Oracle's Virtual Machine
- Details
- Category: Development
- Written by Brad Gibson
Oracle VM Server Development Environment
This document describes my virtualized environment that I use for development and continuous learning. It also notes some of the challenges encountered in setting it as well as recommendations on hardware. Oracle's visualization offering is made up of two main components; Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) Server and Oracle Virtual Machine Manager (OVMM). The OVM is the part that gets loaded on a server that will run guest operating systems, typically a flavor of Linux in my case. OVMM is the tool that is used to manage the virtualized environment. You use it to create VMs, assign network, disk, memory, processors, and other resources to the VM. For this article a VM is a virtualized machine and means the guest operating system on one of the VM Servers that are managed by OVMM.
My Hardware
I used to have 5 Enterprise class Sun Servers along with a Sun D1000 storage array until the my basement flood took them from me. They served a long and useful life. They had every version of Oracle's Application Servers installed on them. They were used in the early development of the ACT Test's registration site and a R&D GIS project for ADM. I will miss them but what came out was much better for today's computing world. To replace my drowned Sun servers I purchased 2 Dell 2950 Gen II servers on eBay for a little less that $400. They are loaded and do the job of a dozen of my old servers. On each server I can run 8 VMs each with 1 proc and 4GB of ram or 1 massive VM with 8 processors and 32GB of RAM. I can even oversubscribe the number of CPUs and say have 16 VMs each using half a core. I have not attempted that just but if I ever need more than 16 small VMs you can bet I will test it. So far I have only need a handful of servers for testing my software. I can easily replicate most n-tier environments with what I have. Currently they are running a few servers for testing a large Nagios customization I am working on. I needed some servers to monitor and a server to host Nagios so I cloned a few VMs and was up and running in no time. A couple months ago they were loaded up with WebLogic and the SOA Suite.
The Why
You may wonder why I put so much of my time and money into my development environment. The answer is simple, nobody would give me one all setup and free to boot. Well maybe it is a little more than that. For one I like to be at home as much as possible and still be able to work. I have a lovely wife and two awesome boys that I want to spend time with. If I have the tools I can work from home and not have to travel as much. I traveled every week to client sites to do work for years. I also believe if you want to be the best at what you do in this field you cannot be a 9-to-5er. Technology changes so fast that if you don't keep up.... To Be Continued.