Oracle Enterprise Manager Extends Management to Oracle VM Server Virtualisation
Continuing to deliver on its top-down approach to application management, Oracle today announced new management capabilities for Oracle® VM through the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 (10gR5). See related release dated today.
With the new Oracle VM Management Pack, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 provides a comprehensive management solution that spans the entire lifecycle of applications and their virtual infrastructure.
The Oracle VM Management Pack helps customers accelerate the adoption of virtualisation, enabling them to optimise IT resources, improve hardware utilisation, streamline IT processes and reduce costs – without adding the complexity and cost associated with multiple management tools.
Customers can now manage both physical and virtual environments with a comprehensive top-down approach that provides a unique business perspective, enabling the understanding of user experiences and the business impact of IT issues, in addition to offering the best tools to manage each component in the stack individually.
Highlights of the New Oracle VM Management Pack
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 optimisation of data center resources through virtualisation.
Built-in configuration management – enables administrators to easily track application relationships and analyse configuration changes.
Policy-based management – helps reduce the on-going costs of IT compliance with the ability to define company specific policies for virtualisation, 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.
ISVs can now streamline deployment of their products and services for virtual environments by providing predefined templates.
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 maximise return on investment in a virtualised 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.
"Two of the main roadblocks of customer adoption of virtualization technologies has been the high cost and complexity of managing virtual environments and a lack of tools to provide an application perspective," said Richard Sarwal, Oracle Senior Vice President Product Development. "With added management capabilities for Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager has taken a major step forward in helping our customers drive down the cost of managing applications in virtual environments."
“CERN has been searching for a comprehensive virtualisation management solution for some time. We recently evaluated Oracle Enterprise Manager's Oracle VM Management Pack and we were impressed with its virtualisation dashboard. It simplifies administrators' jobs by providing an integrated solution for monitoring and administration of virtual servers as well as tracking configuration relationships. We especially liked the ability to provision servers within minutes using templates and live-migrate VMs. These management capabilities can greatly simplify virtual infrastructure management, reduce IT operations overhead, provide cost savings and reduce risk,” said Anton Topurov, Database Fellow, openlab, CERN.
"With the latest additions for Oracle VM deployment and management, Oracle Enterprise Manager will enable us to manage both our existing physical environments and new virtualised infrastructure from a single console. The virtualised Oracle grid infrastructure will allow us to maximise the use of server resources while maintaining high levels of system availability and performance," said April Sims, Database Administrator, Southern Utah University.
