Glossary

An Oracle VM Server dedicated to performing administrative functions on storage servers such as creating a new LUN or extending a file system. The server must be capable of logging into a storage array or file server as an admin user. The administrative functions available to the server are defined by the Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in.

An infrastructure template containing a configuration of multiple virtual machines with their virtual disks, and the inter-connectivity between them. Assemblies can be created as a set of .ovf (Open Virtualization Format) and .img (disk image) files, or may all be contained in a single .ova (Open Virtualization Format Archive) file.

Bonding is a Linux OS feature that provides a method for aggregating several ports into a single bonded interface, to provide load balancing or redundancy. When you discover an Oracle VM Server, the bonded interface is shown as containing a single port.

Network bonding refers to the combination of network interfaces on one host for redundancy and/or increased throughput. Redundancy is the key factor: You want to protect your virtualized environment from loss of service due to failure of a single physical link.

In Oracle VM, there are three modes of network bonding:

The action or result of making an exact copy of an object. The object may be a virtual machine, virtual machine template, ISO file, or virtual disk. Cloning is analogous to copying and maintains the integrity of the original object, while creating a new object based on the original. A clone customizer may be used to define cloning options to specify details of where the object components may reside when cloned, such as in a different storage repository.

The process of adding systems as objects within Oracle VM Manager is known as discovery. When you add Oracle VM Servers and storage to your Oracle VM environment, Oracle VM Manager uses the information provided to connect to the resource and perform verification. During this process, information is usually exchanged between the server and the manager. In the case of an Oracle VM Server, Oracle VM Manager obtains information about the server, its network connectivity and any storage that is already attached to the server. Depending on your hardware and networking configuration, external storage may be automatically detected during discovery of Oracle VM Servers. This is always the case with local OCFS2 storage on an Oracle VM Server.

While storage can be automatically discovered during the process of discovering Oracle VM Servers, you may need to perform storage discovery for resources that are not already attached to any of your Oracle VM Servers. It is important that storage is configured outside of the Oracle VM environment prior to discovery. Depending on the storage type, you can perform different storage discovery operations from within Oracle VM Manager.

Events are used to register status information of "objects" within Oracle VM Manager for future reference or to make problems easier to trace back. Events are often, though not always, related to jobs that are initiated within Oracle VM Manager. For instance, when a job fails, an event is generated. Events can also be triggered through changes in the environment such as server crashes or storage disconnects. Therefore, events are used to alert you to potential problems that may need your attention.

Events are categorized by severity. Most events will be informational, but they can also be warnings or errors. If an event has an error level severity, you need to acknowledge the error event to clear the error and to perform further operations on the object that generated the error.

See Also: jobs

A guest operating system that runs within a domain in Oracle VM Server. A guest may be paravirtualized or hardware virtualized. Multiple guests can run on the same Oracle VM Server.

The physical computer on which the software is installed. Typically used to refer to either the computer on which Oracle VM Server or Oracle VM Manager is running.

Jobs are a sequential operations that take place through Oracle VM Manager, such as server discovery, presenting a repository and creating a VM. Jobs are assigned a status that is refreshed according to their progress. A history of all jobs in the environment is stored within Oracle VM Manager.

Since jobs are sequential and sometimes take time to complete, tracking the status of a job allows you to understand what actions the system is currently performing, and which actions are queued to run in sequence after the current job has completed. Jobs also allow you to access system messages that may be useful to debug the failure of an operation.

Most jobs tend to generate events that each have a different severity level.

See Also: events

Local storage consists of hard disks installed locally in an Oracle VM Server. Local storage is often not appropriate for production environments, because it prevents or sharply constrains the ability of a virtual machine to run anywhere in the server pool in the event of the failure of the Oracle VM server, which owns the local storage.

The act of moving a virtual machine from one Oracle VM Server to another, or to the Unassigned Virtual Machines folder. Migration can be performed on either a running or a stopped virtual machine.

The act of moving an object from one location to another. This may be moving a stopped virtual machine from one Oracle VM Server to another, moving a virtual machine template from one storage repository to another, or moving an ISO file or virtual disk to another storage location.

The technique of creating more than one physical path between the server CPU and its storage devices. It results in better fault tolerance and performance enhancement. Oracle VM supports multipath I/O out of the box. Oracle VM Servers are installed with multipathing enabled because it is a requirement for SAN disks to be discovered by Oracle VM Manager

A self-contained virtualization environment designed to provide a lightweight, secure, server-based platform for running virtual machines. The Oracle VM Server comprises a hypervisor and a privileged domain (called dom0) that allow multiple domains or virtual machines (that is, Linux, Solaris, Windows, and so on) to run on one physical machine. Includes Oracle VM Agent to enable communication with Oracle VM Manager.

The Oracle VM Server for x86 incorporates an open source Xen hypervisor component, which has been customized and optimized to integrate into the larger, Oracle - developed virtualization server. The Oracle VM Server for x86 is also responsible for access and security management and generally acts as the server administrative entity, because the hypervisor’s role is limited.

On Oracle VM Server for SPARC systems, the SPARC hypervisor is built into the SPARC firmware and is generally referred to as the Logical Domains Manager (LDOM). As with the Xen hypervisor, each virtual machine is securely executed on a single computer and runs its own guest Oracle Solaris operating system

An Oracle VM Server dedicated to handling file system refreshes on behalf of a server pool. A refresh server temporarily mounts file systems on an NFS file server during the refresh operation. The server must be granted full data access in order to perform the refresh. For each NFS file server, at least one Oracle VM Server from each server pool accessing the file server must be assigned as a refresh server.

A server processor compatibility group is a group of Oracle VM Servers with compatible processors, or CPUs sharing the same processor family and model number. These groups are created to ensure that a virtual machine running on one Oracle VM Server can safely be migrated and continue to run on another Oracle VM Server. Oracle VM Manager automatically creates processor compatibility groups as it discovers servers that have different processor types.

Using Oracle VM Manager you can create custom compatibility groups to improve your ability to do smooth migrations and to group servers according to your own requirements.