Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

One thing is sure – this is not a simple Virtual server setup – this software is complicated and best of all it’s free! You can have several machines running clustered storage and VMs that can all be controlled by a web driven interface.

We begin by diving into the VM manager interface using Internet Explorer as our web browser. (Some of the demos show Firefox but one thing is sure – you need java installed to use the VNC console for these VMs).

I have seen several of the older VM 2.x install and config documented so I won’t go into detail here but while I was testing this platform I did noticed a few pros and cons that I have noted below.

When configuring the VNC connection to your VMs the session does not stay open. You have to ‘Launch Console’ again and again when setting up your VM after it reboots.

Import/Export is not supported as well as the other platforms. I suspect that there are problems with ‘Stop 07B’ errors when using SATA imaging and then importing them to the VM server.

I think the clear bonus is the free cluster features when using more than one VM server. You can use several network cards to create private networking for management and for clustered storage and fail-over migration to reduce latency.

One caveat is that the machines must share a repository (you can’t use local storage on each of the VM servers and they must be the same versions – 2 AMD or 2 Intels is not enough). I tried to migrate a running vm between two lab machines – HP DX5750 and a Dell Optiplex 740 and received the following ‘reasons’ for the failure from the Oracle VM Manager web interface.

1.VM: WinXPSP3, has its config file is in repository: VMserver1-Local, which is not presented on server: VMserver2
2.VM: WinXPSP3, has vDisk or ISO: WinXPSP3, whose repository: VMserver1-Local, is not presented on server: VMserver2
3.VM: WinXPSP3, has vDisk or ISO: WXP-SP3.iso, whose repository: VMserver1-Local, is not presented on server: VMserver2
4.Server: VMserver2, and server: VMserver1, have CPUs in different compatibility groups: Default_AMD_Family:15_Model:67, Default_AMD_Family:15_Model:75