Oracle VM is the x86 server virtualization solution from Oracle, designed to be the best virtualization platform to run Oracle technologies. It is Oracle's only tested, certified and supported x86 virtualization solution.

Oracle VM is freely distributed from the Oracle eDelivery portal with or without commercial support. The commercial support is provided by Oracle's support organization through Unbreakable Linux Support program. The Oracle VM support covers support for entire Oracle stack, where the user can resolve any issue, ranging from application to the hardware, with a single service request.

Though Oracle supports life cycle management of wide variety of 3rd party technologies along with the Oracle stack, owning the entire stack has various advantages like

a) Easier integration and centralized management across the stack

b) The ability to pre-pack and distribute Oracle technologies via Oracle VM templates

Oracle VM templates speed up delivery and productivity time at lesser risks as they are pre-packaged and pre-configured with key Oracle technologies that can be easily downloaded and deployed quickly. Thus, they also save installation and configuration costs.

Oracle VM consists of the Oracle VM server (the hypervisor) and any one of two management options which include Oracle VM Manager and the Oracle VM Management Pack.

Oracle VM server

Oracle VM Server is based on the Open Source Xen.org hypervisor, an industry open standard for virtualization with broad adoption from major ISVs like Oracle, IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Red Hat, Novel, Debian, Citrix and the Linux community. The hypervisor of Oracle VM server can run multiple guest operating systems concurrently on a single piece of x86 hardware, effectively sharing the CPU and memory resources.

It supports both paravirtualized and hardware virtualized guests, just in case the CPU does not support hardware virtualization.

Management Options of Oracle VM server

Oracle VM servers are manged in pools either from Oracle VM Management Pack or the Oracle VM Manager, but not from both the things.

Oracle VM Manager is a stand-alone management console used to manage Oracle VM servers. It also provides management capabilities at the Oracle VM server, server pool and server pool resources layers. It is distributed in three formats:

1. As a pre-configured template

2. As an application that installs on Enterprise Linux

3. As an Oracle VM Management Pack port

The administrative tasks are executed through a web GUI or from the command line interface, where commands for regular administrative tasks can be scripted and simply run whenever required.

Oracle VM Management Pack is a licensed component of the Oracle VM. Apart from the capabilities of Oracle VM manager, it has additional capabilities like guest operating system monitoring, administration, provisioning and patch management.

The Application Change Console is a separate standalone application, licensed with the Oracle VM Management Pack that enables tracking of changes made in configuration files and sends alerts/notification when changes are made.

Oracle VM vs. VMware and Citrix

Unlike VMware that focuses on Microsoft Windows server consolidation and Citrix focusing on Microsoft server and desktop virtualization, Oracle VM is designed from the ground up to be the best virtualization solution for the Oracle stack. Moreover, Oracle VM uses Para-virtualization architecture, compared to VMware's emulation model vSphere server architecture, allowing much better database and middleware scalability under heavy loads. It also reduces the timekeeping problems that are common with VMware’s design.

Oracle vs. Red Hat

Red Hat offers virtualization as an Operating system feature. Red Hat dropped support for Xen hypervisor with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and Fedora 12 in favor of commercial KVM (Kernel Based Virtual Machine) x86 virtualization solution. Oracle VM server supports Red Hat Linux in both paravirtualization and hardware virtualization modes, whereas Red Hat does not support Oracle products.