Oracle® VM Manager Getting Started Guide for Release 3.4

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clone: The action or result of making an exact copy of an object. The object may be a virtual machine, virtual machine template, ISO file, or virtual disk. Cloning is similar to copying and maintains the integrity of the original object, while creating a new object based on the original. A clone customizer may be used to define cloning options to specify details of where the object components may reside when cloned, such as in a different storage repository.

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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.

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high availability: High availability (HA) help ensure the uninterrupted availability of a virtual machine. If HA is configured for your virtual machine, and if the Oracle VM Server on which it is running fails or shuts down, the virtual machine is restarted on another available Oracle VM Server in the server pool. The server pool must be clustered. You must enable high availability for both the server pool and the virtual machine.

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multipath: The technique of creating more than one physical path between the server CPU and its storage devices. It results in better fault tolerance and performance enhancement. Oracle VM supports multipath I/O out of the box. Oracle VM Servers are installed with multipathing enabled because it is a requirement for SAN disks to be discovered by Oracle VM Manager

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OCFS2

Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS2) is a general-purpose shared-disk cluster file system for Linux capable of providing both high performance and high availability. OCFS2 is developed by Oracle and is integrated within the mainstream Linux kernel. OCFS2 is used within Oracle VM to facilitate clustered server pools, storage of virtual machine images and for the purpose of allowing guests to share the same file system.

A clustered server pool always uses an OCFS2 file system to store the cluster configuration and to take advantage of OCFS2's heartbeat facility. There are two types of heartbeats used in OCFS2 to ensure high availability:

The disk heartbeat: all Oracle VM Servers in the cluster write a time stamp to the server pool file system device.
The network heartbeat: all Oracle VM Servers communicate through the network to signal to each other that every cluster member is alive.

These heartbeat functions exist directly within the kernel and are fundamental to the clustering functionality that Oracle VM offers for server pools. The server pool file system should be stored on a separate NFS server or on a small LUN if possible, as OCFS2's heartbeat facility can be disturbed by intensive I/O operations taking place on the same physical storage.

A storage repository configured on a LUN-based repository must be linked to a clustered server pool due to the nature of the OCFS2 file system. As a result, LUN-based repositories cannot be shared between multiple server pools, although it is possible to move an OCFS2 repository from one server pool to another.

For more information on OCFS2, please refer to https://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/.

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

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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.

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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 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.

virtual machine template

A template of a virtual machine. Contains basic configuration information such as the number of CPUs, memory size, hard disk size, and network interface card (NIC). Create virtual machines based on a virtual machine template using Oracle VM Manager.

Glossary

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