Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Application-Driven Virtualization3
for the Entire Stack29
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1Table of ContentsChapter 1: Complete, Integrated, Application-Driven Virtualization 3Chapter 2: Ensuring Business Availability 8Chapter 3: Taming Management Complexity 12Chapter 4: Enabling Rapid Application Deployment 16Chapter 5: The Foundation for Your Private Cloud 21Chapter 6: Cost-Effective, Enterprise-Proven 25Chapter 7: Single Vendor Support for the Entire Stack 29Resources 312
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Traditional virtualization is an isolated technology that’s limited to one or two layers of the technology stack. When you modernize your data center and migrate to the cloud, you need a design built with virtualization at all levels of the stack.
Does your virtualization solution offer low-cost, high-availability, integrated virtualization for mission-critical applications as well as lifecycle management for the entire technology stack?
Video: Oracle’s application-driven virtualization provides integration throughout the technology stack—exactly what you need for cloud computing.Monica Kumar, Senior Director, OracleWatch the Video (3:23)From Data Center to Service Center
It’s inevitable. The role of IT continues to evolve from “supplier of technology” to “service center,” and IT organizations now must deliver ready-to-run services for users. The trend toward virtual workloads is increasing, so if you’re still relying on traditional virtualization to do the job, you’re getting only part of a solution.
3Everything is critical. You need a solution that provides
- 24/7 access to applications and services for the entire enterprise
- More flexibility
- Faster deployment
- A path to the cloud
- Lower costs
More and more enterprises are deploying business applications into virtualized environments. Research indicates that two-thirds of application workloads are now virtualized.Learn MoreThe Right Foundation for a New Approach
Oracle VM is a virtualization solution that provides benefits beyond simple server consolidation. Oracle VM provides a faster, less expensive, and more efficient way to respond quickly to customers and market changes, and deliver services faster to your users. With application-driven virtualization, Oracle VM offers business solutions—as well as an agile cloud computing infrastructure—that let you spend more time growing your business and innovating for tomorrow.
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By making applications easier to deploy, manage, and support, the application-driven virtualization of Oracle VM offers a new approach to enterprise virtualization. Complete, cost-efficient, and integrated across the entire technology stack, Oracle VM provides the services your business requires and offers a clear path to the cloud.
The Benefits of Integration
Traditional virtualization is no longer sufficient to support the modern service center or provide the infrastructure needed for cloud computing. Delivering timely IT services requires integration throughout the stack—not just among servers and operating systems.
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Oracle application-driven virtualization offers the flexibility and interoperability among components to make virtualization part of your solution at all layers of the technology stack. It also delivers the management and service capabilities to support successful cloud computing.
Fact: Oracle VM is already integrated with Oracle's Engineered Systems to provide a highly scalable, virtualized foundation that offers flexibility and extreme performance.
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Making IT Simpler—and Your Life Easier
What does it take to deploy and manage a private cloud environment with Oracle VM? Find out more with this day-in-a-life story of how one systems administrator saw Oracle VM bring together the many components of a private cloud and simplify virtualized application deployment and management.
White Paper: What does it take to deploy and manage a private cloud environment with Oracle VM?Read the White Paper7
Maintaining high availability is easy—as long as everything stays the same. But guaranteeing high availability in today’s constantly changing business environment is another matter entirely.
Can you ensure continuous business operations and high availability when your virtualization capabilities are limited to only one or two layers of the technology stack?
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Always-On Business Availability
As your business relies more and more on the services provided by IT, ensuring continuous business operations becomes more and more critical. Oracle VM is fully integrated with both your applications and your infrastructure, so you can provide high availability even while you implement the changes that the business—and your customers—demand.
With Oracle’s integrated virtualization solutions, you can deploy tier 1 applications, migrate mission-critical workloads, and manage production databases and storage without downtime—ensuring the highest availability for your users and your customers.
