The Oracle Linux and Oracle Virtualization team is pleased to announce support for the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager 4.5 (ovirt-engine) on Oracle Linux 9. This update enables organizations to run both the Manager and Oracle Linux KVM compute hosts on Oracle Linux 9, helping organizations move Oracle Virtualization environments to a current version of Oracle Linux.

What’s New

Oracle Virtualization now supports Oracle Linux 9 Manager hosts, completing its transition to Oracle Linux 9 following earlier compute-host support.

Moving the solution to Oracle Linux 9 provides customers with the longer lifecycle timeline published in the Oracle Linux lifetime support policy. In addition, the move to Oracle Linux 9 updates several Manager components including PostgreSQL for the engine database and data warehouse, and Grafana for the Monitoring Portal. For customers that use the Self-Hosted Engine, an updated version of the engine appliance is available to deploy the Oracle Linux 9-based Manager.

Oracle Linux 9 KVM hosts run the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 8 (UEK 8), based on the Linux upstream 6.12 long-term support kernel. UEK 8 enables the KVM Two-Dimensional Paging MMU by default, which can improve page-fault performance for virtual machines with many virtual CPUs.

UEK 8 also includes memory-management and Huge Page handling improvements, while its device drivers are aligned with upstream Linux 6.12. Together with Oracle’s ongoing critical bug and security fixes, these updates provide Oracle Linux 9 KVM hosts with an updated kernel foundation for virtualization workloads.

Installation and Upgrades

Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager 4.5 is based on the open source oVirt project and can now be installed from the Oracle Linux 9 channels on Oracle Linux yum server or the Unbreakable Linux Network. To support the Manager on Oracle Linux 9 with Oracle Virtualization, the following two yum repository channels have been updated:

Oracle Linux 9 can be installed with installation media (ISO images) available from the Oracle Linux yum server or the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. Step-by-step instructions to download the Oracle Linux 9 ISO can be found on the Oracle Linux Community website. Using the “Minimal Install” option during the installation process sets up a base system.

Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager 4.5 systems based on Oracle Linux 8 can be upgraded to Oracle Linux 9 following the instructions in the Upgrade the Engine or Self-Hosted Engine section of the Administration Guide.

Support

Support for Oracle Virtualization is available to customers with an Oracle Linux Premier Plus Support subscription. Refer to Oracle Linux Support for information about Oracle Linux support levels.

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