Glossary

A

admin server

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.

D

discover

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.

dom0

An abbreviation for domain zero. The management domain with privileged access to the hardware and device drivers. Dom0 is the first domain started at boot time. Dom0 has more privileges than domU. It can access the hardware directly and can manage the device drivers for other domains. It can also start new domains.

See Also: control domain

domain

A configurable set of resources, including memory, virtual CPUs, network devices and disk devices, in which virtual machines run. A domain is granted virtual resources and can be started, stopped and rebooted independently.

See Also: dom0

See Also: domU

See Also: control domain

domU

An unprivileged domain with no direct access to the hardware or device drivers. Each domU is started by dom0.

J

jobs

Jobs consist of discrete 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 oftened performed sequentially 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

L

local storage

Local storage consists of hard disks installed locally in an Oracle VM Server. Local storage is often not appropriate for enterprise production environments, because it 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, and because the management overhead of this storage is often significant.

M

migrate

The act of moving a virtual machine from one Oracle VM Server to another, or to the Unassigned Virtual Machines folder. Technically, a migration can only be performed on a running virtual machine, however the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface and Oracle VM Manager Command Line Interface may combine multiple operations to make it appear that you can perform a migration on either a running or a stopped virtual machine.

O

Oracle VM Manager

Oracle VM Manager is the management platform, which offers an easy-to-use, web-browser interface as well as a command-line interface (CLI). Oracle VM Manager tracks and manages the resources available in your virtual environment and allows you to easily manage Oracle VM Server pools. Oracle VM Manager lets you manage the virtual machine life cycle, including creating virtual machines from templates or from installation media, deleting, powering off, uploading, deployment and live migration of virtual machines. Oracle VM Manager also lets you manage resources including ISO files, templates and shared virtual disks.

Oracle VM Server

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 guest operation systems (such as Linux, Solaris, and Windows) 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. As with the Xen hypervisor, each virtual machine is securely executed on a single computer and runs its own guest Oracle Solaris operating system

S

server pool

Server pools logically organize one or more Oracle VM Servers into groups where virtual machines can run.

Each server pool can have up to 32 physical servers. Each Oracle VM Server can be a member of only one server pool. The server pool is the operational unit of Oracle VM. Policies are configured and enforced at the server pool level.

A minimum cluster of three Oracle VM Server nodes in each server pool is strongly recommended for high availability. If one node in the cluster experiences a hardware failure or is shut down for maintenance, failover redundancy is preserved with the other two nodes. Having a third node in the cluster also provides reserve capacity for production load requirements.

Storage Connect

Oracle VM integrates with all types of storage, referred to as generic storage, but also provides advanced storage functionality for storage vendors that provide a plug-in to access their storage. This plug-in is part of Oracle VM’s Storage Connect framework.

Oracle VM provides its own Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-in for the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, and for the Oracle Axiom systems.

V

virtual appliance

A package created as a single .ova (Open Virtualization Format Archive) file or a set of .ovf (Open Virtualization Format) and .img (disk image) files. Virtual appliances contain one or more virtual machines and include the virtual disks and the inter-connectivity between the virtual machines.

In previous releases, virtual appliances were known as assemblies.

virtual disk

A file or set of files, usually on the host file system although it may also be a remote file system, that appears as a physical disk drive to the guest operating system.

virtual machine (VM)

A guest operating system and the associated application software that runs within Oracle VM Server. May be paravirtualized or hardware virtualized machines. Multiple virtual machines can run on the same Oracle VM Server.