After a long period of stealth activity around its hypervisor Oracle VM Server, Oracle seems getting ready to articulate its strategy and make it more competitive.
The latest version of its enterprise management platform, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5, can now use a new Oracle VM Management Pack, which includes all the features of Oracle VM Manager.
In this way those customers using Enterprise Manager will be able to manage physical and virtual servers as well as the application inside them from a single console.
The Management Pack brings in the following features:
- Manage virtual environments with an application perspective – allows customers to quickly diagnose whether the root cause of a problem is in an application component, in a virtual resource, or in a physical resource; enabling efficient consolidation and optimization of data center resources through virtualization.
- Built-in configuration management – enables administrators to easily track application relationships and analyze configuration changes.
- Policy-based management – helps reduce the on-going costs of IT compliance with the ability to define company specific policies for virtualization, to enforce configuration best practices and help achieve regulatory compliance.
- Automated deployment – automates software deployment through Oracle VM Templates for packaged applications, middleware, database, and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
- Lifecycle automation – spanning test, deployment, patching and maintenance capabilities, including automated patching of operating systems and Oracle software running inside the guest virtual machines and live migration of guest virtual machines to other servers during server maintenance windows. This helps maximize return on investment in a virtualized environment, through simplified management across the application lifecycle.
- High availability for virtual infrastructure – provides enterprise-class capabilities such as server pooling, automatic load balancing and server failover, helping to ensure business continuity in the virtual environment, usually associated with traditional high-cost physical servers.
Oracle VM Manager will continue to be free of charge.