Hypervisor
"A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. " - WikipediaIn the world of server virtualisation, there are two kinds of hypervisor. 'Type 2' hypervisors are also known as 'hosted' because they rely on an underlying host operating system (i.e Linux, Windows et al) on which to run. VirtualBox is an example of a Type 2 hypervisor. 'Type 1' hypervisors on the other hand are 'bare metal' hypervisors. They are in effect specialised operating systems in their own right, running directly on the host hardware and dedicated to managing guest virtual machines. VMWare ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM Server are examples of this kind of hypervisor.
If you want to set up a demo environment of Oracle VM Server, because it takes over the whole machine, you have a couple of choices. If you have enough spare hardware lying around, you can set up an environment on physical infrastructure. Not everyone has that much spare hardware lying around. The alternative is to do it on virtual hardware.
Inception
With VirtualBox, running on a decent host, you can create virtual versions of all the infrastructure you need. As far as the guest systems are concerned, they are running on real hardware. It is just in this case, the guest system will be Oracle VM Server. And, just like in the movie 'Inception', you can go multiple layers deep in virtualisation.There are pre-built 'appliances' of Oracle VM Manager and Oracle VM Server for VirtualBox. If you just want to get it up and running that way, you can find the instructions for doing so here. Personally, I prefer to 'learn by doing'. In the real world, you would have to build this infrastructure in 'bare metal' so I wanted to replicate that.
The documents below describe in detail the process for building a complete demo of Oracle VM 3 in VirtualBox. It is based on Oracle VM 3.2. It should still work for version 3.3 which was released earlier this month, with the exception that you can no longer use an external database for the Oracle VM Manager repository - you must use the MySQL database that comes with the distribution.
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