Good-bye Oracle VM

Today I decided to abandon Oracle VM and move back to VMWare. A while ago I bought my old 4GB laptop from my company, when I was given a new one. I added a 1TB disk and installed Oracle VM 2.2 on it.

There are some quirks with Oracle VM when it comes to support low end systems.
First of all the system is memory bound quite fast. See an earlier post of me (http://achatzia.blogspot.com/2010/05/oracle-vm-memory-issue.html) to see how Oracle VM treats it memory. The second main issue is the problem with external USB2.0 devices. I ended up rebooting an image quite often as the SCSI drive was declared dead.

I worked with VMWare since about 6 years, and only had lost one image - a colleague disconnected my external drive which resulted in a corrupt Oracle database. With Oracle VM I never had that stability.

So for me it is good-bye OVM, and welcome back VMWare Server. Obviously the VMWare Server will run on a Linux host with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 .

Oracle VM /etc/hosts file

I was reinstalling my Oracle VM (again).

During the configuration of the Oracle VM Manager template I ran into an error: OVM-2007.

The template (new OVM image) could not find the host it was running on.

Quick check in the /etc/hosts file of the OVM Server showed:

127.0.0.1 ovm.mydomain.local ovm localhost.localdomain localhost


So I changed it to read:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
10.1.1.100 ovm.mydomain.local ovm localhost.localdomain localhost

To me as a Unix veteran it is still a mistery why somebody came up with the idea to put anything besides 127.0.0.1 localhost into the first line.