"One of the biggest qualitative measurements is our speed and availability—hitting 100 percent would not have been possible without Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Linux in my opinion."Nate Auwerda, Director, Website Operations, Overstock.com
Video: Overstock.com Achieves 100% Uptime with Oracle VM.Nate Auwerda, Director, Website Operations, Overstock.comWatch the Video (2:20)9Uninterrupted 24/7
Continuous availability is not just a goal. It's what can happen when you have the following:
- Virtualization that’s integrated throughout the technology stack and across a complete portfolio of products
- One vendor supporting the whole stack throughout problem reporting, analysis, and resolution
- Zero downtime to update Oracle Linux
You’ll also see lower operational costs and a lower TCO for your business.
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Virtualization integrated at every layer of the stack, along with complete support from a single vendor, can translate to continuous operations for your business.Learn More
Enterprise-Proven, Oracle-Driven
Virtualized enterprise applications often carry with them a question about how virtualization will affect performance. Although this is a valid concern for applications deployed with standalone hypervisors, in Oracle VM, the hypervisor is tightly integrated with the underlying operating system and specially tuned for uncompromised performance—even with the most-demanding application workloads. In fact, Oracle VM is used to power daily operations at Oracle.
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Migrating to the cloud and putting virtualization to work throughout the stack are complex management challenges for IT. The need for ongoing updates, patches, and other adjustments only compound the problem.
Does managing virtualization complexity cost you more resources than you can afford?
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There’s More to It Now
It sounds complicated: deploy multiple workloads on a single physical server that’s also capable of hosting multiple VMs and multiple operating system instances.
It’s enough of a challenge to do the initial installation, but when you factor in the usual updates, patches, user requests, SLA requirements, compliance issues, and other changes, that already-complex management task can increase exponentially.
Learn More
Oracle Enterprise Manager provides full lifecycle management from a single console for physical data centers, virtualized data centers, and cloud services.Only Oracle provides integrated, full-stack virtualization that can be managed from a single console with a single point of control. Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager simplify IT management so you can focus on your business—and your customers.
Managing and delivering timely IT services requires integration throughout the computing stack and interoperability among components across the enterprise. From operating systems and middleware to networking, applications, and cloud services, Oracle VM is preintegrated with the technology stack—including Oracle Enterprise Manager—at all layers to provide flexibility and high availability.
13Complexity Managed—At No Additional Cost
Oracle VM is tightly integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager, so you get centralized control of the entire environment and complete lifecycle management at no extra cost.
Learn MoreOracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager work together to manage virtualization at every layer of the technology stack.What once required weeks of tedious and repetitive manual tasks can now be serviced, managed, and maintained from a single pane of glass. It’s the more cost-effective way to manage the physical servers, virtual servers, applications, and cloud services for your business.
“Our ultimate goal was to improve application deployment time, increase performance, and save on IT costs.”Gian Giacomo Ferraris, CEO, Versace14 -
Video: Working together with Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager offers a self-service user interface that manages all aspects of the infrastructure lifecycle—from physical servers to virtual server farms to cloud services.Sudip Datta, Vice President of Product Management, OracleWatch the Video (6:22)15
Traditional virtualization takes you only part of the way in your move to the cloud and a more-responsive service center. The larger part of the task—the part that eats up your time and resources—is deploying, provisioning, and managing the applications.
Does your virtualization environment require highly skilled experts to painstakingly deploy applications for development, QA, and (eventually) production?
The Challenge of Traditional Virtualization
Traditional VMs consolidate and virtualize servers and operating systems, but the process can be time-consuming, error-prone, and costly. Unfortunately, when you expand virtualization to other layers of the stack (such as database, middleware, and applications), you also increase the amount of time needed to install, manage, and maintain more VMs.
With traditional virtualization, the process is expensive and seems endless. Today’s virtualization solutions have to do better.
What Can You Save with Faster Deployment?
