Oracle Virtualization: OVM and Enterprise Manager

I took part in the offline seminar "Oracle Virtualization Workshop" hosted by Oracle Korea last Wednesday. This was the chance of knowing the road-map of Oracle and product stacks related to virtualization. The core concept is Oracle VM(OVM) and Enterprise Manager (EM)


To summarize benefit about OVM 3.x  and EM
1. Improvements of OVM manager's Web UI since 3.x

Figure: Oracle VM 3.0.3 Manager web console


UI had simple outline that main menu on the left and chose one of them, sub menus appeared on the right in 2.X. 
In 3.x, knowledge base is newly added on the right side. KB content is changed based on what administrator choose left and center menu.


During the demo, the speaker focused on describing that Oracle prepared a lot of s/w as virtual machine templates. Although these templates are not perfect for production, they are enough to use for developments with only simple configuration. Oracle has already provide various templates from Oracle web site.


2. Extend management capability for Oracle VM by Enterprise manager(EM) 12C. 

Figure: EM 12c Cloud Self Server Portal.

To manage VM by EM, it need to interact with OVM manager. It doesn't have to install EM for the only purpose of managing VM. But, If you want to monitor s/w and advanced functionality, it have to install EM agent on VM or physical machine.

By virtual Assembly builder, VM template can be parameterize. This means that define properties for the VM template and put values later when the vm creation via EM menu. Users can easily make various VMs derived the same template.

Cloud Metering

Figure: EM 12c Cloud Metering.
It can define plans about metering in EM 12c
It has two plan about metering functionality. 

- Universal charge plan: base scheme (cpu, memory and  storage)
- Extended charge plan: can add condition on base or range or ignore universial plan

Features of EM 12C

Figure: How to manage cloud via EM 12C

 Monitoring
- Manage physical and virtual machines simultaneously
- Monitor and manage Linux server
- OVM 3.x environment management
- Resource monitoring of Linux and Virtual Machines
- Manage Oracle DB and other S/W
- Automatic database tuning
  
 Environment mgmt.
- Bare metal provisioning about Linux OS and OVM Server
- Provisioning about VM templates and assemblies
- Provisioning about Oracle DB
- Automatic patch mgmt about Linux and Oracle products.
- Knowledge base about various faults and incidents


3. Licence 
License can be applied to based on target.  If the target of using these products (OVM and EM 12C) is virtualization management (Virtual Machine and physical machine mgmt, VM lifecycle mgmt etc..), It's free. However, You have to pay for the extended functionality above base virtual mgmt. for example, Metering.