CHAPTER

2

What Is Oracle VM?

Oracle is relatively new to the virtualization arena; however, Oracle’s technology is based on established technology. Oracle introduced Oracle VM at the Oracle World conference in 2007 and made the product available for download shortly after that. Oracle touted this as being one of its largest software announcements in the history of the company. The Oracle VM product consists of two major components: the Oracle VM Server and the Oracle VM Manager.

Since Oracle’s recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle VM has been rebranded as Oracle VM Server for x86. At the same time, the virtualization products that are available for the Sun hardware product line have been rebranded as Oracle VM Server for SPARC. In addition, Oracle has added desktop virtualization to its product line with Oracle VM VirtualBox. In this book, Oracle VM Server for x86 will be referred to simply as Oracle VM. Any of the other products will be referred to by its full name.