Glossary

A privileged domain that creates and manages other logical domains and services.

An abbreviation for domain zero. The management domain with privileged access to the hardware and device drivers. Dom0 is the first domain started at boot time. Dom0 has more privileges than domU. It can access the hardware directly and can manage the device drivers for other domains. It can also start new domains.

A configurable set of resources, including memory, virtual CPUs, network devices and disk devices, in which virtual machines run. A domain is granted virtual resources and can be started, stopped and rebooted independently.

See Also: dom0

See Also: domU

The GPG key (or GnuPG key) is the key used in the GNU project's implementation of the OpenPGP key management standard. The GPG key is used to check the validity of a YUM repository, and any packages (RPMs) downloaded from the repository.

A guest operating system that runs within a domain in Oracle VM Server. A guest may be paravirtualized or hardware virtualized. Multiple guests can run on the same Oracle VM Server.

A hardware virtualized guest runs on the virtualization platform as it would on a physical host. Because the device drivers of the hardware virtualized guest are emulated, dom0 must contain device emulation code to support the guest’s device drivers. The other types of privileged instructions issued by the hardware virtualized guest, for example, for CPU or memory access, are not emulated, but are trapped, which also requires support from CPU vendors.

The guest’s OS does not require any modification to run as a hardware virtualized guest.

A virtual machine with an unmodified guest operating system. It is not recompiled for the virtual environment. There may be substantial performance penalties running as a hardware virtualized guest. Enables Microsoft Windows™™ operating system to be run, as well as legacy operating systems. Hardware virtualization is only available on Intel® VT or AMD SVM CPUs.

High availability (HA) help ensure the uninterrupted availability of a virtual machine. If HA is configured for your virtual machine, and if the Oracle VM Server on which it is running fails or shuts down, the virtual machine is restarted on another available Oracle VM Server in the server pool. The server pool must be clustered. You must enable high availability for both the server pool and the virtual machine.

The physical computer on which the software is installed. Typically used to refer to either the computer on which Oracle VM Server or Oracle VM Manager is running.

OCFS2 is a general-purpose shared-disk cluster file system for Linux capable of providing both high performance and high availability. OCFS2 is developed by Oracle and is integrated within the mainstream Linux kernel. OCFS2 is used within Oracle VM to facilitate clustered server pools, storage of virtual machine images and for the purpose of allowing guests to share the same file system.

A clustered server pool always uses an OCFS2 file system to store the cluster configuration and to take advantage of OCFS2's heartbeat facility. There are two types of heartbeats used in OCFS2 to ensure high availability:

These heartbeat functions exist directly within the kernel and are fundamental to the clustering functionality that Oracle VM offers for server pools. The server pool file system should be stored on a separate NFS server or on a small LUN if possible, as OCFS2's heartbeat facility can be disturbed by intensive I/O operations taking place on the same physical storage.

A storage repository configured on a LUN-based repository must be linked to a clustered server pool due to the nature of the OCFS2 file system. As a result, LUN-based repositories cannot be shared between multiple server pools, although it is possible to move an OCFS2 repository from one server pool to another.

For more information on OCFS2, please refer to https://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/.

An application installed with Oracle VM Server. The Oracle VM Agent receives and processes management requests, and provides event notifications and configuration data to the Oracle VM Manager. Oracle VM Manager manages the virtual machines running on Oracle VM Server by communicating with Oracle VM Agent. It contains three components: master Oracle VM Server, Utility Server, and Virtual Machine Server.

The Oracle VM Manager is the management platform, which offers an easy-to-use, web-browser interface as well as a command-line interface (CLI). The Oracle VM Manager tracks and manages the resources available in your virtual environment. The user interface, which is an Application Development Framework (ADF) web application, allow you to easily manage Oracle VM Server pools. Manages virtual machine life cycle, including creating virtual machines from templates or from installation media, deleting, powering off, uploading, deployment and live migration of virtual machines. Manages resources including ISO files, templates and shared virtual disks.

A self-contained virtualization environment designed to provide a lightweight, secure, server-based platform for running virtual machines. The Oracle VM Server comprises a hypervisor and a privileged domain (called dom0) that allow multiple domains or virtual machines (that is, Linux, Solaris, Windows, and so on) to run on one physical machine. Includes Oracle VM Agent to enable communication with Oracle VM Manager.

The Oracle VM Server for x86 incorporates an open source Xen hypervisor component, which has been customized and optimized to integrate into the larger, Oracle - developed virtualization server. The Oracle VM Server for x86 is also responsible for access and security management and generally acts as the server administrative entity, because the hypervisor’s role is limited.

On Oracle VM Server for SPARC systems, the SPARC hypervisor is built into the SPARC firmware and is generally referred to as the Logical Domains Manager (LDOM). As with the Xen hypervisor, each virtual machine is securely executed on a single computer and runs its own guest Oracle Solaris operating system

Logically an autonomous region that contains one or more physical Oracle VM Servers. Presents a unified view of the storage where the virtual machines reside, and groups the users of these virtual machines into a single community called a group, in which each user is a server pool member.

Each server pool can have up to 32 physical servers. Each Oracle VM Server can be a member of only one server pool. The server pool is the operational unit of Oracle VM. Policies are configured and enforced at the server pool level.

A minimum cluster of three Oracle VM Server nodes in each server pool is strongly recommended for high availability. If one node in the cluster experiences a hardware failure or is shut down for maintenance, failover redundancy is preserved with the other two nodes. Having a third node in the cluster also provides reserve capacity for production load requirements.

A guest operating system and the associated application software that runs within Oracle VM Server. May be paravirtualized or hardware virtualized machines. Multiple virtual machines can run on the same Oracle VM Server.

A layer-2 network may be segregated into partitions, at the switch or router, so that network traffic is isolated to a distinct broadcast domain. VLANs can be tagged so that a trunk can transport data for all of the different VLANs in a network.

VLANs are commonly used in large networks to help simplify network design, provide mechanisms to achieve better scalability, and to improve security.

Oracle WebLogic Server is a platform that includes an application server that can run java applications within a web-based framework. Oracle VM Manager runs as an application within Oracle WebLogic Server, taking advantage of many of Oracle WebLogic Server's many features to deliver a robust web UI through which Oracle VM can be fully managed.

The installation process behind Oracle VM Manager automatically installs and configures Oracle WebLogic Server on the system where Oracle VM Manager is installed. During this process, a weblogic user is set up within Oracle WebLogic Server to manage Oracle WebLogic Server configuration and to administer the underlying system. An admin user is also set up within Oracle WebLogic Server and is given permission to access the Oracle VM Manager application. A typical setup uses the same password for both of these users, although this is not always the case and it is possible to configure a different password for each user depending on your requirements.

In general, users of the Oracle VM Manager application should avoid attempting to access the underlying Oracle WebLogic Server, or to change any configuration parameters here without guidance from Oracle Support.