To validate the claim that Oracle VM Templates can save significant deployment time, Oracle commissioned Evaluator Group to conduct a test in its independent labs using only publicly available Oracle documentation.
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The task was a two-node Oracle Real Applications Cluster (Oracle RAC) deployment. Evaluator Group deployed Oracle RAC with VMware vSphere and then deployed Oracle RAC with Oracle VM using Oracle VM Templates.
The results? Deployment time for Oracle VM was approximately 3 hours and 15 minutes; deployment time for VMware vSphere was more than 39 hours—10 times longer. Learn More.
What are longer deployment times costing you?Learn More17Oracle Does the Hard Work for You
Oracle application-driven virtualization encapsulates best practices that make your deployments efficient, less expensive, and fast. Because Oracle has already integrated (and tested and even optimized) virtualization among the components and layers of the technology stack, you start out ahead.
Now add Oracle VM Templates and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder.
“In the case of Oracle's PeopleSoft HCM, we were able to use an Oracle VM Template to bring up a whole new development environment completely patched, configured, and ready to go out of the box in a matter of two days.”Raymond Payne, Principal Systems Architect, Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory
Video: Johns Hopkins University Sees "Virtual" Value with Oracle.Raymond Payne, Principal Systems Architect, Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics LaboratoryWatch the Video (2:29)18 -
The Right Tools Make the Difference
With Oracle VM Templates and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, you get all the capabilities you need to deploy applications faster while significantly cutting operating expenses and realizing the benefits and savings of cloud computing.
- Oracle VM Templates. With more than 100 time-saving templates to use for your environment, a task that once took days can be finished in hours—depending on how much you want to customize the template for your specific environment.
- Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder. Standardize the scripting and repetition of application deployments by packaging your custom VMs and repeatedly deploy even very complex environments.
Application-Driven Architecture Makes It Possible
The unique, top-down, application-driven architecture of Oracle VM is designed for rapid application deployment and migration to the cloud. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle VM supports a variety of workloads—including those running on Linux, Windows, and Oracle Solaris—and manages virtualization at all levels of the technology stack, throughout the lifecycle of the application.
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The enormity and complexity of so many challenges can make moving to the cloud risky and prone to errors—discouraging many IT organizations from even starting the process.
Are you still waiting to migrate to a private cloud because the cost to deploy is just too high?
The List Seems Endless
It shouldn’t be so difficult to get the benefits of a private cloud. Yet IT organizations face a seemingly endless to-do list that includes
- Keeping applications, middleware, and databases running
- Updating and patching to fix known problems
- Pulling together IT silos
- Getting as much value as possible from existing resources
- Matching resources to shifting workflow
- Identifying and resolving bottlenecks
Throughout the process you must continue to accelerate the deployment of applications and services as you manage and maintain the entire infrastructure.
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"With Oracle Virtual Manager, we're able to scale higher than what other competitors can do because of those technologies around OVM that they give us. It's very important for us to deliver a technology that my engineers can support to make sure that we're delivering the good support for our customers."David Cintron, VP of Managed Services, dcVAST
Video: dcVAST Unleashes the Power of Oracle for IaaS.David Cintron, VP of Managed Services, dcVASTWatch the Video (2:09)The Right Foundation for Your Private Cloud
Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager bring together the many components of a private cloud as they simplify virtualized application deployment and management.
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For example, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a self-service portal that allows users to create and manage their own VMs according to strict policies. And, to help you control costs, Oracle Enterprise Manager has chargeback capabilities that let IT measure the consumption of infrastructure and application services and—if you choose—automatically charge those services to specified projects.
Oracle virtualization solutions—the architecture, tools, and features that provide high business availability, full-stack management, and rapid application deployment—are engineered to work together and give you the right foundation for your cloud implementation.
Making IT Simpler
What does it take to deploy and manage a private cloud with Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager?
