Oracle has announced Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0, an integral part of Oracle Virtualization, the industry’s most complete and integrated virtualization portfolio.

Pre-installed on Oracle’s SPARC T-Series servers, Oracle VM Server for SPARC (previously called Logical Domains) is a server virtualization solution that allows up to 128 virtual servers on one system by taking advantage of the massive thread scale offered by SPARC T-Series servers, including the new SPARC T3 servers, enabling organizations to benefit from increased flexibility and improved server utilization.

Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0 includes performance, resource management, flexibility, power management and availability enhancements. It can support highly sophisticated enterprise workloads, including Oracle Real Application Clusters environments.

Oracle VM Server for SPARC makes it possible to run multiple separate OS environments, including both Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11 Express, on SPARC T-Series servers allowing rapid consolidation of separate kernel environments with sharing and dynamic reallocation of CPU, network, storage and other resources.

Enhanced Enterprise-Class Virtualization Capabilities

Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0 delivers:

Enhanced performance: A low-overhead architecture provides scalable performance under increasing workloads. Performance is further accelerated by the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) direct I/O that assigns individual PCI cards to guest domains, removing the restrictions to only assign an entire PCI bus, while also providing native I/O throughput.

Advanced resource management: Dynamic memory reconfiguration allows memory to be added or removed on an active domain helping organizations better align IT and business priorities. CPU whole core allocation and core affinity enable organization to optimize the assignment of virtual CPUs to deliver higher and more predictable performance for all types of application workloads.

Improved power management: CPU clock speed adjustments, memory power management and power limit settings ensure that energy consumption is optimized with utilization.

Greater flexibility: Oracle Solaris has been optimized for guest domain migration with Oracle VM Server for SPARC, enabling flexible migration of an active domain.

Higher availability: Improvements to virtual disk multipathing enhance the availability of a virtualized environment by helping to ensure that the virtual disk failover capabilities can handle I/O domain, storage and storage-path failures.

Improved secure data processing: leverages the SPARC T-Series systems’ integrated on-chip cryptographic accelerators that deliver wire speed encryption capabilities, providing customers with critical data and services protection and delivers improved response times.