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Announcing Oracle VM 3.4 - Engineered for Open Cloud Infrastructure

John Priest
Director of Product Management

 

 

Oracle VM Release 3.4, Oracle’s latest server virtualization product, delivers many important new features and enhancements to enable rapid enterprise application deployment throughout public and private cloud infrastructure. The new release continues expanding support for both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads - providing customers and partners with additional choices and interoperability - including the capability to enable OpenStack support. 

Infrastructure

  • Updated Xen hypervisor - Xen hypervisor updated to deliver greater scalability of up to 256 vCPUs per guest VM.
  • Modern Dom0 kernel - Dom0 kernel updated to Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 4, based on the 4.1 mainline kernel, to bring performance improvements; and rapid driver availability and streamlined partner certifications with Oracle Linux.
  • Enhanced Virtual Appliance support - Improved VM portability across different cloud infrastructure by enhancing OVF based virtual appliance support. Oracle VM Manager now provides the ability to import and export Oracle VM Virtual Appliances as a single .ova (Open Virtualization Format Archive) file or a set of .ovf (Open Virtualization Format) and .img (disk image) files.
  • Storage live migration - Oracle VM uses features built into the OCFS2 file system on x86 platforms to provide live migration capabilities for virtual machines that have virtual disks on local storage.
  • Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) support - Oracle VM provides support for installing Oracle VM Server into FCoE Storage Area Networks (SAN) over selected Host Bus Adapters (HBA) or Converged Network Adapters (CNA).
  • Booting from UEFI - Oracle VM Server can now boot from systems that use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).
  • Automated installation of VNC and Serial Console software - The Oracle VM Manager installer also manages the installation of the VNC and Serial Console software packages which reduces administrative overhead during a deployment of the environment.

Security and serviceability

  • Dom0 kernel update on live systems - Oracle Ksplice updates the Dom0 Oracle UEK with all of the important security patches without needing to reboot.
  • FIPS 140-2 Validation - This release supports enabling FIPS mode for OpenSSL to be compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2.

  • Improved character handling for filters - Improvements to Oracle VM Manager allow for better handling of characters used in filter fields to improve matching capabilities and to provide improved protection against attempted SQL injection attacks.

  • Enabling Kdump during Oracle VM Server installation - During installation of Oracle VM Server, you can now choose to enable the Kdump service that captures a memory dump from dom0 and stores it on the filesystem to help you debug and diagnose issues in the event of a system crash.
  • OSWatcher Utility Available on Oracle VM Server -  the OSWatcher utility is installed on Oracle VM Server by default and is enabled to run at boot. OSWatcher is a collection of shell scripts that collect and archive operating system and network metrics to diagnose performance issues.

Performance

  • Improved Performance - This release of Oracle VM includes several enhancements to overall performance and scalability, including the time it takes to discover a large number of servers.

The following table highlights performance improvements for the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface from Release 3.3.1 to Release 3.4.1:

Action in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface

First time

Subsequent times

Logging in

85%

80%

Switching from Status
Overview to Statistics on the Health tab

23% faster response
time

1 second

Expanding the Server
Pools folder on the Servers and VMs tab

66% faster response
time

0 seconds

Switching from the Servers
and VMs tab to the Health tab

62% faster response
time

73% faster response
time

Usability and manageability

  • Device mappings - Virtual machine configuration details under the Servers and VMs tab in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface display device mappings that allow you to easily identify which physical resources, such as disks in the repository, correspond to virtual resources, such as virtual disks assigned to virtual machines.
  • Object topology view - You can view graphical representations, and generate reports, of virtual machine object nodes and attributes to quickly locate resources and view information about those resources.
  • Generating XML reports - Oracle VM Manager lets you generate XML reports on objects, the object attributes, and direct sub-objects. You can generate reports for virtual machines, Oracle VM Servers, server pools, and storage.
  • User preferences - Oracle VM Manager stores certain user preferences across sessions.
  • Simple names for repository objects - Oracle VM Manager persists simple names for repository objects as metadata. As a result, the simple names are retained when the repository is transferred to a different instance of Oracle VM Manager or easily recovered in cases where Oracle VM Manager is manually restored without a database backup.
  • Configuring management database backups - The Preferences tab in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface lets you set the interval for backing up the management MySQL database and number of backups to keep.
  • Listing the locations of virtual machine disks - Oracle VM Manager provides detailed information on the location of virtual machine disks to facilitate backup tasks.
  • Monitoring Oracle VM Server through SNMP - This release provides an SNMP shared object module that lets you retrieve details about Oracle VM Server, monitor Oracle VM Server health, and return a list of running virtual machines.
  • Viewing virtual machine configuration files - Oracle VM lets you easily retrieve the configuration files for virtual machines (vm.cfg) from the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface or the command line interface (CLI).
  • Avoiding multiple physical disk allocation - Oracle VM provides detailed information about how physical disks are in use to avoid multiple physical disk allocation.
  • Context sensitive help - Online help for Oracle VM now launches directly from elements in the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface to the relevant help topics. This online help system eliminates the need to navigate through help topics to find information.

Visit the following resources for additional details:

To learn more about Oracle's virtualization solutions, visit oracle.com/virtualization.

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Comments ( 2 )
  • guest Tuesday, March 29, 2016

    I see reference to "the capability to enable OpenStack support". But I don't see any mention of this in the online documentation?


  • guest Wednesday, March 30, 2016

    The OpenStack distro that you use should offer the details on deploying and managing compute nodes. Oracle OpenStack 2.1.1 will be released soon and will have documentation with this information to support Oracle VM.


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