Preface

Oracle VM Manager is a management product developed by Oracle that complements Oracle Grid Control and fits into Oracle's Cloud Computing strategy. Oracle VM Manager is a rather new product and is gaining popularity within the Oracle community, especially within groups that have been testing Oracle products in sandbox environments using alternate Virtualization products or tools. Since Oracle provides its own version of Oracle EL jeOS (Just Enough OS), and its own VM stack (or platform as they call it), Oracle VM Manager, Oracle VM Server, and Oracle VM agent become an essential part of the Oracle Virtualization platform; the "one-stop-shop" approach allows Oracle customers to rely on a consolidated support. This could also fit very well into their strategy where Oracle will eventually launch its own Cloud Services and will fully manage and support its offerings via the Cloud.

Oracle entered the virtualization market in 2007 by releasing Oracle VM Server and Oracle VM Manager. Oracle has also been shipping Oracle EL, or Oracle Enterprise Linux products, recently calling Oracle jeOS. Do note that they are separately downloadable from Oracle's e-delivery. Oracle's entry into the virtualization arena is a validation of the fact that virtualization is going mainstream and also that it is increasingly becoming an enabler to Cloud Computing and Cloud Applications.

Oracle VM Manager is a powerful web application, based on ADF (Application Development Framework), and its purpose is, as you may have guessed, to manage multiple Oracle VM Servers. This means that it does the VMLM (Virtual Machine Lidecycle Management), adds virtual machines (whether from completely built templates or from installation media), live migration, deployment, and relocation, among others.

Oracle VM Manager also manages resources such as ISO files, VM templates, and shared disk resources. In the new release, 2.1.2, there are several cool features such as the Server Pool Wizard, HA for Server Pools and VM Servers, VM conversions, Rate Limit of VIF (Virtual Network Interface), and Priority Class of Virtual Disk.

Oracle's virtualization play may seem to encounter a lot of resistance and skepticism, but Oracle is gradually treading a path where it will continue to develop its product to match enterprise class maturity as the market further evolves. Clearly with the latest Oracle VM 2.1.2, many new features have come about indicating that Oracle is more than serious.

What this book covers

The book is designed so that you can dive into chapters on your own, as the chapters will be written independently of each other. You can use them both as reference as well as detailed guidance, purely based on you current focus. So for instance, you may want to do a quick installation of the Oracle VM Server, and then jump to Chapter 3 directly. My intention is to keep this book both conversational as well as provide screenshots to satisfy your needs.

I would recommend beginners to read the book chapter by chapter, increasing the pace as you move ahead with your installations. As the chapters progress, while not necessarily complex, they may require you to dig into some of skills in Linux, Virtualization, and so on. But like I said in the beginning, you need to have some sort of understanding on virtualization and a bit of experience as well. The latter part of the book concentrates on the VM management, a more fun part after you are done with installing and understanding the architecture of the Oracle VM platform.

I have divided the book into two parts, Getting Started and Looking into the Architecture and Management. In the first section, you will learn a little bit about the Oracle VM platform and the components of the Oracle VM platform. In the next part, you will get into the fun part of managing the VMs across a typical high-availability Oracle VM platform by using the Oracle VM Manager.

Part l: Getting Started

The first few chapters introduce the Oracle VM platform. Then we will go about installing Oracle VM manager and Oracle VM Server. You will carefully select the hardware and/or software platforms to carry out these installations.

I have typically chosen two environments and both happen to be hardware platforms. I will explain in detail the architecture that I have chosen for the purpose of writing this book, and also why.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Oracle VM

In this section we provide general information about Oracle VM Manager, Oracle VM Server, and Oracle VM Agent. We will explain how Oracle's VM Manager, a typical ADF web application, can act as a frontend in a typical Cloud architecture, and why Oracle VM Server (which is derived from XEN Hypervisor, a rather popular Hypervisor used by Amazon EC2 type of installations) complements the Cloud services architecture in the backend of the Data Center.

We will go about explaining what Oracle VM Manager is, what is new in the Oracle VM platform 2.1.2, where you can find it, how to install it, and how to get started. And obviously we will end with the "why you should choose Oracle VM Server and Oracle VM Manager" above other virtualization solutions.

Chapter 2: Installing Oracle VM Manager

Here you go about configuring the Oracle VM Manager and go through the regular pre-installation checklists. What kind of hardware requirements you could best use, and which type of Operating Systems could be used to install the Oracle VM Manager upon.

We will get into details here and go ahead with successfully installing Oracle VM Server.

Chapter 3: Installing Oracle VM Server

The Oracle VM Server is based upon Xen Hypervisor, a very small Linux-based management Operating System.

Here we explore installing Oracle VM Server via the CD-ROM and other shared and accessible sources such as NFS, HTTP, and so on.

