that out ourselves!
What Happened?
After two days of configuring and re-installing the Oracle VM Management tools, which had to be installed on Oracle’s own flavor of Red Hat Linux, we figured out that we were missing the most critical component, the actual Oracle server. After installing that on ANOTHER machine, we attempted to create a simple VM. Here is what we found:
- Oracle won’t let you name a VM with spaces
- Running the bare-bone hypervisor on 1 GB machine left me only 483 MB of RAM to use on my VM. In perspective, I created VM with 768 MB of RAM with VMware ACE on my 1 GB Windows XP machine, and it ran fine
- Oracle requires an ISO file to use as the installation media, and won’t let you use a physical disk to use as the installation source. Moreover, you can’t simply upload the ISO file. No, you must use either FTP or HTTP to point to the ISO file. This essentially means that you need ANOTHER ADDITIONAL machine to house the ISO files.
After all of this effort, my VM instantly errored out upon powering off. Checking the error log (which took 25 minutes to find) reveled that some type of error relating to Oracle trying to join the VM to a completely non-existent domain. This issue occurred on both XP and Ubuntu Linux. The other irritating thing is that when asked what type of OS the system will run, you essentially have two options. Two different flavors of Linux server. No option for a Microsoft product. No option for a client OS. Nice!
Final Thoughts
Oracle VM is the most horrible product I have personally ever used. It does (or from my tests, can’t even do) with three to four machines, what VMware or Citrix can do with only one machine. Why Oracle ever felt the need to put out a virtualization product is beyond this tester. Some products are free, and they work wonderfully. This is not one of those products!
If you are looking for something to do, with the pre-knowledge that your VMs will never work, then Oracle is your product!
I’d be curious to hear of anyone that has actually used, or even tested this in a real-life environment?
Hi Mike
I agree with much of your comment – and the restrictions of Oracle VM around such thinks as cdrom devices and iso files is painful. However – if you are prepared to extend into the pain and learn its detail – its actually not too bad a product. Nowhere near as flexible as ECX – but provides great integration and support for oracle products.
Agreed its not for the faint hearted and requires some internal linux knowledge – but once working its very stable, flexible and performs greate – we have 12 VM’s runnign a multitude of products (enterprise class) for internal development.
John
John:
I’d be interested to know why your company picked Oracle VM given all the other options out there? Oracle doesn’t exactly stand out in the virtualization market. They’re very good in the database market, though (and I’m sure you guys run Oracle databases).
I am currently piloting OracleVM for a large Enterprise. I find it to be very easy to work with and extremely stable.
I just don’t think it is meant for a small infrastructure. It supports up to 32G of storage and 32 CPUs.
Currently, I have a small farm of 10 Linux instances. I have ganglia running performance testing and TSM for backup. Multipathing works and I have bonding network interfaces.
I see this product leaving VMware in the dust!
We did a POC with OracleVM back in September 2008. We discovered a bug – here is the SR we opened on Metalink:
“We modify a VM’s vm.cfg file to include another disk. Using “xmn create” the VM
starts up and everything is fine. When using VM Manager to start the VM, the
vm.cfg file is first put back to it’s original configuration (the second disk
is no longer there) and the VM is started.
We want to be able to make changes to the vm.cfg file, and have them stay there when starting the VM from within VM Manager.”
Oracle said this was an enhancement – not a bug. We diagree because Xen worked fine with it – it was only Oracle’s changes to Xen that didn’t work. We did have a work around (symbolic links) but we didn’t want to stray too far. We also found little to know utilities that would allow us to do hot backups or BMR type backups so we could rebuild a vm in the event of a diaster.
After 3 months went by and little to no progress was made – we abandoned the POC. OracleVM has potential, but it still has a long way to go for mission critical applicaions.
This is Oracle’s MO. Release the product “fast” with bugs, and then fix it later. It will take 3 to 4 major releases of Oracle VM before I would even consider it. They are also out there buying companies like Virtual Iron, Sun etc and they will absorb all of it into one product. I imagine it can’t get much worse
We are using Oracle VM 2.2 on IBM HS22 blade servers connected to SUN Storagetek6580 storage. We have faced many issues with oracle VMs. The major issues are abrupt VM server reboots one a while that results in all running VMs instantly shuting down. oracle support could not get into the root cause of the issues. Other points to consider are the multipathing and Network bonding configuration need to be done manually (Linux expertsise required to do all this). Oracle VM is much much far behind VMware.