Creating Your Oracle Virtual Machine

I’ve discussed the Oracle VM Manager in the previous post.  Using it you can do a variety of tasks including:

• Create virtual machines from installation media or from a virtual machine template
• Delete virtual machines
• Power off virtual machines
• Import virtual machines
• Deploy and clone virtual machines
• Perform live migration of virtual machines
• Import and manage ISOs
• Create and manage virtual machine templates
• Create and manage shared virtual disks

I want to cover the Virtual Machine creation process in this post.

If you are using the Oracle VM Manager you must have a gues operating system (O/S) to install when you choose to create a new Virtual Machine.  Currently Oracle VM supports RedHat and Oracle Enterprise Linux (32/64bit), Windows XP, Vista, 2000 and 2003.  The Windows software can be run in 32 or 64 bit but does not run as natively as the Linux guest O/S’s. As you go through the process of defining a new VM have several options.

The first is to to use an existing Template which can either be one you have created or one that you have downloaded from Oracle.  In my case there were two Linux X64 templates that Oracle had created and which I used initially. One Oracle template is just a plan Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3 Template which has OEL pre-configured.  The other is OEL5.3 with the 10gR2 database (10.2.04) already setup with an ORCL instance.  Using the templates is very simple and gives you a quick-running environment.

Another option is to create your own template or image from an existing environment that you have customized.

The other option for building your VM is to create it from an ISO image.  If you are installing Windows 2003 that you could create an ISO image or mount the CDROM and build it from there.

The last option is to create everything manually using a Xen command-line tool, virt-install.  The documentation is good on this option but it can be much more time-consuming so I’m not going to cover that here.

Here are several screens showing the create process using the OEL 5.3 template.

Once the Confirm button is pressed the Manager creates the appropriate Virtual Machine subdirectory in the /OVS/running subdirectory, creates a customized vm.cfg file and then copies the template files to the new directory.  At the same time, the XE database is updated with the appropriate information about the new VM.  (As a side note, if you create a VM manually, you can “import” it into Oracle VM Manager so that the XE database is updated as well).

Once the VM Manager is completed with copying the files into the new directory, the new VM will show up in the list of Virtual Machines.  You can then choose to “start” it up and by selecting the “CONSOLE” option you can watch the boot process as Linux or Windows boots.

So far I’ve setup several Linux hosts.  I’m going to be setting up a Windows 2K host in the next week to support an older version of Oracle’s CBRM software.  I’ll provide an update on how that goes.