Oracle VM is a platform that provides a fully equipped environment for better leveraging the 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 Server for x86 (Oracle VM Server) is a self-contained virtualization environment designed to provide a lightweight, secure, server-based platform to run virtual machines on x86 hardware. Oracle VM Server is based upon an updated version of the underlying Xen hypervisor technology, and includes Oracle VM Agent. It also includes a Linux kernel with support for a broad array of devices and file systems. The Linux kernel is run as Dom0 to manage one or more DomU virtual machines, each of which could be Linux, Oracle Solaris, or Microsoft Windows.

Oracle VM Server for SPARC (previously called Sun Logical Domains, or LDoms) is Oracle's server virtualization and partitioning technology on Oracle's SPARC T-Series servers. Oracle VM Server for SPARC leverages the SPARC hypervisor to subdivide supported platforms' resources (CPUs, memory, I/O, and storage) by creating partitions called logical or virtual machines to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by SPARC T-Series servers and the Oracle Solaris operating system.

Oracle VM Manager is a server side component that allows you to configure and manage your Oracle VM environment. Oracle VM Manager includes both a command line interface and a web-based user interface, which is a standard Application Development Framework (ADF) web application. Oracle VM Manager provides virtual machine management facilities, 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 manages resources, including ISO files, virtual machine templates, and shared virtual disks.

This document contains last-minute release information about Oracle VM.