23Learn more with this day-in-a-life story of how one systems administrator saw Oracle VM bring together the many components of a private cloud and simplify virtualized application deployment and management for his company.
White Paper: What does it take to deploy and manage cloud with Oracle VM?Read the White Paper
Video: Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager also provide the solid foundation for infrastructure as a service (IaaS).Sudip Datta, Vice President of Product Management, OracleWatch the Video (6:22)24 -
Current information about IT spending trends indicate that businesses spend about 80 percent of their IT budget (a number that continues to grow) on operations. Approximately half of that budget is spent on integrating components.
Are you still paying high licensing costs for virtualization without getting what you really need?
“We knew to expect a robust, stable, and easy-to-support solution. We expected performance to be strong. What surprised us, to be honest, was the impressive short- and long-term cost effectiveness.”David Cintron, VP of Managed Services, dcVASTLearn MoreOracle VM Solutions
Only Oracle has a complete, integrated solution in which all the layers of the technology stack—especially virtualization—are engineered to work together.
25Oracle’s expertise with the VM operating environment and the entire application stack stems from rigorous production testing and best practices. For your IT organization, this means fewer risks and more peace of mind because you know that Oracle has certified the interoperability of all Oracle applications deployed with Oracle VM.
“The move to Oracle VM significantly improved performance of our Oracle E-Business Suite environment while reducing our IT support costs by tens of thousands of dollars.”Jim Thomas, Director of IT Operations, Pella CorporationCost-Effective Is an Understatement
It’s no surprise that Oracle VM provides the most complete virtualization solution for the lowest cost.
- Oracle VM is already integrated throughout the entire technology stack.
- The cost of a Oracle VM license is zero, and includes the right to use Oracle Enterprise Manager.
- Oracle Enterprise Manager has automated management capabilities to help you monitor the entire stack from a single console screen.
- Oracle VM Templates provide ready-to-run application deployment capabilities.
- Enterprise support for Oracle VM is available at a very affordable price.
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“Oracle Virtual Server and Oracle Linux provide the capacity of a larger server farm onto a lower hardware footprint.”Charlie Holland, CEO, Ezidebit
Video: Ezidebit Uses Oracle as a Best-of-Breed End-to-End Partner.Jason Turnbull, Chief Information Officer, EzidebitWatch the Video (2:18)Compare Oracle VM Solutions
If your IT organization is transitioning from a traditional data center to a business service center, you’re definitely moving in the right direction. And if Oracle VM is part of that transition, chances are you’re paying less and getting more.
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View the Cost ComparisonCompare total costs between Oracle VM 3 and VMware vSphere 5.
VM Calculator: “How would you spend the US$2 million you could save?”
VM Calculator: “How would you spend the US$2 million you could save?”
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With multivendor systems, there's always the question of which vendor to call for support, but with Oracle VM—and all the Oracle products in your technology stack—there’s only one vendor you need to contact for complete service and support.
One Vendor
When you contact Oracle Support, you can be sure that you’re getting industry-leading response times with no frustrating vendor hand-offs and no time-consuming finger-pointing.
It’s one vendor, supporting the entire stack, from applications to disk.
Complete Support
Oracle offers the most-integrated support solutions in the industry, with comprehensive lifecycle services that help you take full advantage of your Oracle investment.
- Oracle Premier Support. Get complete support essentials with 24/7 coverage and proactive resources to help resolve issues before they become problems. Learn More.
29- Oracle University Virtualization Training. Give your staff the essential skills and updated expertise they need to take full advantage of Oracle virtualization technology. Oracle University offers a variety of online and classroom courses, with a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee. Learn how Server Virtualization Training helps organizations reduce infrastructure cost, improve resource utilization, and simplify data center management. Learn More.
- Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services. Tailored, mission-critical support services help you maintain and maximize the performance of your Oracle mission-critical infrastructure and software. Learn More.
