Oracle® VM Manager Release Notes

Release 2.2

E15440-01

Oracle® VM

Manager Release Notes

Release 2.2

E15440-01

October 2009

This document contains information on Oracle VM Manager Release 2.2.0 and supersedes the product documentation. This document contains last-minute information that could not be included the Oracle VM Manager documentation. Read this document before installing Oracle VM Manager. This document may be updated after it is released. To check for updates to this document, and to view other Oracle documentation, refer to the Documentation section on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Web site:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/

This Release Note is intended for users, and administrators of Oracle VM Manager. It includes a brief introduction of the product, and describes potential issues and the corresponding workarounds you may encounter while using Oracle VM Manager.

Oracle recommends that you read this document before installing and using Oracle VM Manager.

This document includes the following topics:

- Overview of Oracle VM Manager

- Known Limitations and Workarounds

- Upgrading to Release 2.2

1 Overview of Oracle VM Manager

Oracle VM Manager is a server-based user interface, which is a standard Application Development Framework (ADF) web application to manage Oracle VM Servers. Oracle VM Manager provides virtual machine life cycle management, including creating virtual machines from installation media or from templates. It provides features such as power on, power off, deleting, importing, deploying, and live migration of virtual machines. Oracle VM Manager also effectively manages resources, including ISO files, virtual machine templates, and shared virtual disks.

2 Known Limitations and Workarounds

This section discusses the known limitations, in this version of Oracle VM Manager, and the suggested workarounds that may solve the issues. This section includes the following topics:

- User Interface Languages

- Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Set Up

- Changing the OVS User Password

- Importing a Virtual Machine Template or Image May Fail During Oracle VM Manager RPM Upgrade

- Account Data Passed to a New Browser

- Duplicate Server Registration Errors

- New Server Pools Not Displayed

- Servers in a Server Pool Should Have CPUs in the Same CPU Family

- Upgrading Oracle VM Server to Support New Features

- Cannot Perform Any Tasks Before Server Pool Master Turns Active

- Load Balancing Across Server Pools Not Supported

- Cannot Create a Virtual Machine from Oracle VM Server Image

- Hardware Requirements for Hardware Virtualized Guests

- Importing a Virtual Machine Image Fails if Configuration File Name Not vm.cfg

- Importing a Resource May Fail if Size 4GB or Larger

- Status Bar Inactive When Importing an ISO File

- Login May Fail After Re-installing Oracle VM Manager

- Accessing a Virtual Machine Console

- Hard Disk Limit in Virtual Machines

- Network Card Limit in Virtual Machines

- Virtual Network Interface (VIF) Required When Starting Through PXE

- Fully Virtualized (ioemu) Type Required for Hardware Virtualized Machines When Starting Through PXE

- Restart Required to Support Decreasing Memory

- Live Migration Must be in Same Server Pool

- Virtual SCSI Disks as Boot Devices Not Supported

- NFS Mount For Shared Storage in a Server Pool Requires The NO_ROOT_SQUASH Parameter

2.1 User Interface Languages

The current release of Oracle VM Manager only supports the English language.

2.2 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Set Up

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) access, and standard access, to the Oracle VM Manager Web services API is enabled by default when you install Oracle VM Manager. That is, you can use the following URLs to connect to the Web services APIs:

https://ovm_manager_host:4443/OVSWS/WS_name.wsdl

http://ovm_manager_host:8888/OVSWS/WS_name.wsdl

If you enable SSL when you install Oracle VM Manager, you can use the following URL to connect to Oracle VM Manager:

https://ovm_manager_host:4443/OVS

If you do not enable SSL when you install Oracle VM Manager, you can use the standard access URL to connect to Oracle VM Manager:

http://ovm_manager_host:8888/OVS

Previous versions of Oracle VM Manager allowed access to both http and https URLs when SSL was enabled.

Workaround: To enable access to both the http and https URLs, manually configure SSL in OC4J. See "Enabling or Disabling SSL" in the Oracle VM Manager Installation Guide.

2.3 Changing the OVS User Password

If you change the password for the OVS database user account, you must also change the password for the JDBC data source connection. To change the JDBC data source connection information, log in to http://127.0.0.1:8888/em and update the password for the JDBC data source connection.

2.4 Importing a Virtual Machine Template or Image May Fail During Oracle VM Manager RPM Upgrade

Importing a Virtual Machine template or image during an upgrade of the Oracle VM Manager RPM may fail and the import cannot be cancelled. The OC4J instance is stopped during the upgrade and does not gracefully restart the import, or any other similar process.

