Oracle VM Release 3.2, a key component in Oracle’s desktop to data center virtualization portfolio, is now available. There are two main themes to the new release, Adam Hawley, senior director of desktop and server virtualization product management at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One main area of emphasis is to provide a richer, more diverse set of deployment options for customers. The second major collection of enhancements is around allowing users to more easily and efficiently manage larger environments.
In terms of more diverse deployment options, a key new capability is that Oracle VM Manager now offers unified virtualization management for Oracle SPARC T-Series Servers running Oracle VM Server for SPARC as well as x86-based servers running Oracle VM Server for x86, improving operational efficiency. “Customers that are using SPARC, or both SPARC and x86 now have a single tool that they can use to manage their Oracle VM deployment,” notes Hawley.
Oracle VM Manager now also includes support for MySQL Enterprise Edition as the management repository at no additional cost. For customers’ ease of use, the new support for MySQL Enterprise Edition is included as part of the automated install, notes Hawley. Oracle VM customers can now choose to use Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Oracle Database Standard Edition or MySQL Enterprise Edition as the Oracle VM Manager repository when deploying in production environments.
In terms of expanded support for customers that need to manage large environments, the Oracle VM Manager provides a full command line interface (CLI) that supports the same functions as the Oracle VM Manager browser-based interface. This enables common tasks to be scripted and fully automated, saving time and lowering the risk of human error. “Everything you can do from the browser-based interface you can also now do from a command line. Whether you are using that to integrate another tool that you already have, or whether you like to create scripts to do repetitive things like creating a VM or adding a server to the environment, you can just create a script against that command line,” says Hawley. “That lowers the tedium of having to click through a browser all the time but also lowers the risk of human error.”
For customers that prefer to work everything through the browser, there is now the ability for custom tags to be created and used to filter the view of VMs and servers in the user interface (UI). This enables users to quickly identify and act on specific subsets of VMs or servers. There is also the ability to “multi-select” objects, enabling users to take action on multiple objects in one step for faster operations in large environments - such as starting or stopping a collection of virtual machines or servers all together, or live migrating VMs from one server to another.
In addition, new at-a-glance health status home page offers expanded and summarized health and status reporting on VM statistics such as memory and CPU usage, allowing for rapid identification of issues before they become problems. Direct import of virtual machines into an Oracle VM Manager environment also reduces the number of steps required to move VMs into an Oracle VM Manager installation.
“Collectively, all these things make it much easier to maneuver and much more efficient and automated to manage large environments, and now with the addition of SPARC, all those benefits extend over to our SPARC customers,” notes Hawley.
Oracle VM is available as a free download.
For more details, go here.