One of my favorite Oracle products is Oracle Virtual Machine (OVM) which allows me to run multiple virtual servers on a single physical server. In my case that is a loaded DELL 2950 server which supports 8 Virtual Servers we have configured for testing, development and evaluation. I have created several server configurations and saved them as templates. When I need a new one I just create a new Virtual Machine and select the appropriate template. Oracle also provides several templates that you can work with as well.
The beauty of virtual servers is that they maximize your hardware usage and provide fail-over (when configured). The new version of Oracle’s server virtualization software features the latest Xen-based, industry-standard hypervisor, Xen 3.4. Oracle VM supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications and the new version is advertised to offer new CPU power management, memory management, and direct disk I/O capabilities.