Workaround: Make sure all import or similar operations are completed before upgrading the Oracle VM Manager RPM.

2.5 Account Data Passed to a New Browser

If you are using Mozilla Firefox, you can paste the URL of any Oracle VM Manager page into a new browser, and open that page directly without login. In this case, the account data is passed to the new browser. This may cause security problems.

Workaround: If you want to clear the account data, from the Tools menu, select Clear Private Data. Now if you paste the URL into a new browser, you are prompted to enter the user name and password to log in.

You can configure what private data to clear when closing Mozilla Firefox.

To select private data options, from the Tools menu, select Options..., and click Privacy. Select either or both of the following:

- If you want to clear the private data each time you close Mozilla Firefox, select Always clear my private data when I close Firefox.
To customize the private data you want to clear, click Settings.... On the Clear Private Data dialog box, select the data you want to clear.

- If you want to choose the private data you need to clear when closing Mozilla Firefox, select Ask me before clearing private data.

2.6 Cannot Create a Server Pool

If you create a server pool and enable High Availability, the following error may occur:

OVM-1011 OVM Manager communication with hostname for operation Pre-check cluster root for Server Pool failed: <Exception: SR 'path' not supported: type 'ocfs2.local' not in  ['nfs','ocfs2.cluster']>

This may occur if a local OCFS2 storage repository exists, and the cluster root is set to another storage repository.

Workaround: Delete the local OCFS2 storage repository and create the server pool again. For information on deleting a storage repository, see the Oracle VM Server User's Guide.

2.7 Duplicate Server Registration Errors

An Oracle VM Server is not allowed to be registered more than once in Oracle VM Manager. Duplicate registration may result in errors and unstable management of the Oracle VM Server.

2.8 New Server Pools Not Displayed

Though you have created the Server Pool successfully, due to the delay in cache refresh, the cache may not have received the data yet, therefore the newly created Server Pool may not be listed. This also applies to other new servers, groups, users, and so on.

Workaround: Log out of Oracle VM Manager, and log in again. The new Server Pool is now listed.

2.9 Servers in a Server Pool Should Have CPUs in the Same CPU Family

The servers in a Server Pool should have CPUs in the same CPU family. If they are not in the same CPU family, some operations such as live migration may fail. Though the CPUs should be in the same CPU family, they may have differing configurations, such as different number of cores, or amount of memory. It is recommended that the servers in a Server Pool are identical.

2.10 Upgrading Oracle VM Server to Support New Features

It is recommended to upgrade the Oracle VM Server software running on Virtual Machine Servers, Utility Servers, and the Server Pool Master to Release 2.2 in order to use the new 2.2 features.

2.11 Cannot Perform Any Tasks Before Server Pool Master Turns Active

After restarting Oracle VM Agent, you cannot perform any tasks before the Server Pool Master changes to the Active status.

2.12 Load Balancing Across Server Pools Not Supported

The Server Pool Master provides virtual machine load balancing only among the Oracle VM Servers within the same server pool. Oracle VM Manager does not support load balancing for cross-server-pool operations like deploying, cloning, or saving the virtual machine as a template. For example, to deploy a virtual machine to another Server Pool, Oracle VM Manager deploys it on the default partition in the target Server Pool. If sufficient storage is unavailable in the partition, the operation fails and Oracle VM Manager does not attempt to deploy it on another partition of the storage in the Server Pool.

2.13 Cannot Create a Virtual Machine from Oracle VM Server Image

Creating a virtual machine including the Oracle VM Server image inside the virtual machine image is not supported. You cannot create a virtual machine that has Oracle VM Server installed in it.

2.14 Hardware Requirements for Hardware Virtualized Guests

Creating hardware virtualized guests requires the Oracle VM Server has an Intel-VT (code named as Vanderpool) or AMD-V (code named as Pacifica) CPU. See the Oracle VM Server Installation Guide for a list of supported hardware.

2.15 Importing a Virtual Machine Image Fails if Configuration File Name Not vm.cfg

If the virtual machine configuration file is named something other than vm.cfg, Oracle VM Manager may not recognize the configuration file when importing the image. The virtual machine image is not uploaded.

Workaround: Make sure that the virtual machine configuration file is named vm.cfg.

2.16 Importing a Resource May Fail if Size 4GB or Larger

Importing a resource (for example a template or virtual machine image) that is 4GB or larger, may fail if the remote web server is Apache 2.1 or lower.

Workaround: Upgrade the remote web server to Apache 2.2 or higher.

