The Oracle VM Manager does not necessarily have to run on a separate physical server in your environment. You can save on your resources by turning theOracle VM Manager into a virtual machine. As a result, it benefits from all the typical advantages of virtualization: hardware consolidation, high availability, live migration and so on. Because the Oracle VM Manager is not tied to one physical server, it leaves more physical resources for other applications, and at the same time it can be hot-cloned, backed up and migrated without downtime to other hardware when server maintenance is required.
The procedure to turn Oracle VM Manager into a virtual machine starts with a regular installation, either on a physical server or using a virtualization tool such as Oracle VM VirtualBox. Using this installation you set up the bare minimum to run a virtual machine: one Oracle VM Server, one NFS storage server and the default management network should suffice. Once the environment is up and running, you install a virtual machine on your environment and let it take over the role of the original Oracle VM Manager. This section explains the steps to reach that final result.
This procedure is not intended for the reconfiguration of an Oracle VM environment in use. If you wish to run Oracle VM Manager as a virtual machine, run this procedure as part of the setup, with a minimal install, before any significant configuration has taken place.
To run Oracle VM Manager as a Virtual Machine in the virtualized environment:
Install Oracle VM Manager on a physical server or in Oracle VM VirtualBox, according to the instructions in Section 3.4, “Installing Oracle VM Manager”.
Discover an Oracle VM Server for your environment, create a clustered server pool, use the default management network and set up the minimum storage required: a server pool file system and a storage repository for the VM resources. To do so, follow the instructions in the Oracle VM User's Guide.
Create a new virtual machine that complies with the Oracle VM Manager hardware requirements as described in Section 3.3.1, “Hardware Requirements ”. Make sure that the new virtual machine has HA (high availability) enabled.
Install the operating system (Oracle Linux) and make sure that the virtual machine complies with all software requirements for Oracle VM Manager, as described in Section 3.3.2, “Software Requirements”.
On this new virtual machine, install Oracle VM Manager according to the
instructions in Section 3.4, “Installing Oracle VM Manager”. Run
the installer with the --uuid
option to
install this new Oracle VM Manager instance with the same UUID as the
one you installed first.
If you intend to run the Oracle VM Manager database on a separate virtual machine, make sure that the database is up and running before you install the Oracle VM Manager virtual machine.
Copy the UUID of your original Oracle VM Manager from the file
/u01/app/oracle/ovm-manager-3/.config
.
After mounting the Oracle VM Manager install dvd on the file system
of your virtual machine, run the installer as follows:
./runinstaller.sh --uuid
<original_manager_uuid>
. Select your
preferred installation type, as you would with a regular
install.
Stop your original Oracle VM Manager.
From the new Oracle VM Manager virtual machine, rediscover your Oracle VM Server and storage, and refresh your storage repository to make sure that that all your VM resources reappear.
After rediscovering the minimal setup, proceed with the installation and configuration of your full Oracle VM environment.
Oracle VM Manager is now running as an HA VM on top of the environment it is managing. In case an Oracle VM Server fails, the VM will be brought up automatically on a different Oracle VM Server in the environment.