Oracle VM 3.3 delivers enterprise-scale performance enhancements

The latest release of Oracle VM delivers enterprise-scale performance enhancements that provide customers with more flexibility, ease of use, and integrated management.

Oracle VM’s application-driven architecture continues to deliver support for a wide range of enterprise applications including Oracle and non-Oracle application workloads with updated Oracle VM paravirtual (PV) drivers for Microsoft Windows.

Oracle VM 3.3 adds improvements to unified virtualization management for x86 and SPARC systems running Oracle VM Server, in a single console.

Oracle VM is available as a free download with zero license cost and world-class enterprise support.
• Oracle VM 3.3 enhancements include:
• Support for diverse platforms and application workloads: Extends support of Oracle VM Guest Additions to major guest operating systems, including Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Microsoft Windows, to provide administrators fine-grained control over the configuration and behavior of components running within the virtual machine, directly from Oracle VM Manager. Users can also install the OpenStack technology preview with Oracle VM 3.3 test environments and the latest version of Oracle Linux. Furthermore, Oracle developed Oracle VM PV drivers for Microsoft Windows to boost network and disk I/O throughput for Microsoft Windows guest OS environments. Windows PV drivers along with Oracle VM Server for x86 have passed the Microsoft Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) requirements, enabling better support for customers running Windows workloads on an Oracle VM environment.
o Enhanced Integration: Oracle VM Server for x86 leverages Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3, allowing customers to utilize the same high-performance, high-scalability technology powering Oracle Linux and Oracle engineered systems.
o Optimizations of the VM for enterprise-scale performance: Huge-pages support allows guests hosted on an x86 server pool to improve performance and reduce I/O that results in page lookups in a virtualized environment. The statistics and event model in Oracle VM Manager now monitors and automatically adjusts generated statistics to deliver significant performance gains.
o Improved ease of use and flexibility for automation of virtualization management:
New virtual machine console uses HTML5 features to provide faster and more reliable console access.
Oracle VM Manager comes bundled with MySQL Enterprise Edition, providing automated database backup and integrated tools for database object consistency checking to improve supportability and management.
Oracle VM Manager provides a fully supported web services API that includes both SOAP and REST interfaces to enable more automation and interoperability.
Simplified VLAN support definition enables users to specify VLAN interfaces as needed and to define which ports are used for which VLAN tags, bringing more flexibility to network design.
o Tighter security control built into Oracle VM Manager: Reduces the number of required open ports to minimize potential access points and security vulnerabilities. To protect and manage authorized access to Oracle VM Server, a certificate-based authentication model has been implemented for Oracle VM Agent and Oracle VM Manager.
o Improved SPARC virtualization management and availability: Additional storage types such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, ZFS volume, and local disk, in addition to NFS, can now be directly assigned to virtual machines running in a SPARC server pool managed by Oracle VM Manager, offering customers more choices when choosing storage with Oracle VM Server for SPARC.