Starting this week, Oracle has publicly started really pushing Oracle’s virtualization products. I attended a seminar on Tuesday covering the road map and yesterday was an all day online Virtualization forum.

Oracle’s server virtualization is focused mainly on two products – Oracle VM for Sparc and Oracle VM for x86. I’m going to focus on Oracle VM for x86, as commodity x86 hardware is the big industry focus and Oracle is really focusing on why you should go with Oracle VM versus VMware.

I’m hear to tell you Oracle VM just isn’t ready for the enterprise. Sure, there are large reference customers out there, but Oracle VM doesn’t have the features I consider necessary to be called enterprise ready. I run VMware vSphere in my enterprise environments and so I’ll compare Oracle VM to VMware vSphere, since I believe VMware vSphere is enterprise ready.

Load Balancing – with virtualization you can run many virtual servers on one physical server. Oracle VM’s load balancing works by performing automated load balancing at each virtual machine power on. Basically what that means is when you start a VM it gets placed on the least busy (in terms of memory and CPU usage) physical server in your server pool. That’s it. VMware’s load balancing called DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduling) not only does this but also checks the load on each host in the cluster every 5 minutes and (if you have it set to fully automated – the VMware best practice) automatically redistributes VMs for the best possible performance.

In my environments, and I suspect almost everyone’s, the workload on the servers changes throughout the day. During the business day, much of the system load is OLTP type loads – users entering data, querying data, placing orders, etc. After the primary business hours, the system load becomes much more batch intensive as things like reports are generated, statistics are gathered, and backups are performed. With Oracle VM, this isn’t taken into account. I could have some Oracle VM servers completely idle while others are overwhelmed. I believe overall system performance to be critical to a product being enterprise ready.

Snapshots – being able to take a snapshot of a VM is, in my belief, critical to an enterprise virtualized environment. Oracle VM doesn’t do snapshots. Simple as that. When I asked on Tuesday at road map seminar with Oracle if that would be available in the next version (officially due sometime in the next 12 months, though I suspect it might be released in the next month), I was told they couldn’t answer yes or no. The fact is, Oracle VM doesn’t have snapshots and VMware vSphere does. But what really is the big deal? Why do I want snapshots?

o Patching – enterprise systems frequently have patches and code changes and need to have a failback plan if something doesn’t go right. With Oracle VM I’m out of luck. Sure I can go back to the last full system backup I took, but we’re probably talking hours of downtime if I need to failback. With VMware vSphere, I take a snapshot of the VM before I start patching (something that takes only a couple of seconds – no exaggeration) and then start my patching. If I need to fail back, I just go in the vSphere menu and choose “Revert to current snapshot” and the VM will restart right back to where it was when you took the snapshot. You even have the option to “snapshot the virtual machine’s memory” meaning if you revert back, your system won’t be in a state as if it had just rebooted, but will have all the processes running as if the machine never stopped.

o Backups – with Oracle VM, if I want to take a backup of the entire VM, I have to use a software agent running inside the VM. As anyone who has ever dealt with Windows knows, you frequently have troubles backing up open files… you know, like an Oracle database or the OS itself. As that backup runs, something that frequently takes hours, files are changing and you’re not getting a completely consistent image of the system. In VMware vSphere, there are many software packages, both from VMware and from third-party vendors that utilize snapshots to take a consistent image of the system. To me, enterprise ready includes good backups. Maybe I’m too demanding.

o Cloning – with Oracle VM if you want to clone a VM, you need to power it off. Yes, if I want to clone my production ERP system VMs, Oracle VM requires I turn VMs off to perform a clone. It’s on page 68 of the Oracle VM Manager 2.1.5 Manual . In VMware vSphere, I can clone with the VM up and available to users. In addition, with the latest version of VMware vSphere, vSphere uses public vStorage APIs to push much of this work onto the SAN itself, thereby reducing and almost eliminating network traffic AND freeing up compute resources on your cluster.

Memory usage – One of the benefits of virtualizing is consolidation – putting many VMs onto one physical server and thereby getting getting better usage of my resources. Oracle VM offers no memory consolidation technologies to increase your consolidation ratios (how many VMs you can put on a physical server). VMware vSphere offers FOUR technologies to increase your consolidation – Transparent Page Sharing, Ballooning, Memory Compression and Swapping. If I’m going to virtualize to consolidate my infrastructure, why not use the product that allows the best consolidation?

There’s many more scenarios where VMware vSphere is a much better and mature product than Oracle VM, but that’s not my point here. My point is that Oracle VM doesn’t meet what I would consider to be an enterprise ready product.