Oracle VM provides scripts that automate the upgrade process and minimize downtime for your virtualization infrastructure.

Interactive installations of Oracle VM Server allow you to configure disk partitioning. See Installing Oracle VM Server From a DVD-ROM in the Oracle VM Installation and Upgrade Guide for more information.

During installation of Oracle VM Server, you can now choose to enable the Kdump service that captures a memory dump from dom0 and stores it on the filesystem to help you debug and diagnose issues in the event of a system crash.

Oracle VM Manager now provides the ability to import and export Oracle VM Virtual Appliances as a single .ova (Open Virtualization Format Archive) file or a set of .ovf (Open Virutalization Format) and .img (disk image) files. See How are Virtual Appliances Managed? in the Oracle VM Concepts Guide for more information on virtual appliances.

The Oracle VM Manager installer also manages the installation and upgrading of the VNC and Serial Console software package on the Oracle VM Manager host. Reducing administrative overhead during a deployment of the environment.

You can now perform live migrations of running virtual machines that have virtual disks on local storage. Oracle VM uses features built into the OCFS2 file system on x86 platforms to provide this live migration capability that helps you achieve nearly uninterrupted uptime for virtual machines.

Some restrictions apply to storage live migration. In particular, there are various requirements surrounding disk space on the source and target repositories. See How Can a Virtual Machine be Moved or Migrated? in the Oracle VM Concepts Guide for more information.

Additionally, performing storage live migration can disrupt the cluster heartbeat function if the server pool file system is not separate to the cluster heartbeat file system. Additionally, you should ensure that you configure separate channels for live migration network traffic and other network functions such as cluster heartbeat. For more information about storage configuration guidelines, see Are there Guidelines for Configuring Storage? in the Oracle VM Concepts Guide. For more information about network channels, see How are Network Functions Separated in Oracle VM? in the Oracle VM Concepts Guide.

As of this release, when editing virtual disks, Oracle VM Manager now displays the allocation type that was specified when the virtual disk was created. Additionally, tooltips are available in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface to provide more information about how virtual disks are created and how subsequent virtual disk space is allocated. See Create Virtual Machine in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information on creating virtual machines and virtual disk allocation.

Oracle VM provides support for installing Oracle VM Server into FCoE Storage Area Networks (SAN) over some Host Bus Adapters (HBA) or Converged Network Adapters (CNA). See Installing Oracle VM Server to Multipath Storage in the Oracle VM Installation and Upgrade Guide for more information.

Oracle VM Server can now boot from systems that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). See Installing Oracle VM Server From a DVD-ROM in the Oracle VM Installation and Upgrade Guide for more information about installing Oracle VM Server in UEFI mode.

You can install Oracle VM Server in legacy BIOS mode or UEFI mode. However, you cannot change modes after installation. For example, if you install Oracle VM Server in legacy BIOS mode, you cannot then switch to UEFI mode. If you want to change from legacy BIOS mode to UEFI mode, or from UEFI mode to legacy BIOS mode, you must re-install Oracle VM Server.

The following restrictions currently apply to UEFI mode:

The Oracle VM SOAP API is deprecated as of Release 3.4.1.

The Oracle VM Utilities version 2.1 now communicate directly with Oracle VM Manager using a Oracle VM API. This change improves performance and usability of the Oracle VM Utilities. Additionally, in this release, a number of the Oracle VM Utilities scripts have been deprecated by the Oracle VM Manager Command Line Interface. For more information, see Using the Oracle VM Utilities in the Oracle VM Administrator's Guide.

This release includes the P2V utility on the Oracle VM Server ISO file. You can use the P2V utility to convert physical hosts to virtual machines. For more information, see Converting Physical Hosts to Virtual Machines in the Oracle VM Administrator's Guide.

As of this release, the OSWatcher utility is installed on Oracle VM Server by default and is enabled to run at boot. OSWatcher (oswbb) is a collection of shell scripts that collect and archive operating system and network metrics to diagnose performance issues with Oracle VM Server. For more information, see Working with the OSWatcher Utility on Oracle VM Server in the Oracle VM Administrator's Guide.

Oracle VM Manager now displays the apparent size, in GiB, of repositories. The apparent size is the total size of the entire repository. For more information, see Repositories Perspective in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide.

The dom0 kernel for Oracle VM Server is updated to Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4 in this release.

Oracle VM supports increased configuration limits, including a maximum of 256 virtual CPUs (vCPU) for virtual machines of PVM domain type. See Chapter 7, Configuration Limits for Release 3.4 for a complete list of configuration limits for Oracle VM.

This release of Oracle VM includes several enhancements to overall performance and scalability, including the time it takes to discover a large number of servers.

The following table highlights performance improvements for the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface from Release 3.3.x to Release 3.4.1:

Improvements to Oracle VM Manager allow for better handling of characters used in filter fields to improve matching capabilities and to provide improved protection against attempted SQL injection attacks.

This release of Oracle VM includes changes to how user passwords are stored on the system so that they are not exposed on the command line.

This release supports enabling FIPS mode for OpenSSL to be compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2. For more information about FIPS and Oracle VM security, see the Oracle VM Security Guide.

Information on enabling FIPS mode for OpenSSL is provided in the Oracle Linux 6 Security Guide, available at: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37670_01/

Virtual machine configuration details under the Servers and VMs tab in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface display device mappings that allow you to easily identify which physical resources, such as disks in the repository, correspond to virtual resources, such as virtual disks assigned to virtual machines. See Virtual Machines Perspective in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information.

You can view graphical representations, and generate reports, of virtual machine object nodes and attributes to quickly locate resources and view information about those resources. See Display VM Hierarchy Viewer in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information.

Online help for Oracle VM now launches directly from elements in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface to the relevant help topics. This online help system eliminates the need to navigate through help topics to find information. See Help Icon in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information.

Oracle VM Manager stores certain user preferences across sessions. See User Preference Persistence in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide for more information about user preferences.

Oracle VM Manager persists simple names for repository objects as metadata. As a result, the simple names are retained when the repository is transferred to a different instance of Oracle VM Manager. Likewise, the metadata allows you to easily recover the simple names in cases where Oracle VM Manager is manually restored without a database backup. For more information, see How is Object Metadata Stored in a Repository? in the Oracle VM Concepts Guide.

Oracle VM Manager lets you generate XML reports on objects, the object attributes, and direct subobjects. You can generate reports for virtual machines, Oracle VM Servers, server pools, and storage. For more information, see Reports in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide.

The Preferences tab in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface lets you set the interval for backing up the MySQL database and number of backups to keep. For more information, see Preferences in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide.

Oracle VM Manager provides detailed information on the location of virtual machine disks to facilitate backup tasks.

This release provides an SNMP shared object module that lets you retrieve details about Oracle VM Server, monitor Oracle VM Server health, and return a list of running virtual machines. See Monitoring Oracle VM Server with SNMP in the Oracle VM Administrator's Guide for more information on the Oracle VM Server shared object module.

Oracle VM lets you easily retrieve the configuration files for virtual machines (vm.cfg).

Oracle VM provides detailed information about how physical disks are in use to avoid multiple physical disk allocation.

The field to specify a virtual IP address (VIP) while creating a server pool is deprecated in this release but available for backwards compatibility.