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ResourcesCustomer and Partner StoriesInteractive MediaProduct AssetsArticles and ReportsWebsitesSocial Media
- Video: dcVAST Unleashes the Power of IT for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Customers (2:09)
- White Paper: dcVAST Unleashes the Power of IT for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Customers
- Video: Ezidebit Uses Oracle as a Best-of-Breed, End-to-End Partner (2:18)
- Video: Johns Hopkins Sees “Virtual Value” with Oracle (2:29)
- Video: Overstock.com Director of Website Operations, Nate Auwerda, Describes How Oracle VM Enables 100% Uptime and Offers and Improved Customer Experience While Reducing Hardware Costs by 87% (2:20)
- Article: Pella Corporation Consolidates Servers and Makes Applications More Available, Reliable, and Manageable with Oracle VM
- Press Release: Versace Deploys Business Applications Faster and Increases Data Center Efficiency with Oracle VM
- Cost Calculator: Oracle VM vs. VMware vSphere Cost Calculator
- Video: Server Lifecycle Management from Virtualization to Cloud (8:49)
- Video: What Is Application-Aware Virtualization? (3:23)
- Video: TechCast Live: Linux and Virtualization with Wim Coekaerts (3:45)
- Podcast: Oracle VM Podcast Series
- Demo: Accelerating Application Deployment with Oracle VM (3:48)
- Podcast: Accelerate Your Path to the Private Cloud with Oracle VM with Adam Hawley, Senior Director of Virtualization, Oracle
- Podcast: Simplify Virtualization Lifecycle Management with Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager
- Podcast: Why Oracle VM Is Best for the Oracle Stack with Ronen Kofman, Director Product Management, Oracle VM, Oracle
- Podcast: Three Key Reasons Why Oracle VM Is the Most Cost-Effective Foundation for the Private Cloud
- Podcast: Unified Virtualization Management for x86 and SPARC with Oracle VM Manager with Jeff Savit, Principal Technical Product Manager, Oracle VM, Oracle
- Presentation: Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder 11.1.1.6 Overview
- White Paper: Oracle VM 3: Integrating Oracle VM into a Disaster Recovery Solution Using SAN
- White Paper: Oracle VM Templates Automated Virtual Machine Provisioning
- Data Sheet: Oracle VM 3.2: What’s New
- White Paper: Oracle VM 3: Application-Driven Virtualization
- White Paper: Oracle VM 3: Architecture and Technical Overview
- White Paper: Oracle Real Application Clusters in Oracle VM Environments
- White Paper: What It Takes to Deploy and Manage a Private Cloud with Oracle VM
- White Paper: Creating and Using Oracle VM Templates: The Fastest Way to Deploy Any Enterprise Software
- White Paper: Oracle VM: Enabling Rapid Migration to Private Cloud
- White Paper: The Most Complete and Integrated Virtualization: From Desktop to Data Center
Copyright © 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.31 -
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As IT organizations seek better ways to integrate, provision, deploy, and manage systems at a faster pace, virtualization has become a key technology in the solution. But traditional virtualization is no longer sufficient to support a modern service center or provide the infrastructure for cloud computing. 
Video: Oracle VM provides a complete virtualization solution that includes Oracle VM Templates for faster deployment.
Watch the Video (3:45)
Trends in VirtualizationVirtualization has always been critical for optimizing and managing resources—as reflected by the increase in the use of VMs and hypervisors. Not coincidentally, these increases correspond with IT’s evolution from data center to service center. |
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Ensuring high availability with no unplanned downtime is the goal, but Oracle VM takes it to the next level.
Video: Learn more about the top-down, application-driven approach to high availability of Oracle VM.
Adam Hawley, Vice President Product Management, Oracle Virtualization, Oracle
Watch the Video (5:59)
Oracle VM also offers other capabilities to help you maintain the high availability your organization requires. |
White Paper: Ensure business availability at the application and server layers for single and multiple geographic locations with Oracle RAC working with Oracle VM.
