Remora OVM management app for Splunk: life gets better

We're currently working on a Splunk app for OVM management--a set of tools to help admins work out what's up with their pool, servers, guests, and the OVM Manager system. We use it in house for this very thing. So when one of our guests has a disk that's getting full, we can see it immediately on our dashboard and move things or add storage as needed. No guesswork--no surprises.

A few interesting new features

Oracle VM has just been updated to 3.03. The main new feature is anti-affinity support, which allows definition of which guests may not reside simultaneously on a single host. This is useful in cases such as a database cluster on guests, in which having multiple nodes on the same physical hardware would negate the hardware fault tolerance the cluster is providing.

Other notable improvements are mainly within Oracle VM Manager, which has had some extra polish added to the user interface.

A full changelog can be found at:

• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26996_01/e18546/index.html

Unbeatable Price/Performance for IT Infrastructure Applications

Oracle's Sun Fire X4170 M2 server is the most versatile IT infrastructure building block and offers the optimal balance of compute power, memory capacity, and I/O capability in a compact and energy-efficient 1RU enclosure.

This server is ideal for middleware workloads, application development, and systems administration requirements.

Optimized to run Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle VM Server. They are also certified to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Windows Server, and VMware.

With shared storage these servers are a great starting point to creating an OVM server pool.

We eat our own tinned products...

Remora recommends and is implementing Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) for many of our customers. But what a lot of people don't know is that we've been using it ourselves for over a year. We have migrated a server-room full of noisy, power-hungry systems onto just three Oracle Sun X86 servers with OVM version 2.2 and a Sun ZFS storage appliance. Oracle has recently released OVM version 3 which includes a greatly improved management layer and the latest version of the Xen engine which underpins it.

OVM gives us high availability and live migration of guest systems, so that on the rare occasions we need to perform routine maintenance, we can keep our critical systems running while part of the server pool is down. Another significant advantage of OVM is a substantial cost saving, of the order of 80%, compared to another well-known and widely-deployed virtualisation framework, including licensing and implementation services.

So, if your virtualisation vendor's bills are bringing tears to your eyes, you might want to consider an alternative that is production-ready and working right now.

Not content with that, Remora has extended the OVM management interface with status reports and metrics provided through a Splunk application we've developed in-house. The two products work beautifully together, and Remora is the leading partner in Australia for both Oracle and Splunk. This is no accident, and it's not buzz-word synergy--it's actual synergy.

Remora rolling out an OVM cluster across 4 continents

Remora has been contracted to provide one of the largest Oracle Virtual Machine 3 deployments in the Asia-Pacfic region. OVM 3 is the latest virtualisation technology from Oracle and provides some major advancements from it's predecessor OVM 2.

Oracle Virtual Machine utilises the Xen hypervisor and is rapidly becoming the preferred option for VM deployments due to it's robustness, competitive licensing and support costs. When purchased with Oracle hardware it has no licensing costs and comes with 1 year support.

The deployment being rolled out for the large international client spans over 4 continents. Once completed, the client will be able to manage their entire infrastructure from a central location. The result will be a more robust global network with greater flexibility, high availability, greater redundancy and lower maintenance costs.

Make deployment of VMs easier

There are several reasons the use of templates in a virtual environment makes sense, they are quick to set up, taking mere minutes rather than an hour or so to bring up a fresh VM, and they are best used as 'Gold images', which are templates that are set up as close as possible to the best case for specific work loads.

When a template is used in a VM environment, they speed up the process of bringing up a VM, and help maintain consistency between several similar VMs.

By utilizing templates as 'Gold images', one can be assured that the VMs are capable of dealing with what they were designed to do, such as a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) template, which would make bringing up a webserver quick and easy.

Another benefit of templates, is they can be easily transferred between VM servers, and they are assured to be set up the same. Where that level of certainty cannot be given to freshly built VMs

Browse through the prebuilt templates available here:

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/vm/templates-101937.html

JeOS creation is interesting

The issue with JeOS creation is, if you want to do it manually, it's difficult to actually find anything to help you.

Use this: http://oss.oracle.com/ol5/docs/modifyjeos.html
Or this: http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/027000.pdf

To do it automatically download OVM template builder and basically just follow the prompts.

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