Oracle VM

The Oracle VM is a virtualizaion tool which can be used to create, manage, and customize virtual machines. It's lSO works as a hypervisor. The host OS is the Oracle VM Server on top of which other guest OS can be virtualized. Both 32 as well as 64-bit versions of RHEL are supported as guest OSes, right from versions 3.x to 5.x. Also, Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.x and 5.x along with Windows OS that are newer than Windows 2000 can be used to implement para virtualization as well as hardware virtualization.

It supports i686 and x86_64 host hardware only. Oracle VM Server requires a 32-bit or 64-bit processor with at least an i686-class processor on the host computer.

This includes all Intel Pentium Pro or newer, and all AMD Athlon/Duron processors and newer. At least a Pentium 4 or Athlon CPU is recommended. For hardware virtualized guest operating systems (for example, Microsoft Windows), a CPU with hardware virtualization support is required. This includes some Intel Pentium D, Core, Core2 and Xeon models, and some AMD Athlon and Opteron models. 1GB RAM, although it is recommended. Oracle VM server does not put any limitation on the number of virtual machines. Oracle VM Manager is a tool which is used for the management of virtual machines and can remotely manage them too. This tool needs to be downloaded separately.

Virtual machine management options like moving virtual machines from one server to another, backing up virtual machines, etc is also supported. An interesting feature of this tool is that it creates a virtual machine tree and manages them remotely through one common console. This means that one can create multiple levels of virtual machines inside a virtual machine using Oracle VM. Setting up Oracle VM server is command based and hence requires some level of expertise to install and manage this tool.