Oracle VM for x86 (Oracle VM) is a platform that provides a fully equipped environment with all the latest benefits of virtualization technology. Oracle VM enables you to deploy operating systems and application software within a supported virtualization environment. The components of Oracle VM are:
Oracle VM Manager: Provides the graphical user interface, which is an Application Development Framework (ADF) application, with a familiar web-browser based interface, to manage Oracle VM Servers, virtual machines, and resources. Use Oracle VM Manager to:
Create virtual machines
Create server pools
Power on and off virtual machines
Manage networks and storage
Import virtual machines, ISO files, and templates
Manage high availability of Oracle VM Servers, server pools, and virtual machines
Perform live migration of virtual machines
Oracle VM Server: A managed virtualization environment or part of such an environment, designed to provide a lightweight, secure, server-based platform for running virtual machines. Oracle VM Server is based upon an updated version of the underlying Xen hypervisor technology, and includes Oracle VM Agent.
Figure 1.1, “Oracle VM Architecture” shows the components of Oracle VM.
Oracle VM Manager is an Oracle WebLogic Server application running on Oracle Linux. This can be a standalone computer, or part of a virtual machine running on an instance of Oracle VM Server.
Oracle VM Server is installed on a bare metal computer, and contains the Oracle VM Agent to manage communication with Oracle VM Manager. Dom0 is an abbreviation for domain zero, the management domain with privileged access to the hardware and device drivers. DomU is an unprivileged domain with no direct access to the hardware or device drivers. A user-domain (domU) is started and managed on an Oracle VM Server by dom0.
Oracle has a unique position in the virtualization market as an Enterprise application, operating system and hardware vendor that delivers technologies across the stack. Owning the entire stack has various advantages:
integration and centralized management of all components
the ability to pre-package and distribute Oracle technologies via Oracle VM templates
integrated enterprise support across the entire technology stack, from application to hardware
Oracle VM support is an add-on component of Oracle's enterprise support package that offers an end-to-end single vendor support solution from the application to the disk. A single support call covers the entire Oracle stack which expedites problem resolution. Using Oracle support allows an Oracle support service request (SR) to transition between support teams with issues that require cross stack collaboration. For example, if you open a service request for an application issue and the root cause is at the virtualization layer then the service request will transition between the application and virtualization teams.