Read the White Paper
White Paper: Automatically restart VMs and get back online sooner with Oracle VM Manager.
Read the White Paper
Video: Monitor service at all levels of the technology stack and issue early warning alerts with Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Watch the Video (8:49)
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In the first validation, Evaluator Group1 deployed Oracle RAC with VMware vSphere and then deployed Oracle RAC with Oracle VM using Oracle VM Templates. 
In the second validation, Evaluator Group deployed Oracle E-Business Suite using Oracle VM Templates and then using VMware vSphere. With Oracle VM Templates, the deployment took approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes; with VMware vSphere, it took more than 15 hours—almost 7 times longer. |
Evaluator Group also examined how many steps were required for each deployment and discovered that the number of steps did not vary significantly; however, the amount of database administrator (DBA) time required to deploy Oracle RAC using VMware vSphere was 10 times greater. 1Evaluator Group Lab Validation: "Oracle VM - Quantifying the Value of Application-Driven Virtualization." |
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If you do a quick cost assessment that assumes an average annual DBA salary of US$100,000 and 2,000 hours work in a year, you get an hourly rate of US$50 per hour. In the first deployment example, deployment time for VMware vSphere was more than 39 hours (estimate 40 hours). Multiply the hourly rate by the number of hours and you see that this one deployment of VMware vSphere cost $2,000. Now apply that figure to the cost of maintaining your environment—and keep in mind that application deployment for enterprises is not typically a one-time event for the production environment. In fact, you need to repeat the process to deploy a 4-node or 6-node Oracle RAC, and then deploy Oracle E-Business Suite several more times for development, QA, and then production. And, if you’re delivering a new feature or service to users, you’ll need to repeat the entire deployment. |
Analyst Report: Oracle VM: Quantifying the Value of Application-Driven Virtualization.
Read the Analyst Report
The cost of such long deployments is significant—in time, money, and resources—and affects your ability to meet customer SLAs. |
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Faster application deployment with Oracle VM Templates means your applications are up and running in hours, not weeks. 
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Oracle VM Templates require only minimal knowledge of the operating system and application installations, so IT organizations can download and import preconfigured, preinstalled, production-ready VMs for the entire stack, including for
Fact: With Oracle VM Templates, you can automate the deployment of a complete, production-ready, 8-node Oracle RAC cluster in minutes through a single simple configuration file. |
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Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder helps you design, package, and deploy virtualization for complex and multitier applications. With Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder’s point-and-click interface, you can visually compose and construct an entire application stack and encapsulate management directives for individual applications. This capability—not available with any other virtualization solution—works by providing a framework to capture the configuration of existing software components, and then packaging them as self-contained building blocks, known as appliances. The appliances are then connected to form ready-to-run application blueprints called assemblies. Appliances can include your own best practices along with metadata that directs how the application is to be deployed, updated, and managed. Once appliances are built into assemblies, they can be deployed onto virtualized and cloud environments with automated configuration, and then easily monitored and managed with Oracle Enterprise Manager. You can also use Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder to select the components you want to include from application maps. When you click Build, Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder creates the application stack assembly and lets you specify detailed directives for deploying, updating, and managing each application. And because Oracle Enterprise Manager is tightly integrated with Oracle VM, you can also set up the specific policies required for each application. |
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After evaluating both single and multivendor solutions against its requirements for greater scalability, more flexibility, and lower costs, dcVAST selected Oracle’s Sun x86 systems, which included (at no extra charge) a choice of operating system, virtualization, storage, blades, and 10 GbE. Six months after implementation, the Oracle solution is on track and delivering 50 percent TCO savings due to low acquisition costs, ongoing operational efficiencies, and Oracle’s licensing policy.
“We were looking for the greatest combination of availability, support, cost-effectiveness, and—just as important—peace of mind. In all these cases, the Oracle solution didn't miss a beat.”
David Cintron, VP of Managed Services, dcVAST
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