Today we formally announced the release of Oracle VM Server for x86 3.1. It is available for download from http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux. The software consists of 2 ISO images, the Oracle VM 3.1 Manager iso and Oracle VM 3.1 server iso... You can find the documentation library on the documentation website.Oracle VM Manager UI enhancements to improve ease-of-use.
We continue to reduce the number of clicks to do actions and also have very easy to use and very streamlined configuration wizards and setup wizards. For instance for create VM or Create Server pool.Storage enhancements for backup and recovery purposes.
It is now possible to do an nfs export on an Oracle VM server of a local/shared SAN/iscsi repository. When you have a filesystem based (ocfs2) repository with Oracle VM 3, only servers that are part of the Server pool can access the filesystem, with this new enhancement, you can define an nfs client hostname/IP address which will be allowed to do a remote nfs mount of this volume for backup purposes (or restore).Using Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2 (2.6.39+) as the dom0 kernel
We now use the exact same Linux kernel for Oracle Linux with 2.6.39 (uek2) and for Oracle VM 3.1. This is possible because of all the work we have done together with Citrix/Xensource people over the last few years to get the necessary support for Xen and Linux merged into Linux. As I have mentioned in a previous blog entry, Linux mainline contains everything needed to have Linux be a complete dom0 management kernel for Xen without any additional patches. Unlike some of the FUD out there about "Xen" not being part of Linux, we have always made clear that Xen is a hypervisor. And Linux runs on top as the management/control domain kernel giving a great level of separation/isolation. In enterprise environments this is a big deal and helps us create solid, stable, secure solutions.Clone many times
Simply the ability to say, clone a template X times in one step.
Quite a few enhancements went into this release :
The advantage for customers is that we do an incredible amount of testing on uek2 in terms of performance, network, disk io and scalability/stability in general and now Oracle VM automatically benefits from this additional testing. On top of that, for our partners, they do not have to worry about testing 2 different products in terms of drivers, since we share the exact same code base we have the exact same drivers for our hardware/storage vendors.
You can find more information in the documentation set and in the release notes.