Part II: Looking into the Architecture and Management

These chapters are intended for all Data Center administrators, architects, and system builders, just about anyone who is interested in knowing and managing Virtual Machines on Oracle's VM platform.

There are no really advanced features such as testing Oracle RAC on a typical multiple-Oracle VM Server node, but it will have enough meat to not only do things through the feature rich VM Manager web application, but also to get your hands dirty with the console.

The main purpose of this section of the book is to see what really happens on the Oracle VM platform and how we can manage multiple Virtual Machines.

Chapter 4: Oracle VM Management

Here we will get into the management of the Oracle VM servers such as the addition of nodes, removing nodes, editing nodes, and starting and shutting down the nodes.

We will manage the Oracle VM server pool, explore the principles of designing the server pool, and creating and enabling the HA—all of the meaty stuff is explained here. This chapter will be interesting for anyone who wants to learn about managing the Oracle VM Manager.

Chapter 5: Managing VMs with Oracle VM Manager - Part 1

In this part, we will go about explaining what VMs are, how we create them, how to startup-shutdown those VMs, typical console based actions required to manage the VMs, and basic configuration tasks around VM management.

We will discuss what Guest VMs are supported on Oracle VM Servers and do a quick install of one of them.

Chapter 6: Managing VMs with Oracle VM Manager - Part 2

Continuing from the previous chapter we will go about managing the VMs and exploring the VMs through the Oracle VM Manager, such as viewing VM information or details, editing configurations, and other advanced functions such as Live VM Migration.

Chapter 7: Managing VMs with Oracle VM Manager - Part 3

In the final part, we shall be performing some typical VM resource management tasks, such as importing VMs via several methods such as templates, VM Images, ISO files, and so on. We will also look briefly at creating shared storage.

Chapter 8: Troubleshooting and Gotchas

Like any other tool, this platform will not be completely free from problems and here we will explain briefly about the problems you can run into, and what steps you must take to remediate them.

Appendix: Command Line Tools

We cover some essential command line tools in the Appendix. We will explore some of the important ones and the rest will be an exercise.

What you need for this book

Unless otherwise stated, the environment used in the examples and referred to throughout the book is Oracle VM Manager 2.1.2, installed on hardware. I have chosen two scenarios—the first is a two box HP DL 360 Dual CPU, 2 GB RAM configuration and the other is a two box Dell 2900 Quad-core, 32GB RAM each. We'll use the shipped Oracle templates where necessary, so as to do exciting things such as Server pool creation, live migration, and so on, but we will also go about creating custom templates where necessary.

All Oracle VM platform and tools are available on Oracle's virtualization site and we will use them for the purpose of understanding this book.

Who this book is for

This book is meant for all virtualization fans, not just the ones who have been playing with Oracle databases or other Oracle applications but just about anyone who wishes to test and create sandboxes, and test their applications and eventually deploy them in production. Oracle has recently won some new customers, so Oracle VM platform is also being deployed in production environments.

But like I said, VM is also meant for the regular virtualization enthusiast who wishes to run and deploy multiple flavors of Operating Systems. You can also create Windows VMs! In the later chapters we will look into the supported OSes and it will surprise you that you can do a lot with Oracle VM platform. Don't expect this book to answer all your problems, it should be treated more as an introductory book where we will test the waters and get you up and running. If you do happen to like this book then I will be tempted to write a more advanced book that will take a deep dive into advanced concepts, but for now let's get you up and running with the basics.

It is also very handy to be a little inclined towards Oracle applications such as databases. I myself have been an Oracle DBA, and knowing a little bit about SQL might help as we might test Oracle jeOS + 11g DB VMs, but it is not a must by any means.

On the whole you will definitely benefit a lot more if you are aware of Linux commands, Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, and so on. To get that information please feel free to dig into Oracle's rich documentation manuals, both in PDF as well as downloadable media sets to run locally at your end.

What you will find in the book

This book intends to provide you with in depth detail about all aspects of using Oracle VM Manager and installing Oracle VM server, and then touching lightly all aspects of Oracle VM Management aspects. We will go about by installing Oracle VM platform and managing it. This will help you get more productive with your time and you will learn techniques to manage your VMs both effectively and efficiently.

What you won't find

This book will not teach you SQL, PL/SQL, Linux, or any other languages here. We will also not delve too deeply into the concept of virtualization either. We expect you to know a bit about virtualization and expect you to have used other virtualization products already.

Neither will we get into all forms of virtualization such as clustering, hardware-assist, host- based, full, or Para virtualization. We will also not get into the security part of the book, something which is increasingly becoming a hot topic among the virtualization industry. We will first concentrate on getting you started.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The OC4J log file can also be investigated and can be located at /opt/oc4j/dump-timestamp.dmp."

A block of code is set as follows:

[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# mkdir mnt-pt
# mount -o loop,ro OracleVM-Manager-2.1.2.iso mnt-pt

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When the Installation screen appears, choose Next".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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