2.17 Status Bar Inactive When Importing an ISO File

The status bar does not reflect the true import percentage progress, or is inactive, when importing an ISO file using FTP, and occasionally using HTTP.

2.18 Login May Fail After Re-installing Oracle VM Manager

Login to Oracle VM Manager may fail after manually removing the existing Oracle VM Manager RPM packages from the host computer and re-installing them.

Workaround: Do not manually remove the Oracle VM Manager packages. To uninstall Oracle VM Manager, run the Oracle VM Manager installation script, runInstaller.sh, and choose Uninstall Oracle VM Manager. To re-install, run the runInstaller.sh script again and choose the Install Oracle VM Manager option.

2.19 Accessing a Virtual Machine Console

Oracle VM Manager requires a VNC browser plug-in to enable remote access to the virtual machine (guest) consoles.

- Linux users who access virtual machines using Mozilla Firefox must download and install the ovm-console package on the client side before running Oracle VM Manager. Download it at http://oss.oracle.com/oraclevm/manager/RPMS
Select the right type of ovm-console package according to the CPU architecture on the client.

For an i386 computer, download ovm-console-1.0.0-2.i386.rpm.

For an x86_64 computer, download ovm-console-1.0.0-2.x86_64.rpm.

- To enable non-Linux users to access the virtual machine consoles, download tightvnc-java-1.2.9-3.noarch.rpm from http://oss.oracle.com/oraclevm/manager/RPMS and install it on the Oracle VM Manager host.

2.20 Hard Disk Limit in Virtual Machines

A hardware virtualized machine may have up to four IDE disks (including CD-ROM and shared virtual disks), and seven SCSI disks.

For a paravirtualized machine, you need to restart it for the disk changes to take effect.

2.21 Network Card Limit in Virtual Machines

Oracle VM Manager supports eight network cards for each virtual machine. However, the system library does not allow users to add more than three network cards when creating a virtual machine from installation media.

Workaround: After the virtual machine is created, add up to five new network cards by editing the virtual machine in Oracle VM Manager.

2.22 Virtual Network Interface (VIF) Required When Starting Through PXE

When starting a virtual machine through Preboot Execution Environment (PXE), make sure there is at least one valid virtual network interface (VIF) available.

2.23 Fully Virtualized (ioemu) Type Required for Hardware Virtualized Machines When Starting Through PXE

When starting a hardware virtualized machine through PXE, the VIF type must be fully virtualized (ioemu).

2.24 Restart Required to Support Decreasing Memory

For both hardware virtualized, and paravirtualized guests, any new memory setting must be less than or equal to the maximum available memory. For hardware virtualized guests, increasing or decreasing the memory requires a restart of the guest. For paravirtualized guests, no restart is required.

2.25 Live Migration Must be in Same Server Pool

Oracle VM Manager does not permit cross-Server Pool migration. Users can only migrate a virtual machine from one Virtual Machine Server to another within the same Server Pool, provided these two servers have the same CPU architecture.

2.26 Virtual SCSI Disks as Boot Devices Not Supported

When creating a virtual disk for a hardware virtualized machine, the option to create both IDE and SCSI disks is provided. IDE disks can be used in all cases. SCSI disks should only be used as non-boot devices for pure hardware virtualized machines which do not have paravirtualized drivers installed.

2.27 NFS Mount For Shared Storage in a Server Pool Requires The NO_ROOT_SQUASH Parameter

An NFS share used as shared storage in a server pool must contain the NO_ROOT_SQUASH parameter in the /etc/exports file. If this parameter is not included, a server pool cannot be created using the NFS share. For example, a correct entry in the /etc/exports file might look like:

/mypath    *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

If you make a change to the /etc/exports file, restart the NFS service:

# exportfs -a
# service nfsd stop
# service nfsd start

3 Upgrading to Release 2.2

See Oracle VM Manager Installation Guide for information on upgrading from a previous release to Release 2.2.

4 Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible to all users, including users that are disabled. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Accessibility standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For more information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/.

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

Screen readers may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, some screen readers may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.

Deaf/Hard of Hearing Access to Oracle Support Services

To reach Oracle Support Services, use a telecommunications relay service (TRS) to call Oracle Support at 1.800.223.1711. An Oracle Support Services engineer will handle technical issues and provide customer support according to the Oracle service request process. Information about TRS is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/trs.html, and a list of phone numbers is available at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/dro/trsphonebk.html.

Oracle VM Manager Release Notes, Release 2.2

E15440-01

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