The Oracle Virtual Machine (VM) environment makes it possible to manage disparate physical infrastructures in a datacenter as virtual pools of resources (processors, memory, storage, and networking). The Oracle VM environment is made up of a number of software component layers and Oracle applications. Oracle VM supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications.
Each physical host in an Oracle VM environment runs the Oracle hypervisor software to execute a number of VMs. The hypervisor provides a layer in the physical host upon which the VMs are created. Each VM can run a different operating system and can contain one or more applications. The resources from the physical hardware in the Oracle VM environment are aggregated into pools of functional resources. These functional resources can be allocated (or assigned) to specific VMs and applications as needed.
Figure: 1 Oracle VM architecture
For more information, refer to the Oracle VM documentation on the Oracle Technical Network (http://docs.oracle.com).