Oracle announced new management capabilities for Oracle VM through the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5 (10gR5). With the new Oracle VM Management Pack, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR5 provides a comprehensive management solution that spans the lifecycle of applications and their virtual infrastructures.

The Oracle VM Management Pack helps customers accelerate the adoption of virtualization, enabling them to optimize IT resources, improve hardware utilization, and streamline IT processes. Customers can now manage both physical and virtual environments with a comprehensive top-down approach that provides a unique business perspective, enabling the understanding of user experiences and the business impact of IT issues, in addition to offering the best tools to manage each component in the stack individually.

Highlights of the New Oracle VM Management Pack:

• Manage virtual environments with an application perspective - allows customers to quickly diagnose whether the root cause of a problem is in an application component, in a virtual resource, or in a physical resource; enabling efficient consolidation and optimization of data center resources through virtualization.
• Built-in configuration management - enables administrators to track application relationships and analyze configuration changes.
• Policy-based management - helps reduce the on-going costs of IT compliance with the ability to define company specific policies for virtualization, to enforce configuration best practices and help achieve regulatory compliance.
• Automated deployment - automates software deployment through Oracle VM Templates for packaged applications, middleware, database, and Oracle Enterprise Linux.
• ISVs can now streamline deployment of their products and services for virtual environments by providing predefined templates.
• Lifecycle automation - spanning test, deployment, patching and maintenance capabilities, including automated patching of operating systems and Oracle software running inside the guest virtual machines and live migration of guest virtual machines to other servers during server maintenance windows.
• High availability for virtual infrastructure - provides enterprise-class capabilities such as server pooling, automatic load balancing and server failover, helping to ensure business continuity in the virtual environment.