Oracle VM Templates
Last year at Oracle World, Oracle launched a new exciting product called Oracle VM. It is our own x86/x86-64 virtualization product solution which adds a real hypervisor underneath our full product stack. For those that forgot - go to http://www.oracle.com/virtualization for more information.
This gives us a very nice top to bottom product layer :
application (our various applications offerings) -> middle tier (our various middleware suite offerings) -> database tier (our various database products) -> OS (Oracle Enterprise Linux) -> Virtualization (Oracle VM).
All fully certified and supported by Oracle, top to bottom.
All fully managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle VM Manager.
So what would be the logical next step ? Well - make pre-installed and pre-configured virtual machines of these components and deployment becomes a "download -> start virtual machine" process.
In the virtualization world most people talk about virtual appliances however we decided to call it virtual machine templates. The reason for this is that we are looking at more complex and more feature rich product components. In many cases people want to make changes to the installations. We have to be able to do upgrades and apply security patchsets and so on. So we decided not to create blackboxes but create virtual machine images which have been pre-configured with recommended patches, recommended OS settings, then the Oracle product on top with the recommended patchset level and also other changes and fixes applied.
The first few templates are now already available for download. There are 2 siebel software templates, one for the middle tier and one for the database and there are the recently released Oracle Enterprise Manager templates, also one middle tier and one database tier.
The downloads might be pretty hefty but once downloaded you can just import these into Oracle VM and start a virtual machine. All you have to do is provide a password or 2 and an ip address and hostname. You then end up with a fully configured Siebel product stack or Enterprise Manager product stack .In the EM one, we even added a virtual disk which contains full yum repositories for Oracle Enterprise Linux so you can do patch management and provisioning out of the box for the OS as well.
The license on these templates contains free download and free trial use with the option to purchase a product license and use in a production environment (for the traditional Oracle products). Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Linux are free download and free use.
We will continue to add more templates on a regular basis and enhance existing ones but this is a very exciting project which will help our partners and our customers get started on using Oracle products out of the box. Hope you like it. And.. more to come
