Introduction

Oracle VM is an enterprise-class server virtualization solution comprised of Oracle VM Server for x86, Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle VM Manager. Oracle VM Manager controls the virtualization environment, creating and monitoring Oracle VM servers and the virtual machines. Oracle VM Server installs directly on server hardware and does not require a host operating system. An Oracle VM Server is comprised of a hypervisor and privileged domain (Dom0) that allows multiple domains or virtual machines (i.e. Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc.) to run on one physical machine. The Dom0 runs a process called Oracle VM Agent. The Oracle VM Agent receives and processes management requests, provides event notifications and configuration data to the Oracle VM Manager.

Figure 1 : The Citrix XenMobile Architecture

As can be inferred from above figure, multiple virtual machines on the Oracle VM server share the physical resources of the server – i.e., the CPU, memory, network, and disk resources of the host. This resource dependency introduces many management troubles for administrators! For instance, a resource contention at the host-level will not only affect the performance of the host, but also the VMs on the host. In the same way, a resource-intensive application running on any of the VMs will significantly degrade the performance of the other VMs on the host and even the virtual host itself. This is why, when a virtual application slows down, administrators often take hours to figure out where the bottleneck is – is it owing to the a resource-starved host? Is it because of resource-intensive applications running on VMs? Or is because of poor resource allocation to the VMs? The specially designed Oracle VM Server model that eG Enterprise accurately answers these questions!