The Oracle VM Agent is a daemon that runs within dom0 on each Oracle VM Server instance. Its primary role is to facilitate communication between Oracle VM Server and Oracle VM Manager. The daemon listens for connections from Oracle VM Manager on the TCP port 8899, and implements a messaging facility that allows Oracle VM Manager to connect to each Oracle VM Server instance and exchange information required for the efficient running of the entire Oracle VM infrastructure.

Oracle VM Agent is responsible for carrying out all of the configuration changes required on an Oracle VM Server instance, in accordance with the messages that are sent to it by Oracle VM Manager. This means that when a networking change is implemented in Oracle VM Manager, it is the Oracle VM Agent that reconfigures the server to cater for the change. Equally, if new storage is discovered and presented to a server in Oracle VM Manager, it is the Oracle VM Agent that handles the actual mount process required on the server.

Oracle VM Agent is also responsible for starting and stopping virtual machines as required by Oracle VM Manager. For this reason, the actual implementation of Oracle VM Agent differs significantly between different hardware platforms, even though actions within Oracle VM Manager are consistent across platforms.

For security reasons, the Oracle VM Agent must authenticate any system attempting to connect to it on port 8899. When an Oracle VM Server is not configured for any particular Oracle VM Manager it is in an unowned state. In this state, an Oracle VM Manager must take ownership of the server before it is able to communicate with the Oracle VM Agent. During the process where the Oracle VM Manager instance takes ownership of a server, the Oracle VM Manager authenticates using a password configured for the Oracle VM Agent. This password is exchanged over a connection that is secured using an SSL certificate. Once the Oracle VM Agent has authenticated Oracle VM Manager, an SSL key-certificate pair is set up to authenticate and encrypt all future communications between that Oracle VM Manager instance and the Oracle VM Agent. At this point, no other Oracle VM Manager instance or application can take control of the Oracle VM Server via the Oracle VM Agent. If you wish to allow another Oracle VM Manager instance to take ownership of the server, the original Oracle VM Manager instance must release ownership first.

There are also times when Oracle VM Agent must initiate a connection to Oracle VM Manager to signal an event or to provide statistical information. This is achieved using the Web Services API exposed by Oracle VM Manager via HTTPS on TCP port 7002.

Oracle VM Agent also maintains its own log files on the Oracle VM Server that can be used for debugging issues on a particular server instance or for auditing purposes.

Oracle VM Agent is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, Understanding Server Pools and Oracle VM Servers.