Summary

This chapter provided some insight into the Oracle VM architecture. By understanding the architecture, you will find it is easier to understand the factors that influence performance and functionality. The beginning part of the chapter covered the components of the Oracle VM system—the Oracle VM Server and the Oracle VM Manager as well as the Agent, which is a key component of the system.

Because of Oracle VM’s use of the Xen Hypervisor, this chapter also covered the architecture of the Xen virtualization environment and the Xen Hypervisor. The Xen virtualization system is an open-source project, which is heavily influenced by Oracle since Oracle relies on it. This chapter provided an overview of the Xen system and Xen Hypervisor, as well as detailed some of the hardware requirements necessary to run Oracle VM and Xen. Although Xen runs on a number of different platforms, Oracle VM only supports the x86 and x86_64 environments at this time. Oracle VM will work on 32-bit hardware, but I recommend running Oracle VM on 64-bit if at all possible.