Oracle VM Server for x86: OVM Administration Ed 1

In order to provide good coverage at work I needed to take this class between the time we hired a new DBA and the time our contract DBA rolled off our project. That narrowed the choice down to classes scheduled for September. The only class available was in San Jose CA. I had never visited any of the towns south of San Francisco so this was a good chance to experience the Silicon Valley culture. My hotel was walking distance from the classroom and there are several great places to eat along the way.

At work we are using Exalogic to host virtual machines on OVM. I had already dabbled in OVM and had set up some RAC databases on OVM running under Virtualbox on my Toshiba Qosmio before class (I bought the Qosmio with 32G specifically to run database VMs). I think this was good preparation for the class since there was a similar setup in our labs. We used remote OVM servers that hosted our lab OVM manager and our lab OVM servers. So we were running two levels of virtualization. We installed  OVM manager and OVM server in the first few labs (one OVM server was pre-built). There were other labs for configuring storage, networks, guest OS creation, templates, etc. I enjoyed the labs a lot.

The last virtualization class I had attended was for VMware back in 2008. I have used VMware ESX and Workstation over the past several years. I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of our lab systems.

We had an excellent instructor, Hans Forbrich (aka Fuzzy Graybeard). I knew of Hans because he’s an Oracle Ace director and Daniel Morgan, another Ace director had presented to our local Oracle User’s Group in July. One of Dan’s slides is about Hans. The name was also familiar because Hans has contributed to the Oracle-l mail group for several years and before that was a frequent contributor to the Usenet group comp.databases.oracle.  If you attend  “RAC Attack” at Oracle Open World you will probably see him. He is very knowledgeable about Oracle Virtual Machines and was able to answer most questions immediately. If he couldn’t answer, he would research during our lab time and was always able to provide a satisfactory answer.

I would recommend this class to anyone who wants to get started administering an Oracle Virtual Machine environment.

Class Link