In addition to known issues that might apply for a given release of Oracle VM, limitations exist for managing Oracle VM Server for SPARC with Oracle VM Manager.
There are currently several features in Oracle VM Server for SPARC that cannot be represented in Oracle VM Manager. These features include the following:
Physical I/O domains such as SR-IOV, direct I/O, and root domains.
Certain network options such as Private VLAN (PVLAN), "vNICs on VNets" or multiple MAC addresses per virtual network device, and Quality of Service (QoS) configurations.
Crypto accelerators assigned to guest domains. This is a feature on SPARC servers prior to the T4 series that required some administrative effort. With the T4 series and later, crypto accelerators are always available without any administrative effort required.
Whole-core and max-cores constraints, although these can be configured by editing the configuration file named
/etc/ovs-agent/agent.inithat is used by the Oracle VM Agent for SPARC on each Oracle VM Server.Multiple service domains, also known as 'shadow service domains', which are typically used to provide redundancy. Initial support for these has been implemented in the Oracle VM Agent for SPARC.
There are a number of limitations that exist in Oracle VM Manager for server pools that contain Oracle VM Server for SPARC servers. These limitations include the following:
ISCSI or Fibre Channel storage cannot be used to store a repository or a server pool cluster file system. However, these disks can be used for direct virtual machine assignment. NFS storage should be used if you need to set up a server pool cluster file system. Either NFS, ZFS or a local disk may be used to configure a repository.
Huge page support on SPARC systems is not controlled by Oracle VM. All the page sizes available on the underlying hardware are always available to the guest virtual machine.
Virtual machine suspend and resume functionality is not available for virtual machines running in a SPARC-based server pool.
Support for a secondary service domain, running alongside the primary service domain, has been added to the Oracle VM Agent. This feature allows you to restart the primary service domain without causing any interruption to network or disk I/O for any of your running virtual machines.