The networking infrastructure in the Oracle VM environment comprises connections between Oracle VM Servers, between Oracle VM Servers and Oracle VM Manager, between the Oracle VM Servers and their storage sub-systems, as well as communications among virtual machines deployed in the environment, and between virtual machines and external private or public networks. These networking connections can leverage features supported by Oracle VM, such as networked file systems, clustering, redundancy and load balancing, bridging, and support for Virtual LANs (VLANs).

The physical network is the collection of physical connections in Oracle VM Manager and all Oracle VM Servers, and the switches and routers that allow information to reach its destination. A logical network in Oracle VM is built on top of these physical connections. When you create an Oracle VM network, you map available network ports to a set of logical Ethernet networks. You perform this mapping in Oracle VM Manager.

In Oracle VM a network can perform one or more network functions. Oracle VM has the following network functions: server management, live migrate, cluster heartbeat, virtual machine, and storage. Functions can be combined or spread over several different networks; this design decision depends on the available physical network infrastructure, such as the number of NICs in each server.