In Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, you can create and manage the virtualization hosts that provide the physical resources for creating guests. These options require access to storage and networks.
The supported virtualization technologies are:
System Information Reports provide information on assets, including logical domains and zones.
Starting with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12 c Release 3 (12.3.2.0.0), a comprehensive view and analysis of the server pool resource is displayed in the Analytics tab of the selected server pool. Here, you can view information about the CPU, memory, storage, guests, power consumption, and history of the selected server pool. See the Virtualization Reference for more information.
Oracle Solaris Zones enable you to virtualize operating systems on SPARC and x86 platforms. A zone is a virtualized operating system environment created within a single instance of the Oracle Solaris operating system. Each zone provides an isolated and secure environment for running software applications.
Kernel zones are a new type of zone introduced with Oracle Solaris 11.2. Kernel zones implement virtualization from within the global zone's operating system kernel. Each kernel zone has a separate kernel from the global zone, its own file systems and user space. Configuration of each zone (including the global zone) puts limits on the CPU, memory and I/O resources available to the zone. Beginning with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12 c Release 3 (12.3.1), Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center supports discovery, creation, and management operations for Oracle Solaris 11 kernel zones.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides lifecycle management of non-global zones from a unified user interface. You can discover and manage existing zones, create zones, view zone analytics, and perform operations such as booting and shutting down a zone. You can create server pools for your zones, enabling you to migrate zones between different operating systems to provide load balancing. Ops Center can automatically balance the load, or you can balance it manually. You can disable Automatic Recovery at the server pool level or the zone level. You can also limit the number of attempts to recover an asset. If certain assets should be grouped together on a host or placed on separate hosts, you can use affinity and disaffinity tags to ensure that they are placed correctly.
Note:
When you use OpenStack software to create a zone, do not use Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to modify the zone. OpenStack cannot handle the modifications.
Oracle VM Server for SPARC is virtualization of SPARC servers. You can create and manage multiple virtual machine instances simultaneously on a single SPARC machine. Each virtual machine, or guest, can run a different operating system. To extend virtualization further, you can create zones on your virtual machines.
With Oracle VM Server for SPARC, you can allocate the various resources of the system such as memory, CPU threads, and devices, into logical groupings and create multiple discrete systems. You can either select to allocate the CPU resource to a logical domain as CPU Threads or whole-core. When you specify to allocate a core to a logical domain, all the CPU Threads in the core are allocated to the logical domain. You can also limit the number of maximum number of whole-core to be allocated to the domain. You can edit the configuration of the logical domain and switch back and forth from virtual CPU to whole-core CPU.
You can discover and manage existing Oracle VM Server for SPARC systems, or you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to create logical domains and install the Oracle Solaris OS on them.
A logical domain is a virtual machine that has its own operating system and identity within a single SPARC server. You can create, reconfigure, reboot, and destroy a logical domain independently, without requiring the server to be powered off. You can run a variety of applications in different logical domains to keep them independent for performance and security purposes.
You can create logical domains with the following roles: Guest Domains, I/O Domains, Root Domains, and HA Guest Domains.
I/O domains have direct access to physical I/O devices such as PCIe Controller or Endpoint Devices.
Root domains also have direct access to physical I/O devices such as PCIe Root Complex.
Guest domains have access to virtual devices, such as virtual disks and virtual network interfaces.
HA guest domains have access to virtual devices, have at least two network connections, and have redundant access to virtual disk storage to provide high availability.
Beginning with 12.2.2, the software detects when a logical domain is in a delayed reconfiguration state. A message in the center pane is visible to all logical domains attached to the affected control domain. You can cancel the delayed reconfiguration in the control domain, or a PCIe root domain (if supported.)
As with hardware and OS management, virtualization management uses profiles and plans to help you to reduce the complexity of using virtualization technology and provides a method of consistently creating new virtual hosts.
You can create server pools for logical domains, enabling you to migrate guests between different hosts to provide load balancing. Ops Center can automatically balance the load, or you can balance it manually. If certain assets should be grouped together on a host or placed on separate hosts, you can use affinity and disaffinity tags to ensure that they are placed correctly.
Single Root I/O Virtualization is a PCI-SIG standard specification that enables efficient use of PCIe devices. A single PCIe card owned by a PCIe root complex is made to physically appear in multiple domains simultaneously. A virtual machine shares a single I/O resource also know as physical function. A physical function is a PCIe device that is SR-IOV enabled and with the appropriate hardware and OS support can appear as multiple, separate physical devices, each with its own configuration space. Each physical function can have up to 64000 virtual functions associated with it. You can directly assign a virtual function to a logical domain.
An SR-IOV enabled network interface has virtual functions created on the physical function. You can connect to a network using an SR-IOV enabled network interface and assign the virtual functions to the logical domains. SR-IOV enabled networks are available from the Control Domain and Root Domain. If you assign a PCIe card to an I/O domain, then the SR-IOV feature is not enabled.